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Chapter One -- Chapter Two -- Chapter Three -- Chapter Four -- Chapter Five -- Chapter Six -- Chapter Seven -- Chapter Eight -- Chapter Nine -- Chapter Ten -- Chapter Eleven -- Chapter Twelve
Papi tells a story in the voice of an eight year old girl waiting in Santo Domingo for her father to return from New York to lavish her with gifts and the glory of his fame. Things don't go according to plan.
This is the story of the children of the revolution, of many revolutions. This is real life on a Caribbean island, in fact: on two islands. Argenis Luna is an artist who no longer paints, a heroin addict who no longer uses, and an overgrown child trying to make sense of his inheritance in the Dominican Republic, a country where his once-revolutionary father and his comrades are now part of the ruling elite. Thrown out of rehab in Havana, Argenis picks his way between his own crisis and the detritus of an abandoned generation in a series of highly charged encounters with drag queens, fellow artists, and the gleaming muscles of his former dealer. After the nightmare-ish hallucination of Tentacle, Rita Indiana's new novel strikes a mellower note as it conjures up this vivid world in all its beauty, love and corruption.
"This book is a part of the Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture publication initiative, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."
In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identities, publics, and politics. To understand this dynamic, Balance advocates for a "disobedient listening" that reveals how Filipino musicians challenge dominant racialized U.S. imperialist tropes of Filipinos as primitive, childlike, derivative, and mimetic. Balance disobediently listens to how the Bay Area turntablist DJ group the Invisibl Skratch Piklz bear the burden of racialized performers in the United States and defy conventions on musical ownership; to karaoke as affective labor...
In The Borders of Dominicanidad Lorgia García-Peña explores the ways official narratives and histories have been projected onto racialized Dominican bodies as a means of sustaining the nation's borders. García-Peña constructs a genealogy of dominicanidad that highlights how Afro-Dominicans, ethnic Haitians, and Dominicans living abroad have contested these dominant narratives and their violent, silencing, and exclusionary effects. Centering the role of U.S. imperialism in drawing racial borders between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, she analyzes musical, visual, artistic, and literary representations of foundational moments in the history of the Dominican Republic:...
Defining Bachata -- Music and Dictatorship -- The Birth of Bachata -- Power, Representation, and Identity -- Love, Sex, and Gender -- From the Margins to the Mainstream -- Conclusions.
In Tigers of a Different Stripe, ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson examines a variety of music genres in the Dominician Republic, and its diasporic communities, to shed light on how gender is performed through music, especially merengue tipico, a traditional, accordion-based genre that has undergone great change since the 1960s. Hutchinson goes beyond looking at just the music itself, to how dancing and listening, as well as viewing and discussing music, all play a part in gender performance and construction. Dominican gender roles are usually defined by a binary understanding of gender that is at its worst sexist and patriarchal, with macho men and subservient women. Hutchinson shows how wrong this is in musical performance, where musicians like Rita Indiana bend both gender and genre. The discussion naturally expands to movement, migration, race, class, and notions of tradition and modernity. In the end, Tigers shows how music can either reinforce entrenched gender roles or help to open up possibilities by imagining new roles and identities for all."
This translation of the well-received "Escrituras de Desencuentro en la Republica Dominicana" examines the writings of Dominican and Dominican-American authors such as Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez, Josafina Ba ez, Manuel Rueda, Rita Hernandez, Aurora Arias, and Silvio Torres-Saillant. The author posits that this work is a radical aesthetic enterprise challenging the Dominican cultural establishment. These writers represent Dominicanness as a diverse and heterogeneous cultural identity, complicating the purported homogeneity of the Dominican Republic.
Using a blend of historical and literary analysis, Colonial Phantoms reveals how Western discourses have ghosted—miscategorized or erased—the Dominican Republic since the nineteenth century despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. Through a variety of Dominican cultural texts, from literature to public monuments to musical performance, it illuminates the Dominican quest for legibility and resistance.