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Ethnicity in the Caribean: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoetink
This article tries to describe the kind of war that experienced Venezuela and New Granada during their emancipation, arguing that it can be qualified as a "race war" by using Michel Foucault's concept of historicism. The "war to the death" that Bolivar declared to the Spaniards in 1813 confronted two races in a cruel fight that was supposed to give way to a new temporality for the patriots. This work tries to link the emergence of new historicist discourses on colonialism and freedom and the dynamics of war that characterized Tierra Firme during its independence.
How do Dominican migrants living in New York City relate to the changing social and cultural contexts that accompany experiences of migration, settlement and return? Dominicans, on migrating to the United States, confront a blunt racialised categorisation of black, white, Asian or latino/a, as opposed to the seemingly more fluid labelling in the Caribbean. In this paper, which draws on interview-based research in the US and the Dominican Republic, I explore the impact of contemporary international migration on racialised discourse and identification among Dominicans. Given the popular and historical rejection of African Caribbean or black identity in Dominican society, migrants who would not identify as negro/a (literally translated as black) or mulato/a in the Dominican Republic, find themselves being labelled as black Hispanic or latino/a in the US. Increasing emigration and transnational connections since the 1960s have not heralded a predicted re-evaluation of racialised discourse in the Dominican Republic. The commonly used term indio/a, which retains meanings specific to the Dominican context with regard to the rejection of negritud and concomitant anti-Haitian sentiment, remains a popular term of reference among Dominican migrants and returnees. While Dominicans living in the US may ‘overcome the legacy of denial regarding the African part of their heritage’ (Torres-Saillant and Hernández, 1998: 145), I argue that the much-vaunted dynamics of transnationalism have so far failed to lead to a full reappraisal of racialised identification in Dominican society, both on the island and within the US. Transnational experiences, rather than stimulating a wider understanding of race, have promoted stasis or further reinforced existing racialised identities and prejudice. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In general, three periods can be distinguished in the Dutch research activities con-cerning Latin America and the Caribbean. In the first period before the 1970s, re-search interest in Latin America was a highly dispersive affair, often depending on the private interests of individual scholars. It is interesting to note that in the over-view article written in 1988 by Bernard Slicher van Bath, the section on Latin American history was just one page long. In the social sciences more work was done on the Americas, but the research was often 'hidden' within the different dis-ciplines. 1 At that time, there were only a few scholars that were explicitly dedicat-ing their professional career to the field of Latin American Studies. In particular may be mentioned the path-breaking works of Harry Hoetink on American race relations and Tom Zuidema on pre-Columbian Andean culture. Other scholars of that period who may be considered Latin Americanists were Rudolf van Zantwijk and Raymond Buve who worked on Mexico, Geert Banck on Brazil and Jan Klein-penning on the Amazon (Brazil) and Paraguay. The historian Bernard Slicher van Bath shifted his research interests from Europe to Latin America in this period and was to play an important role in the consolidation of Latin American history in the Netherlands. Other scholars like Gerrit Huizer, Hans Tennekes, André Droogers and Benno Galjart wrote important studies on the region but remained firmly em-bedded in their disciplinary networks. Because of the Dutch colonial tradition in the Caribbean and the consequent availability of sources, work on this region was more systematic and more embed-ded in an institutional context. Rudolf van Lier's Frontier Society (originally pub-lished in 1949) on the social and ethnic development of Suriname may be consid-ered a landmark in the field of Caribbean studies. It firmly established a modern Caribbean research tradition that gave rise to the work of Harry Hoetink, Peter Kloos, André Köbben, Bonno Thoden van Velzen and Ineke van Wetering. In the second period, beginning in the 1970s, worldwide decolonization and increased attention for what came to be known as the Third World consolidated the new interest in Latin America and the Caribbean. This resulted in a much more institutionalized embedding of scientific research, now often called 'area studies', These kinds of articles are prone to provoke controversy and criticism. I did my best to be as com-plete and fair as possible, but, in spite of the help from all these colleagues, I am the only one who can be held responsible for the inevitable omissions, biases and unbalances in this article.
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