The Imagined Island

History, Identity, and Utopia in Hispaniola

Pedro L. San Miguel, Jane Ramírez

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780807856277
  9780807829646
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807876992
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

In a landmark study of history, power, and identity in the Caribbean, Pedro L. San Miguel examines the historiography of Hispaniola, the West Indian island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He argues that the national identities of (and often the tense relations between) citizens of these two nations are the result of imaginary contrasts between the two nations drawn by historians, intellectuals, and writers.

Covering five centuries and key intellectual figures from each country, San Miguel bridges literature, history, and ethnography to locate the origins of racial, ethnic, and national identity on the island. He finds that Haiti was often portrayed by Dominicans as “the other” — first as a utopian slave society, then as a barbaric state and enemy to the Dominican Republic. Although most of the Dominican population is mulatto and black, Dominican citizens tended to emphasize their Spanish (white) roots, essentially silencing the political voice of the Dominican majority, San Miguel argues. This pioneering work in Caribbean and Latin American historiography, originally published in Puerto Rico in 1997, is now available in English for the first time.

NOTES

Introduction: A Kind of Sacred Writing

1 Silvia Álvarez-Curbelo, “Terrores de fin de siglo,” in Silvia Álvarez-Curbelo and Antonio Gaztambide-Géigel (eds.), Historias vivas: Historiografía puertorriqueña contemporánea (San Juan, P.R., 1996), 207-10.

2 Raúl Dorra, Profeta sin honra: Memoria y olvido en las narraciones evangélicas (Mexico City, 1994), 242.

3 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), esp. 147-68; Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994), esp. 15-43; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979).

4 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.; Chicago, 1994).

5 Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth, 52-90; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973).

6 Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York, 1961), 5; Sir George Clark, The Listener, June 19, 1952, p. 992, quoted in ibid., 7.

7 De Certeau, Writing of History; Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth, esp. 91-125; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed.; New York, 1996); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993).

8 Andrés L. Mateo, Al filo de la dominicanidad (Santo Domingo, 1996), 43, and Mito y cultura en la Era de Trujillo (Santo Domingo, 1993).

9 David K. Herzberger, Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain (Durham, N.C., 1995), 17.

10 Carr, What Is History?, esp. 3-35; White, Metahistory, xii. [The title of this section, “The Poetics of History,” is from White, Metahistory, 1. Trans.]

11 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (2nd printing; Baltimore, 1986), 105, quoted in George E. Marcus and Dick Cushman, “Ethnographies as Texts,” Annual Review of Anthropology 11 (1982): 56.

12 Dorra, Profeta sin honra, 234.

13 Ibid., 11-14; Mateo, Mito y cultura.

14 White, Tropics of Discourse; Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (2nd printing; Baltimore, 1992).

15 These terms are taken, respectively, from the essay by Marilyn Strathern, “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 28, no. 3 (1987): 251-81, and from a fictional work by Ana Lydia Vega, Falsas crónicas del sur (Río Piedras, P.R., 1991).

16 Herzberger, Narrating the Past, 84.

17 Dorra, Profeta sin honra, 14.

18 Marcus and Cushman, “Ethnographies as Texts,” 54, 56.

19 Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993); Roger Chartier, The World as Representation, published as El mundo como representación: Estudios sobre historia cultural (2nd ed.; Barcelona, 1995).

20 Dorra, Profeta sin honra, 156-57.

21 Chartier, El mundo como representación, esp. 107-62.

22 Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, xxi.

23 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 36-54. [The quotation is from the title of Geertz, Local Knowledge, chap. 2, p. 36. Trans.]

24 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1955).

25 Michael Agar, Speaking of Ethnography (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1986), 19.

The Imagined Colony: Historical Visions of Colonial Santo Domingo

This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented before the Seventh Dominican History Congress, National Museum of History and Geography, Santo Domingo, October 16-19, 1995.

1 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), x, 7. See also Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (2nd printing; Baltimore, 1986), and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (2nd printing; Baltimore, 1992). In addition to White’s works, the following are also relevant: Ana Lydia Vega et al., Historia y literatura (San Juan, P.R., 1995), and David K. Herzberger, Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain (Durham, N.C., 1995).

