Aquí and Allá: Transnational Dominican Theater and Performance by Camilla Stevens

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aquí and Allá: Transnational Dominican Theater and Performance by Camilla Stevens Bretton White Stevens, Camilla. Aquí and Allá: Transnational Dominican Theater and Performance. U of Pittsburgh P, 2019. 269 pp. In this engaging study of contemporary Dominican drama and performance, Stevens makes a compelling argument for how theater can illuminate transnational subjects. By focusing on multiple aspects of Dominican migration and the diaspora, Aquí and Allá shows the complex nature of migration and transnational identity through the lens of theater written, published, and performed both in the Dominican Republic and the United States. As Stevens argues, since the 90s, these theatrical representations of Dominican subjects have become a way to counteract negative stereotypes of Dominican migrants for audiences in both countries, while they also [End Page 253] complicate how these transnational subjects see race, class, gender, and sexuality as they cope with the many aspects of transnational migration, from the initial departure to return migration. For audience members, Stevens is concerned with how theater provides local spaces for reimaging and expanding interpretations of Dominican identity. With close readings of approximately 15 plays and/or performances from the 1990s until 2015, Aquí and Allá deftly addresses how Dominican transnationals are viewed as minority figures whether in the United States or in the Dominican Republic. Since most have migrated due to the dire economic situation, Dominicans historically maintain strong cultural ties to the Dominican Republic, even when born abroad. Upon their return to the home country, many transnational Dominicans find that they are treated as outsiders due to linguistic, economic, and cultural differences. Indeed, as Stevens shows, the significance of the words aquí and allá shifts for the characters in these plays, depending on one’s location and perspective. Sometimes these transnational shifts become muddled for the characters themselves, giving a sense of both the separation and the connection of both national spaces for the transnational subject. The riskiness of this transnational mobility is especially evident in a chapter on deadly yola migration performances. It is also extremely complicated, as we see in chapters on works that upend traditional Caribbean masculinities, prompt ethical audience engagement through the treatment of sex trafficking and immigrant rights, and show characters’ arduous citizenship journeys. Stevens’s careful readings and engaging writing illuminate the texts and stagings of these understudied works, resulting in an important corpus of theater that treats contemporary, transnational Dominican experience. One of the book’s most intriguing theories is that these performances function as what Juan Flores calls “cultural remittances” (131). Given that many Dominican stories of migration are rooted in economic need and that remittances are essential to Dominican citizens’ survival, this parallel form of remittance, according to the author, is attractive because of its ability to create more expansive definitions of national identity. Likewise, Stevens’s exploration of Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s “minor transnationalism” dismantles the binaries evident in postcolonial theory and gives space to translocal works that are always a part of minoritarian discourse. Stevens’s analysis of the works featured in Aquí and Allá shows how transnational identity is integral to the Dominican experience. Additionally, she identifies how the artistic production of theater practitioners working in the minor transnational realm can awaken audience members to new subtleties within the Dominican experience, both aquí and allá, and the spaces in between. [End Page 254] Bretton White Colby College Copyright © 2021 The Center of Latin American Studies