Spirals in the Caribbean - by Sophie Maríñez (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An in-depth analysis of literary and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and their diasporas

Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court's Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution--a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers--contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.

With its emphases on folk tales, responses to the 1937 genocide, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic, Afro-indigenous collective memories, and lesser-known literary works on the genocide of indigenous populations in the Caribbean, Spirals in the Caribbean will attract students, scholars, and general readers alike.

Review Quotes

"Students of Haitian-Dominican relations will be thrilled by the ease with which Sophie Maríñez crosses languages and borders, and moves among media and genres, to bundle topics and sources as diverse as the musical, lyrical, and style innovations of Dominican rock pioneer, Luis ('Terror') Días, the aesthetics and philosophy of Haitian Spiralist authors René Philoctète and Frankétienne, diverse historiographic and literary figurations of the martyred Taíno cacica, Anacaona, and border-crossing folklore and vodou symbolism. A heady and richly detailed portrait of an island crisscrossed with intense human and cultural exchanges, Spirals in the Caribbean will trigger fruitful conversations among feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist scholars in a range of humanities fields."-- "Samuel Martinez, University of Connecticut"

"Spirals in the Caribbean draws together analyses of artistic production, pedagogical nationalism, and popular narratives into the same frame, unspooling tight knots of Dominican national mythologies, such as sanitized narratives of early indigenous history or an 1805 massacre that never happened, in the process. One of the remarkable achievements of the book is its energetic reconstruction of the islandwide literary production about African and indigenous liberation practices. Spirals in the Caribbean meditates, returns, and expands on these connections, demonstrating not only how expansive and deep these shared traditions are but how they repeatedly transcend racist violence, from the colonial period to the present day."-- "Anne Eller, Yale University"

"This deeply historicist treatment of Haitian-Dominican relations offers an important riposte to the oft-reiterated statist narrative of enmity between these two countries by revealing a far more complex and entangled view of the island than most previous accounts. Maríñez to her credit includes important Haitian literature and history neglected by most scholars of the Dominican Republic, delving deeply into both Haitian and Dominican works. She also chronicles popular resistance to state projects such as the protests against Christopher Columbus' five hundredth anniversary homage by the Balaguer regime and the teardown of Columbus' statue in Haiti in 1986. Drawing upon a wide-ranging archive including history, archaeology, popular religion, music, and literature, this tour de force offers a compelling and important cultural history of cross-island articulations that should resonate widely with literary scholars and historians of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Caribbean writ large and will change how scholars characterize Haitian-Dominican relations."-- "Lauren Derby, University of California, Los Angeles"

"With Spirals in the Caribbean, Sophie Maríñez has crafted an eloquent and wide-ranging exploration of Haitian Spiralism, grounded resolutely in the space of the Americas writ large. Maríñez's tracing of the spiral aesthetic across both the fraught border of Hispaniola and the boundaries of academic disciplines offers a stunning multilingual and transnational approach to multiple cultural forms. The exciting constellation of questions and propositions Maríñez presents will richly inform the overlapping fields of inquiry this book so provocatively engages."-- "Kaiama Glover, Yale University"

About the Author

Sophie Maríñez is a Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and an affiliated Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Ph.D. Program in French at The Graduate Center.