Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés

Abstract

Reviewed by: Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés Gabriel Bámgbóṣé (bio) Vanessa K. Valdés, editor. Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean. SUNY, 2020, Pp. 275. US $95 (hardcover) / $24.95 (paper). One of the most powerful elements of Vanessa K. Valdés' scholarship is the incisive comparative lens she deploys, one which reimagines the Black literary and cultural geographies of the Americas. Her monograph, Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas, is a clear example of how this approach advances a greater understanding of the contributions of peoples of African descent in the imagination of the Americas. In the same vein, Valdés' recent edited collection, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, uses this comparative perspective to rethink the place of Haiti in the Hispanic Caribbean space, with broad implications for resituating the historical meanings and cultural significance of Haiti in the Americas. The contributor Mariana Past articulates the main problem twelve diverse scholars engage with in the collection: "Haiti, independent since 1804—and whose original constitutions abolished slavery and guaranteed universal liberty to all citizens of Hispaniola, who were defined as free, equal, and Black—remains a perpetual outlier in the Caribbean context" (161). Thus, questioning the racialized othering of Haitians in the Caribbean imagination, the collection argues that, notwithstanding the disavowal of Haiti's Blackness, its revolutionary history and culture play a central role in the symbolic and material envisioning of decolonial struggle against multiple colonialities in the Americas. In her preface to the collection, Myriam Chancy notes that, despite the linguistic differences among the Caribbean nations, their "makeup and realities have overlapped and cannot truly be understood fully without one another" (xiv). The quest to map out these overlapping realities and histories of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico is at the center of the collection's eleven chapters. Each chapter explores different but related dimensions of Haiti's fundamental yet denigrated influence on the Caribbean imagination through compelling critical analyses of fictional narratives, poems, short stories, historical texts, and films. Valdés' introduction situates the collection in the problematic of the field, posing the crucial question of how to reread Haiti and its complex relationship with other nations in the Hispanic Caribbean, whereas most studies have often concentrated on Haiti's representations in Anglophone Caribbean literature (15). Valdés contextualizes three key moments that the collection evocatively interrogates and that [End Page 177] signify the tragic consequences of anti-Haitian sentiments: the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Haitian-Dominican border under the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–1961); the 2010 earthquake that foregrounded the racialized perception of Haiti as a space of disaster; and the 2013 law instituted by the Dominican Republic Constitutional Tribunal that stripped many Dominicans of Haitian descent born between 1929 and 2007 of their citizenship. Six chapters focus on the problematic relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; they critique the colonial racialization of geography and Blackness/Africanness that produces the border tension within the island of Hispaniola. In "The Border of Hispaniola in Historical and Fictional Imaginations since 1791," Claudy Delné's sharp analysis of Jacques Stephen Alexis' General Sun, My Brother, René Philoctète's Massacre River, and Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones shows how Haitian writers articulate the experience of border crossing as simultaneously tragic and liberating. Ángela Castro's chapter focuses on the same Danticat novel through a symptomatic reading of time, trauma, and the repetition of historical violence on the Hispaniola border. Drawing attention to Junot Díaz's figuration of implicit "Haitianism" in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Mohwanah Fetus' chapter reads the historical trauma and violence in the novel through the lens of the cane field racialized as "a 'Haitian space' in the Trujillo's nation-state" (211). Carrie Gibson's chapter, "The Dictator's Scapegoat," turns to conservative Dominican historians' ideological roles in propagating the anti-Haitian discourse that occurred during the Trujillo regime. By analyzing Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi's historical writing, Gibson demonstrates how the production of historical texts legitimizes anti-Haitian and anti...