2 Antonio Sánchez-Valverde, Idea del valor de la isla Española, annotated and ed. by Emilio Rodríguez-Demorizi and Fray Cipriano de Utrera (Santo Domingo, 1971) (cited hereinafter as Idea, followed by the corresponding page number[s]).

3 Ibid., 158.

4 Ibid., 169, 174-75.

5 The historical sections of Idea are found primarily in chaps. 11-15, apparently a summary of more extensive research conducted by Sánchez-Valverde, since he states at the beginning of his work, “I have produced a compleat History of the Island” (ibid., 5; in Emilio Rodríguez-Demorizi’s note 3, this work is said to be lost). For evaluations of Sánchez-Valverde’s work, see Roberto Cassá, “Historiografía de la República Dominicana,” Ecos: Órgano del Instituto de Historia de la Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo 1, no. 1 (1993): 10-12, and Máximo Rossi Jr., Praxis, historia y filosofía en el siglo XVIII: Textos de Antonio Sánchez Valverde (1729-90) (Santo Domingo, 1994).

6 This type of discursive strategy was common in the colonial period. See the shrewd analysis by Severo Martínez-Peláez, La patria del criollo: Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca (3rd ed.; San José, Guat., 1975).

7 Idea, 98.

8 In his annotations to Idea, Rodríguez-Demorizi, who can hardly be suspected of trying to diminish the grandeur of Santo Domingo in colonial days, alludes to these exaggerations. See, for example, nn. 116 and 118.

9 See Roberto Cassá and Genaro Rodríguez, “Algunos procesos formativos de la identidad nacional dominicana,” Estudios Sociales 25, no. 88 (1992): 67-98.

10 Jacques Le Goff, El orden de la memoria: El tiempo como imaginario (Barcelona, 1991), 11.

11 [That is, the apportionment of native laborers among the Spanish colonizers. Trans.]

12 Idea, 107.

13 The term is borrowed from Samuel Stone, La dinastía de los conquistadores: La crisis del poder en la Costa Rica contemporánea (3rd ed.; San José, C.R., 1982).

14 See San Miguel, “Racial Discourse and National Identity: Haiti in the Dominican Imaginary,” in this volume.

15 Ibid. I take the term “criollo homeland” from Martínez-Peláez, La patria del criollo.

16 Rossi, Praxis, historia y filosofía. On the configuration of “criollo patriotism,” see Martínez-Peláez, La patria del criollo; Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813, trans. Benjamin Keen (Chicago, 1976); David A. Brading, Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano, trans. Soledad Loaeza-Grave (2nd ed.; Mexico City, 1991); and Enrique Florescano, Memoria mexicana (2nd ed.; Mexico City, 1994).

17 For general context, see Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (2nd printing; New York, 1973), esp. 255- 79, and Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900 (Baltimore, 1987), 94-170. For studies of the islands mentioned, see Manuel Moreno-Fraginals, The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760- 1860, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York, 1976), and Francisco A. Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800-1850 (Madison, 1984).

18 This argument is based on Raymundo González, Bonó, un intelectual de los pobres (Santo Domingo, 1994), esp. 39-83.

19 I am indebted to Silvia Álvarez-Curbelo for suggesting this parallelism. On Michelet, see White, Metahistory, 135-62; Georges Lefebvre, El nacimiento de la historiografía moderna, trans. Alberto Méndez (Barcelona, 1974), 195-213; Josefina Vázquez-de Knauth, Historia de la historiografía (2nd ed.; Mexico City, 1973), 108-9; Josep Fontana, Historia: Análisis del pasado y proyecto social (Barcelona, 1982), 121-22; and Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993), 131-33.

20 Fonta...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• PREFACE
• Introduction
• The Imagined Colony Historical Visions of Colonial Santo Domingo
• Racial Discourse and National Identity Haiti in the Dominican Imaginary
• The Island of Forking Paths Jean Price-Mars and the History of Hispaniola
• Storytelling the Nation Memory, History, and Narration in Juan Bosch
• NOTES