Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana
Edition: 1st
Series: Pensamiento Caribeño
Publisher: Siglo xxi editores
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Mexico City
Language: spa
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 140
First sentence: Este libro parte del siguiente supuesto: la vigencia en el contexto de la República Dominicana contemporánea de una herencia intelectual nacionalista que ha prescrito históricamente la manera de entender la cultura. Me refiero a una tradición que puede rastrearse —salvando las distancias y matizando sus condiciones discursivas a través de la historia— desde los orígenes del Estado dominicano en el horizonte decimonónico hasta el momento actual. Mi intención es, por un lado, identificar las variables epistémicas que han permitido la dilatada validez de esta Gran Narrativa, y describir las circunstancias sociopolíticas que la han sustentado como matriz retórica primordial en la teorización de lo nacional dominicano. Asimismo, pretendo destacar la realidad de un proceso de colonización interna en el imaginario social resultante de la influencia perniciosa de este molde discursivo. La violencia simbólica que le es consustancial atraviesa las estructuras de lo cotidiano para instalarse allí donde los actores sociales se asumen como sujetos.
Description: Throughout the more than 140 years of national history in the Dominican Republic, the culture of a dominant Hispanophile minority has been perceived as the norm in its cultural identity. As such, it has articulated a frontier that excludes any cultural production that does not conform to those limits. During the early twentieth century, the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo helped to perpetuate a vision of Dominican national identity devoid of any cultural heritage other than Spanish and the distant Arawak. The Afro-Caribbean tradition, for instance, is excluded from the Dominican Republic’s national history despite its obvious influence. As a result, the vast majority of today’s Dominicans remain colonized by a patriarchal discourse that permeates all aspects of civil society, making the Dominican context an ideal laboratory for Postcolonial theory and cultural studies. It can be argued that contemporary literature and intellectual production in the Dominican Republic and the diaspora is proposing an alternative locus for the articulation of identity, a space in which new relationships might be formed from a fully assumed cultural diversity. This alternative space may be best described in terms of the urban metaphor; the city as the only space were multiculturalism and diversity of any kind can exist. An important part of the literary and intellectual production of the 1980’s and 1990’s is contributing to this new theory of Dominicanness. Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana deals with the problems of identity politics and nationalism in the writings of Dominican and Dominican-American authors such as Manuel Rueda, Julia Álvarez, Rita Hernández, Aurora Arias, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Josefina Báez and Junot Díaz. These works describe a distinct and conflicting project to that of their predecessors in that they represent Dominicanness as a diverse and heterogeneous cultural identity, complicating in this way the purported identitary homogeneity of the Dominican Republic as a normalized political body.
Table of contents: value: Los espacios de la nación dominicana