The Imagined Island

In The Imagined Island, Pedro San Miguel establishes a number of purposes for the five essays that constitute the volume. One is to extend and apply theories that reveal the fictional narratives with which historiographies are constructed. Flowing from that, the author analyzes historical visions of the colonial period. The third involves a sustained critique of the works of seven authors: Antonio Sánchez-Valverde, Pedro Francisco Bonó, José Gabriel García, Manuel Arturo Peña-Batlle, Joaquien Balaguer, Juan Bosch, and Jean Price-Mars (the last, a Haitian, is the only one not from the Dominican Republic). The dominant concern of the first four essays involves a critical examination of writings about the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and how the narrative, fictional frameworks of these authors produce the contrasts drawn between the two halves of Hispaniola. The critique focuses on Dominican constructions of Haiti as a black "other" and the Dominican Republic as fundamentally white, Spanish, European, and civilized. In his analyses, San Miguel covers a vast range of literature, focusing primarily on historical texts, with limited discussions of novels, essays, and ethnographies. The research that produced this volume is so considerable that the notes and index together constitute one-third of this otherwise slim work. The author very effectively fuses a "history of ideas" approach with critical, constructionist, and postmodern reinterpretations of the act of writing history.San Miguel's own narrative framework is rooted in theories of historiographies as narratives and as confirming scriptures, a stance shaped especially by the works of Michel de Certeau and Hayden White, as well as E. H. Carr, Benedict Anderson, Clifford Geertz, George Marcus, and Dick Cushman. The analysis that results closely resembles the "ethnography as fiction" critique elaborated by James Clifford. The emphasis here is on discourses of the "real" being joined to the practices of fiction. San Miguel does not engage in detailed empirical descriptions and assessments but instead seeks to highlight the ways that historical narratives permeate collective life, become dogma, and are tied to state power. By stressing canonical texts, the effects of power in organizing history's memory, and the ways that identities are codified in accordance with the reigning utopias of those in power, he produces a strong view of hegemonic discourses and narratives. He does not address any criticisms of the constructionist approach, leaving his analysis as a kind of uncontested truth that transcends the narrative fictions he deconstructs. Without empirical counterweights, his argument too often rests on suggestions and assertions.Given San Miguel's approach to power and historiography and his focus on the works of "men of letters," there is little mention of heterodox historiographies. Indeed, the title may be misleadingly broad: this is a study of neither all utopias in the island, nor all identities, nor the broad range of historical discourses, nor, even all the island, for the most part, given the emphasis on the Dominican half. Much of the book is worked out in black-and-white terms - the abominable construction of Haiti as an African contaminant, a perennial savage Other, producing the basis for a contrasting Dominican identity that denies the society's own African roots. From this vantage point, the work fits in with a current emphasis in Puerto Rican studies (San Miguel is himself based at the University of Puerto Rico) that emphasizes hegemonic, historical denials of African identity. Although it is not mentioned, it is interesting that San Miguel accepts, like the authors he critiques, the narrative of indigenous obliteration: the real Dominican world is thus an Afro-Dominican one, and his concept of mestizaje is limited to mixing between black and white. As a result, the Taíno are barely mentioned in passing. Unfortunately, while San Miguel mentions some Dominican popular cultural views of Haitians, these appear only briefly in the text, and Haitians themselves appear as a relatively static background, apart from Jean Price-Mars. The first two chapters overlap considerably, with instances of quotes and whole paragraphs being repeated. This suggests that the papers were not adequately revised to appear together in the same volume. The final chapter, on Juan Bosch, deviates considerably from the other three that are focused on Hispanism, anti-Haitianism, and relations between the two halves of the island. Without any form of conclusion, the book ends quite abruptly.Despite these criticisms, the volume will still be of significant interest to graduate students in history and Latin American and Caribbean studies. For more advanced historians of the region, there will be little that is not already familiar, either in terms of theory, methodology, or history. The volume is written in a very fluid, accessible style, and the translation has clearly done a great service to the Spanish-language original. All told, San Miguel offers us a necessary and fairly refreshing companion to any study of the history of the Dominican Republic and to broader considerations of the writing of history itself

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