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Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature. Néstor E. Rodríguez. Coconut Creek FL: Caribbean Studies Press, 2010. 178 pp. (Paper US$ 24.50)
The oft-neglected, multifaceted, and complex literary production of the Dominican Republic is once more receiving the attention it deserves from scholars. In Divergent Dictions, the newly published translation and updated version of his Escrituras de desencuentros en la República Dominicana (2005), Néstor E. Rodríguez analyzes texts whose significance and value have been determined by their proximity to the discourse of identity. His objective is to identify the "epistemic variables" that have perpetuated this rhetoric in the definition of Dominican identity. In fact, Rodríguez refers to its pernicious influence upon all forms of Dominican culture as a symbolic form of violence. For him, the fact that dominicanidad is a racial identification with a native population that hasn't existed since the sixteenth century illustrates this point as well as the demonization of the Dominican diaspora. Although he laments that the foundation of the national identity has remained unchanged for centuries, Divergent Dictions illustrates that there has been significant effort to dismantle its rhetoric.
The book is organized into five chapters preceded by a brief Introduction. In Chapter 1, Rodríguez dismantles the premises sustaining the pro-Hispanic discourse that corroborates the fictitious ethnicity of the Dominican "race." The concept of Dominican national identity was first initiated by nationalists of the nineteenth century emerging from the twenty-two years of Haitian occupation, but was perfected over time by the "theoretical Trujillismo" which fabricated its foundation upon the Hispanophile discourse of (racist) nationalism.
In Chapter 2, Rodríguez identifies the perpetuation of the stagnant theoretical apparatus of dominicanidad by analyzing the essays of the "intellectual triad" of the 1940s, Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle, Joaquín Balaguer, and Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, and the contemporary essayist Manuel Núñez. He contends that the discourse of Dominican national identity remains unchanged today because the intelligentsia still...