Description
Book SynopsisConsiders how certain literary texts confront the dominant and, at times, exaggerated anti-Haitian Dominican ideology. Megan Jeanette Myers examines the antagonistic portrayal of the two nations, endeavouring to reposition Haiti on the literary map of the Dominican Republic and beyond.
Trade ReviewMapping Hispaniola is a monumental work that thoroughly and astutely explores the intersections and connections between the countries of Hispaniola in the literature created by its writers, whether based on the island or in the Diaspora. Binary us/them representations are debunked and instead we are connected to the third spaces in literature that show the nuances and connections behind the divisions, polemics and ideologies. Cogently argued and written, with clarity and elegance, this will become one of the seminal texts in the study of the literature not just of Hispaniola and the Caribbean, but of communities and countries that share border spaces and places. Megan Myers does with critical theory what the writers she studies have done with their fiction, poetry, plays, stories and memoirs: create more light."
"In
Mapping Hispaniola, Megan Jeanette Myers tackles an extremely rich and complex topic, that of representations of the Dominican border. She does so largely be examining the twentieth century writings of Dominican novelists and poets, and placing them within the context of historical representations and struggles over the border itself. The corpus is interesting, comprising a mix of relatively well-studied texts and others that have received less attention. Myers successfully coheres the analysis of these texts around a vision of the border region that draws from various theorizations, including that of Anzaldua, seeing the border itself as a space of layered complexity and contradiction.
