Digital Translations of Quisqueya
This semester, BCRW will host a plethora of events on transnational feminisms and activism in the Caribbean.
Here you will find student-generated content on topics ranging from feminism to political economy on the island of Quisqueya, more commonly known as Hispaniola. I hope that they can serve as resources for research or just getting to know more about such topics after attending talks such Caribbean Feminisms on the Page with Edwidge Danticat ‘90 and Victoria Brown, or “Easy Money and Respectable Girls: Neoliberalism and Expectation in the US Virgin Islands” with Tami Navarro.
Digital Translations of Quisqueya
Last semester, I was in Professor Maja Horn and Professor Kaiama Glover’s team-taught course “Translating Hispaniola.” In this course, we explored the ways in which the transnational histories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic have influenced present times. The course culminated in the creation of a digital humanities project.
Map of Quisqueya
Protesters taking a stand against the Dominican Republic’s mass deportation of Haitian people
For this class, we used a variety of resources from films such as “Des hommes et des dieux” (Of Men and Gods), fictional works by Edwidge Danticat ‘90 and Junot Diaz, legal documents, and news articles, and we were able to delve into an interdisciplinary study of the island of Hispaniola. In addition to the texts and films we worked with, we also attended weekly lectures with scholars such as Ginetta Candelario and Carlos U. Decena, who were also kind enough to direct us in our research.
Some of the topics we explored included the Haitian-Dominican border crises 1937 and 2013, colonial Hispaniola, US imperial interventions and their gendered implications, and literary engagements with dictatorship.
Working in teams of four, we carefully curated and developed timelines on topics such as sex tourism on Hispaniola, queerness in Hispaniola, dictatorship and economy, and women’s political engagement.
Along the way of completing such research, there were many challenges ranging from language barriers to researching topics that there is very little to no academic scholarship on. Nonetheless, we were able to complete our research and create our timelines, which you can see below:
Queering Hispaniola
Zachary Etheart
Karina Jougla
Salma Nakhlawi
Nichelle Watkins
Sex Tourism on Hispaniola
Erasmia Gorla
Sarah Freedman
Katherina Barguil
Maria Paley
The Economy Under Dictators
Olukemi Adeniji
Danique McGowan
Katherine Castro
Yarimar Gonzalez
Women of Hispaniola: Female Political Engagement
Cinneah El-Amin
Wilda Escarfuller
Nina Anacaona Mency Reign
Elina Rodriguez
-Salma Nakhlawi ‘17
Salma Nakhlawi is an Africana Studies major at Barnard College and a Research Assistant at the BCRW. http://www.tb-credit.ru/microkredit.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/get.html