A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The author discusses the conceptualization of blackness in the Dominican Republic.
"The state of Afro-Latin studies is reviewed, starting with questions about terminology and racial classification, then exploring issues of racism and the relation between race and class. The impact of black (and indigenous) social movements on the field of study is then examined and this raises the question of how ideologies and practices of mestizaje have changed in the wake of ethnic mobilization and challenges to nation-building narratives of mestizaje. Finally, some of the implications of the concepts of diaspora and globalization are examined in relation to approaches to black culture. Adapted from the source document." (author)
Examines Caribbean representations of race, gender and ethnicity, and how these influenced the labor allocations of female migrant workers in St Maarten's tourism economy. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, thousands of poor women from Haiti and the Dominican Republic worked in the service sector of St Maarten's tourism economy. St Maarten's black population, and especially its male residents, interacted with the migrant women, and created gendered and social-sexual images that privileged the Latina/mulatta women over the black Haitian women. These gendered/racial stereotypes helped to incorporate the Haitian and Dominican women into specific and different labor sectors of the tourism economy.
For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. This article draws on Waugh and Hutcheon to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation.