The Imagined Island by Pedro L. San Miguel

Author:Pedro L. San Miguel [Miguel, Pedro L. San]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807856277
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2005-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

A HISTORY (AND A FUTURE) OF SEVERAL PATHS

I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

Jorge Luis Borges

Virtually unknown in the Dominican Republic at the time of its publication in the 1950s, La República de Haití y la República Dominicana was contested by various intellectuals of the time, including Sócrates Nolasco, Emilio Rodríguez-Demorizi, and Ángel del Rosario-Pérez.101 Save for a few minor discrepancies in emphasis, the positions assumed by these critics of Price-Mars differ little from the official history of the Trujillo dictatorship. In all three authors we find what Mateo has called the “great themes of the Trujillo ideology”;102 prominent among these themes are Hispanicism and anti-Haitianism. Price-Mars’s work was judged in the light of these conceptions, which became virtual reasons of State during the Trujillo Era. That, far more than any deficiencies in his work, is why criticism from the Trujillo camp was bent on turning Price-Mars into “the enemy.”103 Jesús Zaglul writes of this process of making Haiti into “the enemy”;104 as a reflection of this demonizing, Price-Mars was vilified as the spokesman for the most bitter opposition to the Dominican Republic. Criticism covered the spectrum from his errors of scholarship regarding names, dates, and events to his interpretations, ideology, and methodology.

One of the main reasons for the Dominican critics’ antagonism toward Price-Mars was the “negritude” at the center of his proposal regarding Haitian identity. Negritude emerged “initially” in the 1920s as (in the words of René Dépestre) “a form of revolt of the spirit against the historic vilification and denaturalization of a group of human beings, who, during the colonization process, were baptized generically and pejoratively as ‘Negroes.’ ” Soon, however, negritude took on absolute dimensions, making cultural and social differences “evaporate into a somatic metaphysics.”105 Seen in this way, negritude was understood as a “totalizing” black identity, ennobling “black values” of African origin; it was an identity strategy that, like Trujillo’s mythologized “Spanishness,” crushed differences, concealed cracks, demolished diversity. 106

But this trait was not exclusive to negritude. In the 1920s, the emblematic works on Latin American and Caribbean identity tended to be fundamentally exclusivist—or, at least, they strongly favored one ethnic or cultural tradition in particular. Dépestre reminds us that this trait was common to the identity proposal found in So Spoke the Uncle by Price-Mars, to the essay collection Siete ensayos by Mariátegui, and to the essay collection Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión by Dominican author Pedro Henríquez-Ureña. “In none of the great books that we have just mentioned can we find the entirety of the sociohistoric roots of our American-ness. In them we find, planted in parallel rows, Mariátegui’s ‘Indian’ trunk, the ‘Black’ trunk of Price-Mars, and the ‘White Creole’ trunk of Henríquez Ureña. In each one of the three studies the historically Creole unity of the American trunk of our common identity was absent. . . . None . . . has offered a definition of the self . . . useful at once to all the social types that have emerged from our common colonial tragedy.

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