Professor Dixa Ramírez on “Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present”

What has blackness historically meant in the Dominican Republic? And, what does it mean to be Dominican, both on the island and within the diaspora? These are two of the questions that Yale professor Dixa Ramírez tackles in her new book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present. Coming out April 24, 2018, Colonial Phantoms examines a range of cultural texts to understand Dominicans’ ambivalent relationship towards blackness, from the late colonial era into the present day.

Ramírez draws upon a wide variety of sources, including novels, poetry, public monuments, film, visual art, musical performances, and public interventions. She argues that Dominicans’ ambivalent relationship towards blackness is deeply related to what she terms the “ghosting” of the Dominican territory. She said, “The Dominican Republic was ‘ghosted’ from the imaginary of the Americas and the Western World because it represented a space where free blackness developed in a really ambivalent way. For centuries, this territory…was a majority mixed-race and black population that was free.” This unique racial history has shaped the Dominican Republic’s self-identity, as well as its relationship to the rest of the world.

As her title suggests, Ramírez is interested in Dominicans’ quest to “belong,” but also their constant struggle to do so on their own terms. Dominicans “have wanted to belong to something, some community, some institution, and often also have wanted to belong within the global economy and a global understanding of what it means to be a modern nation.” At the same time, Dominicans have refused to conform to ideas about blackness imposed upon them from abroad. They have resisted the U.S. “one-drop” idea of racial formation, and have also refused the idea of that to be black is to be inherently emancipated and pro-Haitian.

“I’m interested in ambivalent spaces, not necessarily in politically liberatory projects,” she said. “My point is to understand where this really strange view of blackness emerged from, among a people that most outsiders consider to be black.”

At Yale, Ramírez holds teaching positions in American Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Spanish and Portuguese. Colonial Phantoms reflects Ramírez’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship. This commitment extends as far back as her undergraduate days, when she was a student of Japanese literature at Brown University. “ I started studying Japanese literature as I was a total outsider. I knew that in order to understand it I had to learn its language, its literature, its culture–that is, holistically. So, I unwittingly formed an interdisciplinary major, because I approached the topic as a total novice.”

As a graduate student, she was trained broadly as a Caribbeanist and had planned to study Caribbean literature, before deciding to focus on her home country of the Dominican Republic for her dissertation. “I ended up falling in love with the history of the place where I was born,” she said. Despite this shift, Ramírez said that her early training still informs her work on the Dominican Republic. Her experience as a Caribbean woman and Latina immigrant studying Japanese literature taught her “not to take for granted that I knew anything about the D.R. just because I was born there.”

Ramírez hopes that her book will contribute to a burgeoning scholarly conversation on race and blackness in the Dominican context, a theme that has received little scholarly attention in the past. Her next project, “Blackness in the Hills: Geographic Isolation and White Supremacy in Dominican and U.S. Nationalist Imaginaries,” will look at the imaginary of el monte in the Dominican Republic and its U.S. counterpart, “the hills.” Through an analysis of these two geographic imaginaries, she will explore the relationship between land use, indigeneity, and racial identity in the Americas. In Colonial Phantoms as well as this new project, Ramírez hopes to understand “the afterlives, echoes, and repercussions of colonialism in the Americas.”

Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present is available for pre-order.

Written by Hannah Greenwald, second-year PhD student.