Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, by Sophie Maríñez, will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in August 2024.

Kaiama Glover (Yale University) writes, “With Spirals in the Caribbean, Sophie Maríñez has crafted an eloquent and wide-ranging exploration of Haitian Spiralism, grounded resolutely in the space of the Americas writ large. Maríñez’s tracing of the spiral aesthetic across both the fraught border of Hispaniola and the boundaries of academic disciplines offers a stunning multilingual and transnational approach to multiple cultural forms. The exciting constellation of questions and propositions Maríñez presents will richly inform the overlapping fields of inquiry this book so provocatively engages.”

Description: An in-depth analysis of literary and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and their diasporas.

Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution—a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers—contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.

With its emphases on folk tales, responses to the 1937 genocide, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic, Afro-indigenous collective memories, and lesser-known literary works on the genocide of indigenous populations in the Caribbean, Spirals in the Caribbean will attract students, scholars, and general readers alike.

Sophie Maríñez is a Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and an affiliated Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Ph.D. Program in French at The Graduate Center.

For more information, see https://www.pennpress.org/9781512826401/spirals-in-the-caribbean/