Other Possible Worlds: Hispaniola and the Speculative

Abstract

Other Possible Worlds:Hispaniola and the Speculative John D. Ribó (bio) As the first European colony in the Americas and the site of the Haitian Revolution, Hispaniola has long been a linchpin of speculative imaginings of the world to emerge from the global colonial encounter and transatlantic slave trade. This essay explores the complementary speculative charges of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the Americas today. Drawing on the scholarship of Dixa Ramírez and Matt Clavin, I argue that the relative prevalence of Haiti and absence of the Dominican Republic in U.S. speculative fiction are interlinked manifestations of a singular process of erasure rooted in narratives of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). I then turn to work by Marlene Daut, N. K. Jemisin, Junot Díaz, and Michael Zapata to show how writers today disrupt Hispaniola's erasure by challenging racist stereotypes of Haiti, recentering Hispaniola, and portraying Haitians and Dominicans not only as enemies but also as allies. Haiti has long been the source of clichés such as the zombie, witchdoctor, and voodoo doll. These popular Haitian stereotypes, linked to Vodou, and thus to the Haitian Revolution, often function as racist caricatures.1 And until recently, the DR has been largely absent from U.S. culture, speculative or otherwise. This overrepresentation of Haiti and underrepresentation of the DR are, however, two distinct yet interconnected expressions of one historical process of erasure. The overrepresentation of Haiti through such degrading stereotypes epitomizes a form of erasure enacted not through absence nor silence but rather through overwhelming presence and deafening noise—the saturating proliferation of grotesque misrepresentations. This noise not only misrepresents Haiti but also drowns out the DR. The marked difference in the charges of Haiti and Dominican Republic in contemporary U.S. culture can be traced back to the kinds of stories told about Haiti since independence. Whereas Haiti came to represent the horrors or wonders of Black liberation, the ambiguities of Dominican society doomed it to relative obscurity abroad. In Colonial Phantoms (2018), Dixa Ramírez explains how: [End Page 294] the understudied Dominican example exists beyond the recognizable, and often oversimplified, visions of Haitian insurrection that inspired fear or hope in broader Western imaginaries. The free black and mixed-race negotiations of a slaveholding, impoverished, and scarcely populated society that developed in Dominican territory are too murky, compromised, and foggy to grab the kind of attention reserved for narratives of slaves toppling masters.2 This "ghosting" began in the nineteenth century when "Haiti" often denoted the entirety of Hispaniola and continues today. Ramírez pinpoints the complementarity of these forms of erasure, arguing that "dominant Western discourses have ghosted Dominican history and culture despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas."3 Literary genre has also shaped the kinds of stories told about Haiti. The Haitian Revolution and the emergence of Gothic fiction coincide, and both detractors and advocates of Haitian independence adopted the genre in written accounts of the revolution. In "Race, Rebellion, and the Gothic," Matt Clavin argues that the commodification of printed materials and the popularity of the Gothic transformed the Haitian Revolution into "a source of imaginative fancy and personal entertainment, in addition to a pedagogical device."4 All too often the lesson these texts taught was to fear slave revolt and abolition. Writers of the Black Atlantic understood the dangers of such negative depictions. Haitian writer Baron de Vastey (1781–1820) dubbed the literary smear campaign against Haiti the "paper war," and abolitionist writers turned to the Gothic to emphasize the cruelty of slavery in Saint-Domingue.5 Despite these efforts, the paper war distorted Haiti's image leaving a pervasive legacy of frightful figures of questionable Haitian origins in contemporary culture. To challenge these stereotypes, writers today turn to the speculative to recuperate historical genealogies and imagine alternative timelines that center Haiti. In response to Marvel's Black Panther (2018), Marlene Daut draws parallels between T'Challa's Wakanda and Henry Christophe's Kingdom of Hayti (1811–1820) as "a refuge from the colonialists and capitalists who have historically impoverished the real continent of Africa."6 N. K. Jemisin's novelette, "The Effluent Engine" (2010), imagines an...