The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction by Lorgia García-Peña

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction by Lorgia García-Peña Ian Russell García-Peña, Lorgia. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Duke UP, 2016: 288 pp. In The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction, Lorgia García-Peña frames her exploration of Dominican identity with two personal experiences. The book begins with her own interpellation as a racialized subject in the US via a racist comment from a university professor and ends with her reaction to [End Page 223] increasingly visible violence against black and brown bodies in a global context. She acknowledges her particular position—its privileges and potential disruptions—as a discursive manner of linking her own body to the embodied knowledge practices that she traces on and off the island of Hispaniola. The text's principal trajectory follows the production of a racialized and embodied archive of Dominican nationalism and its movements, displacements, and contradictions. Indeed, the author highlights the root of diction as speech act, where normative dictions performatively enact particular histories and identifications and contradictions become a theoretical tool for signaling those speech acts that enunciate or gesture to disruptions, displacements, and silences. The author utilizes performance studies to relate these scholarly negotiations to an island forgotten and excluded by US-centric institutions. She joins in and elaborates on discussions of cultural importance around Dominican and diasporic identities by Caribbean and Latinx-focused scholars such as Silvio Torres-Saillant, Maja Horn, Dixa Ramírez, and Carlos Decena. García-Peña presents her research on a broad corpus of texts, materials, and bodies, spanning the nineteenth century to the present, to destabilize easy conceptions of the Dominican national project through what she calls living in El Nié. El Nié is an in-between space developed by poet and performance artist Josefina Báez that García-Peña theorizes as a bodily negotiation of the borders violently imposed on the racialized subject from the Haiti-Dominican Republic frontier and its resonances in the migratory subject between the Dominican Republic and the US. This body twists and troubles relationships to the Dominican nationalist archive's erasures, injustices, and silencings. As well, it provides García-Peña with a "rayano consciousness"—a borderland (rayano), embodied subjectivity that confronts violence and trauma through performance of "intrasolidarity dialogues" between Haitians and Dominicans (202). García-Peña's rayano consciousness disrupts Dominican nationalism and "creates a transnational, transtemporal interchange" that "encompasses the multiplicity of borders" imposed on and embodied by heterogeneous Dominican subjects (18). Performance proves to be a highly effective site for positing rayano consciousness because it underscores the multiplicity of borderings that García-Peña seeks to explore. Many of the book's objects of analysis are recognizably understood within a performance studies field, particularly the treatment of artists Josefina Báez and David 'Karmadavis' Pérez or writer-musician Rita Indiana. García-Peña juxtaposes such performances with other contradictions that receive similar treatment: quotidian gestures of solidarity at the Haitian border, exiled and diasporic writings against the Trujillo dictatorship (1930-61), Afro-religious spiritual practices, and popular music. The oscillation between diction and contradiction constantly re-directs the text back to a border between hegemonic and marginalized knowledges and uses the site of the border as a similarly performance-based and embodied praxis. Working through El Nié, García-Peña is able to push performance-as-methodology further. Performance demonstrates how El Nié "signifies […] the body that carries the [End Page 224] violent borders that deter them from entering the nation, from access to full citizenship and from public, cultural, historical, and political representation" (4). García-Peña splits her book into two overarching sections entitled "Founding the Archive" and "Diaspora Contradicts." The first three chapters focus on critical moments in Haitian-Dominican relations from the 1800s through the Trujillo regime, with particular emphasis on the ways that performative repetitions of particular national and racial narratives solidified the discursive regimes that would shape the Dominican Republic's identity. She also reads literary works about the Haitian Massacre of 1937...