As a new wave of scholarship on Dominican history has recently challenged official narratives casting the nation in opposition to Haiti, a heated debate has emerged. While one camp charges this new scholarship with skewing the “true” history of the nation, which harks back to late 19^th-century nation-building narratives, new wave historians, on their part, draw on the latest methodologies for filling gaps and silences, redressing distortions, and excavating a “history from below” that focuses on the subaltern. Grounded on these tenets, this session asks how scholars in literature and film studies intervene in this debate through analyses of literary and cinematic works by authors from Haiti and the Dominican Republic. These works challenge dominant constructions of Dominican national identity and anti-Haitianism, a discursive and state-sponsored policies assemblage that cast Haitians as inferior and as an economic burden for the Dominican Republic. The three papers included in this panel propose an islandwide perspective that expands current scholarship in Haitian-Dominican literary and film studies.

The first paper centers the session from the perspective of indigenist literary works that emerged across the island as part of a broader response against the Quincentennial commemoration of the “Discovery” of the New World in 1992. These literary works illustrate how writers from both sides of the island drew from the indigenous past to articulate the nation according to changing views of the colonial past. While a Haitian play published in 1986 draws on the radical tradition initiated by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, which inscribes the indigenous anti-colonial legacy as a precursor of the Haitian Revolution, a little-known Dominican novel published in 2002 approximates the Dessalinian anti-colonial vein, as it dismantles late 19th-century articulations of the nation as resulting from a “reconciliation” between the indigenous and the colonizers. These two works offer a militant decolonial aesthetic, reflecting the impact of anti-Quincentennial mobilizations across the island.

The second paper focuses on literary (re)imaginings of history and cross-border dynamics in works by Dominican American Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. These novels serve as models to examine how two authors write one another’s country and how they have sought guidance from each other during the writing process. This paper highlights the myriad “home” sites in Danticat’s and Alvarez’s historical fiction that position home as a specific location—but also as a feeling—and suggests that both fear and violence define physical home sites and imaginary ones. A focus on Danticat’s election to write about the 1937 Massacre for a diaspora-based audience in The Farming of Bones offers a fictional perspective of home as un-safe space. Building on Russell Jacoby’s understanding of “neighborly violence,” this paper relays how neighborly violence emerges as a constant in Danticat’s and Alvarez’s work concerning the massacre and broader experiences related to migration and diaspora.

The final paper shifts to looking at both Haiti-philic (the expression of an idealizing admiration for Haitian culture by Dominican scholars, journalists, and artists) and phobic scenes and characters in dramatic feature films created by Dominican and Haitian screenwriters and directors since 2010. Both Haiti-philia and Haiti-phobia revolve around a shared sense that the Dominican nation is a product of historical rupture, cultural erosion, and identity loss, which requires a process of collective healing in search of lost wholeness. For Haiti-phobes, that process of national recovery must begin by expelling Haitian people and influences; for Haiti-philes, it must begin by embracing Haiti as a culture that is whole and firmly rooted in negritude, thus bringing a positive influence for the Dominican people. As invaders, sorcerers, seducers, monsters, guides, members of the generous and long-suffering poor, Haitians make the difference cinematically. Their presence, whether casual or central, takes these movies’ plots toward unexpected twists in a narrative always informed by anxieties about cultural difference across the island and the im/possibility of its transcendence. In all this, theories of political fantasy and racial disavowal provide formal analytic resources that complement context-specific, historically, and sociologically informed close readings of the points where these films touch on the presence of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

Together, these three papers expand on dialogues concerning the temporally-situated efforts of literary and visual artists to account for differences and articulate commonalities between the two nations. Each panelist will speak for 15-17 minutes followed by approximately 25 minutes of unstructured discussion.