Content area
Full Text
Paul Laurence Dunbar's (1872-1906) "The Lynching of Jube Benson" (1904) and Juan Bosch's (1909-2001) "Luis Pie" (1946) are two short stories that depict violent lynchings of innocent black men whose victimizers ultimately go unpunished. In both stories the victimizers, US whites in Dunbar's case and Dominicans in Bosch's, act based on the false belief that black men are a threat to their country's (gendered) resources. When juxtaposed, these stories reveal how binary notions of white versus the Other fuel both dominant groups' racist actions in different ways.
What makes the comparison of these two stories all the more unique is that although the two writers in question never met, or read each other's writings, each composed a similar story as a form of literary activism aimed at transforming his country's racial consciousness. Both stories were written in eras when the respective countries were existing under racial regimes-Jim Crow in the United States and the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.1 On the surface, the two stories bear little resemblance, but upon closer inspection they reveal extraordinary similarities and linkages that speak to how white supremacy continues to affect blacks across the world in the twenty-first century. As Bashi reminds us "global anti-blackness is a particular kind of racism (i.e., primarily targeted towards the material, social and political exclusion of phenotypically 'black' persons) that operates on a multinational scale" (602). Reading the two stories in tandem, while treating their juxtaposition as a case study, can elucidate how "racialized" nationalism centered around anti-black violence plays out in both countries (Derby 496). This study expands the literatures in both Dominican and black studies because it explores the African American and Dominican connection from a unique perspective.
In "The Lynching of Jube Benson," Paul Laurence Dunbar uses the guise of white American guilt to portray lynching as a racist tradition that is outdated and incompatible with modernism. In actuality, Dunbar's portrayal of white repugnance toward lynching overstates the reality that at the turn of the twentieth century: "Many whites responded with puzzlement to the violence allegedly committed in the defense of their civilization, but few expressed outright horror or condemnation of the practice" (Brundage 4). In contrast, in "Luis Pie" Juan Bosch-a Dominican intellectual, politician, and anti-Trujillista-uses lynching...