Repositioning Race: Prophetic Research in a Postracial Obama Age

6. Contextualizing “Race” in theDominican Republic

6 • Contextualizing “Race” in the Dominican Republic Discourses on Whitening, Nationalism, and Anti-Haitianism Antonio D. tillis Dartmouth College The ideology of race is often configured and contextualized within national frameworks. While global discourses on race and racial identity necessarily inform the racialized experiences of global citizens, the specifics of racialization are constructed within national contexts. This chapter explores how race is configured within the national framework of the Dominican Republic vis-à-vis its island neighbor, Haiti. Like most binary constructions of race, dominance is defined with and against Otherness as Dominicanness is set against an Othered Haiti. Specifically, in an effort to distinguish itself from its island neighbor, as well as its neighbor’s blackness and poverty, the Dominican Republic constructed a genealogical history that tied the nation firmly to a Spanish-speaking, European -descended, White identity. The refractory ideological material of this contemporary crucible in Dominican society has calcined and erupted into 139 140 • Antonio D. Tillis a nationalistic performative display that marginalizes Haitianism in order to solidify Dominicanness and Dominican national identity. Yet, despite its similarities to global racial hierarchies, the social construction of race in Hispaniola has features endemic to postcolonial Black republics that inform Diasporic Black experiences. These methods of racial construction reflect the past and prophetically point toward the future of racialized experiences for marginalized Black populations globally. The historical and evolutionary development of national and racial identity in the Dominican Republic has fostered a present-day vilification of Haiti in everyday racial discourse in the Dominican Republic. This paradigmatic iteration implicates the manner in which the average citizen sees himself or herself vis-à-vis the rest of the global world, and in particular in relation to her conjoined neighbor, the Republic of Haiti. Indeed, Dominicans forge a national discourse that centers prejudicial hostility toward Haiti. This discourse manifests within the imagined borders of the neoslave sugar cane community, or batey—an intra-Dominican community of Haitian migrant workers. This chapter examines the historical development and structural organization of the batey in order to unpack how this “imagined” community of the batey serves as the geopolitical space where Dominican discourses on race, whitening, nationalism, and anti-Haitianism converge. In his exegesis on nationalism, entitled Imagined Communities (2006), Benedict Anderson states the following in the revised edition relative to the limited-spatial conceptualization of defined national territories : “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which other nations lie. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind” (p. 7). In the painstaking process of mapping, cartographers are challenged when it comes to the axis of geospatial boundaries as one community distinguishes itself from another topographically and territorially. In terms of coterminality, as Anderson evokes, of particular intellectual concern is the encounter, or exchange, that occurs at the bordered-space in mediated articulations of national culture and understandings of geospatial proprietorship. The island of Hispaniola stands as a testament to Anderson’s postulation of the spatial configuration of nation-building in that an essential understanding of “nation” is conceptualized within the context of presumed geographical boundaries that separate one from the other. In terms of North America, the United States, Canada, and Mexico have constructed such boundaries to protect the confines of the autonomous rule of each nation state. These “gated national communities” have for centuries attempted to define and contain the core attributes that have distinguished one Contextualizing “Race” in the Dominican Republic • 141 nation from its bordering neighbor. An observation of note in this play of “nationalizing” one’s spatial domain is the length to which one nation will go to differentiate itself from the other, especially when they share a common land mass. Scholars generally agree that the concept of “nation-building” in the Americas has its genesis in the eighteenth century with the American Revolutionary War, followed by the Haitian Revolution. As these new nations began to free themselves from colonial enterprise, they engaged in the arduous task, one akin to launching a new commercial product for global consumption, of “packaging and selling” themselves and their new economies as they entered the marketplace of independent state-building. In an attempt to construct a national identity subsequent to liberation from Haitian rule in 1844, the Dominican Republic formulated a history lodged in the myths of a selectively imagined identity that valorized certain moments spanning from...