Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint : Nation, State, and Race on Hispaniola

To explicate the workings of power in differentiation and boundarysetting is to uncover the logic underlying the constitution of Otherness. The national Self, in accord with this logic, is created in the division and distancing of that Self from the foreign Other. Self and Other, in the case of Hispaniola, are defined, or "positioned," by spatialized representations that play a crucial role in the securing and maintenance of power at the expense of subjugated Others. Yet, in contradiction to the operations of individuating, naming, and assigning that characterize a political culture of difference, there emerges, between the national Self and the foreign Other, a third term, another figure that is neither one nor the other, and yet both. One representative instance of this third term is the fact of the borderlands. Neither Haitian nor Dominican, and yet both, an interstitial and syncretic culture grows in viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS the Haitian-Dominican borderlands, assuming a life of its own. Yet such a culture stands out not so much between borders, David E. Johnson (1997) suggests, as within borders, nor is it limited geographically to the zone of the national frontiers. For borderland cultures do not so much erase the borders: "they multiply [them]." 3 Borders proliferate, reduplicate themselves both on the margins of the national territory but also in the heart of each society. The unreflective dualism of the dominant ideology would, on the contrary, lump each nation's populace into the presumably united masses of "us" set in opposition against "them." State-sponsored Manichaeanism would proscribe the existence of the borderlands, dictating instead the clear political division of sovereign territories and also the code of the differing and opposed ethnicities to which the two national populaces putatively belong. Yet against this hegemonic dualism, another style of thinking, one that I would call contrapuntal, can guide us heuristically in our search, not only for the obvious differences between nations, but also for the covert if, at times, transitory identifications that borders simultaneously frustrate as they engender. My thanks go out to friends and family who shared time, advice, encouragement, homes, food, cars, and company as I traveled the roads of research toward completion of this project. Such friends and family were you, José

What would the island of Hispaniola look like if viewed as a loosely connected system? That is the question Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint seeks to answer as it surveys the insular space shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic throughout their parallel histories. For beneath the familiar tale of hostilities, the systemic perspective reveals a lesser-known, unitarian narrative of interdependencies and reciprocal influences shaping each country'sidentity. In view of the sociocultural and economic linkages connecting thetwo countries, their relations would have to resemble not so much acockfight (the conventional metaphor) as a serial and polyrhythmic counterpoint.

What would the island of Hispaniola look like if viewed as a loosely connected system? That is the question Haitian-Dominican Counterpointseeks to answer as it surveys the insular space shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic throughout their parallel histories. For beneath the familiar tale of hostilities, the systemic perspective reveals a lesser-known, "unitarian" narrative of interdependencies and reciprocal influences shaping each country'sidentity. In view of the sociocultural and economic linkages connecting the two countries, their relations would have to resemble not so much acockfight (the conventional metaphor) as a serial and polyrhythmic counterpoint. Point counterpoint Limits of colonialism, 1492-1750 The great opening, 1751-1801 Haiti and Santo Domingo, 1802-44 Territorial imperatives, 1845-1929 Transnational dictatorships, 1930-85 Close encounters: Haitians in Dominican literature Searching out the boundary, 1986-2003. They are separate and unequal: Haiti has a predominantly black, French patois-speaking population; the Dominican Republic, a pre-dominantly mestizo or mulatto, Spanish-speaking population.