Activating the Past
May 02, 2014
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8903197-activating-the-past?from_search=true Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World by Andrew Apter (Editor), Lauren Hutchinson…
Robin Derby
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Lauren(a.k.a. Robin)Derby's research interests include the Caribbean (esp. the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico and Cuba), Latin American political regimes, authoritarianism, state terror, U.S. imperialism, popular religion, and cultural history. Her dissertation focused on public culture and daily life during one of the longest dictatorships in Latin America, the regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-61). The study examined the culture of consent forged by the regime via forms of symbolic patronage and exchange, from official oratory, gifts and rumors to state rites and monuments, as well as state efforts to reshape the citizenry through ritual and urban reform. The analysis relates official projects -- such as the rebuilding of the capital city and the execution of a year long national pageant -- to their reception by various public sectors. Moreover, it interpreted local representations of the dictator through popular idioms of gender, race, honor, patronage and religion. In contrast to the literature that portrays the excessive state ceremony of the Trujillo regime as insignificant window dressing in relation to state terror, it demonstrates how public ritual played a critical role in establishing a new mestizo state elite and civic identity. The research combined archival material with oral histories as well as the analysis of novels, scrapbooks, memoirs, gossip and official propaganda. This social and cultural history of the Trujillo regime built upon an earlier research project on racial ideology and state violence focusing on a state-sponsored massacre of some 10-20,000 Haitian border migrants on Dominican border terrain in 1937. Conducted jointly with Richard Turits, this study considered the role of anti-Haitianism in official nationalism under Trujillo and how this was interpreted at the popular level by Haitians and Dominicans, as well as questions of violence and memory during the regime. Life narratives with Haitian massacre survivors and military as well as Dominican assassins, collaborators, and eyewitnesses were combined with archival research in Washington, DC, Port-au-Prince, and Santo Domingo. Her article on Dominican racial ideology in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands entitled "Haitians, Magic and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, 1900-1937," in Comparative Studies in Society and History won the 1995 Conference on Latin American History award.
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