Anne Eller. We Dream Together

With We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom, Anne Eller has produced not only an invaluable contribution to the academic field of history, but also a forceful manifesto that debunks the dominant, imposed idea of race in the Dominican Republic. In the elite’s construction of the Dominican Republic, blackness was erased, and Dominicans were socialized on the basis of an assumed Euro-Christian epistemology. Haiti was presented as a constant menace to Dominicans’ “civilized” values and white skin color. In We Dream Together, Eller invalidates Dominican officials’ argument that the Dominican Republic was disconnected from Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean. At a time when many Dominicans are rewriting their history, building identities, celebrating their cultural heritage, and contesting state attacks against Haitian nationals and Haitian-Dominicans, supporting narratives such as this book are needed as a foundation for an alternative academic epistemological model that explains the continuities of alliances and allegiances to the freedom of former slaves in Hispaniola, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Eller’s approach urges Dominicans to reconsider their own past and the history that is omitted in the present.

Dream · Independence (probability theory) · Latin Americans · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies