My project considers deviance, deficiency and excess as primary analytics through which blackness and the nation state as a political concept interact, focusing specifically on the political necessities of Latin American nationhood. Honing in on the Dominican Republic, I locate black geographies and black cultural productions as central sites that demonstrate those analytics and that refuse, taunt, or call into question (through conceptualizations beyond resistance) the particular narratives of the Dominican nation state as they relate to economic progress and its emblematic discourse of being a touristic paradise. This larger focus is broken up into three thematics which clarify the activities that I carried out with the Tinker funding: the ‘teteo’ or working poor party that made it to the touristic Zona Colonial in Santo Domingo on October 31st (geographic observation, quotidian conversation, and archival research), two selected Dominican dembow music videos, and Jacques Viau Renauds work and legacy in the context of the 1965 US occupation of the DR and later ani imperial left leaning movements against Joaquin Balaguer’s government (archival research). An important lesson I have learned during this time, particularly for those doing dissertation work that is interdisciplinary and not just archival, is that often times the daily effort you put into integrating yourself into your field, and talking to people who are apart of your daily routine, gives you the kind of knowledge that leads to better and more profound findings when it comes to doing the work formally recognized as research. Archivally, for those working on subaltern subjects or in precarious national contexts the search for less institutional and more personal or relationship based archives is often more useful than state archives. Finally, make use of the option or at least consider oral history as an important archival contribution.
Beyond undergraduate experience, which included qualitative interview research and oral history, my previous research experience has heavily focused on archival work both domestically and internationally. Through my work in the state archives in La Habana, Cuba. In June and July of 2022, I assisted Dr. Rosa of Stanford University in identifying 18th and 19th century archival documents related to enslaved and free Black women’s marronage and negotiations with colonial authorities in Cuba. I transcribed these documents in preparation for her first monograph.
