Colonial Ruins as Intervened Sites

La Zona, the US Occupation, and Dominican Racialised Sovereignty (1870-1924)

Bibliographic Data

ID2170376
AuthorsWendy Muñiz (corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume30
Issue1
Pages1-23
Publication date2021-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Latin American Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1356-9325 • E-ISSN: 1469-9575
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13569325.2020.1832450
OpenAlexW3164349187
LanguageEN
References cited26

This article traces the transformation of Dominican colonial ruins into racialised and mediated symbols of “the nation” in consumer culture from the emergence of local nation-building in the 1870s through the country’s first US occupation (1916–1924). It re-examines the work of renowned criollo painter Alejandro Bonilla to show that while the nationalisation of ruins through consumer culture in La Zona (the present-day name for colonial Santo Domingo) fuelled a fin-de-siècle cultural effervescence, this visuality made no effort to conceal the racial difference in the Dominican elite’s fragmented nationalism. Contrasting the elite vision of colonial ruins in La Zona with that of US imperial commodity racism in print culture, the article reveals how after 1916 local intellectuals reframed La Zona’s colonial ruins into an anti-colonial, anti-Black, and Hispanicised state optic for mass consumption. Yet La Zona also allows us to see the histories of Black freedom and resistance inscribed in its colonial ruins, which still stand as records attesting to settler colonialism’s racialised and gendered liminal experiences

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Elite · Empire · Ethnology · Liminality · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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