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We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom
In We Dream Together Anne Eller breaks with dominant narratives of conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti by tracing the complicated history of Dominican emancipation and independence between 1822 and 1865. Eller moves beyond the small body of writing by Dominican elites that often narrates Dominican nationhood to craft inclusive, popular histories of identity, community, and freedom, summoning sources that range from trial records and consul reports to poetry and song. Rethinking Dominican relationships with their communities, the national project, and the greater Caribbean, Eller shows how popular anticolonial resistance was anchored in a rich and complex political culture. Haitians and Dominicans fostered a common commitment to Caribbean freedom, the abolition of slavery, and popular democracy, often well beyond the reach of the state. By showing how the island's political roots are deeply entwined, and by contextualizing this history within the wider Atlantic world, Eller demonstrates the centrality of Dominican anticolonial struggles for understanding independence and emancipation throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published December 9, 2016
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March 8, 2021
3.5
Reading 19th to mid-20th-century Caribbean history is like looking through a sunlit fog into a lost dream. Any war fought against European/US hegemony was in part sustained by the collaboration, cooperation, and encouragement of a country’s Caribbean neighbours. The official understanding of Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s history is divisive: one country negatively defines itself against the other, at times violently. In We Dream Together, Anne Eller looked at La Española in the mid 19th century, from the end of Haitian Unification in 1844 to the War of Restoration’s end in 1865, to complicate that story.
Eller began by elucidating how the name changes revealed the competing narratives. In 1822 when Jean-Pierre Boyer, the Haitian president, emancipated Santo Domingo a second time on a “wave of Dominican support” was it a Unificación, as it was known then or Ocupación Haitiana, as it is now? When a “small movement” overthrew Boyer’s weak government in 1844 was that a Separación or Independencia? If the latter, how should we understand the War of Restoration? Dominicans of all classes and colours, from all corners of it and other islands as far as Curacao, supported the fight in the harshest circumstances. Yet it is positioned as a comparatively minor blip to the year-long power contest amongst a few factions which led to the first republic (1844-61). Who or what was behind these changes? Eller gives no definitive answer but her research presents a perennial group of wealthy elites who, in identifying with Spain’s civilizing ideals, are dogged in their insistence to forge a nationalism founded in race and slavery’s erasure.
Birthing a nation in one island amongst competing visions is difficult enough. Imagine the clusterfuck when busy body outsiders of all sorts insist on meddling. Spanish officials in Cuba and Puerto Rico, unenthused about another emancipated neighbour, take advantage of the troubled Separation government. They find a powerful collaborator with then Pedro Santana–the kind of “Come Taste and Buy” sellout with whom we are too familiar–and succeeded in making the DR a Spanish protectorate. The delusional Frenchies were eager to reconquer Haiti, capture the rest of the island as brawta, and get them both to pay the indemnity. The British kept things low key throughout, interested in a peace that allowed them to profit. And we got a baby USA sponsoring gung ho filibusters, eager to Monroe Doctrine the Americas into its own personal playground.
Eller ably presented her thorough research–half this book is endnotes, y’all–in a straight forward no frills manner. Each chapter focused on a defining moment, issue or concept which Eller fleshed out with relevant analysis of the various movements, politics, and diplomatic intrigue both on the island and in the wider Americas, recharting timelines as she saw fit, to convey the story’s scope. The major caveat is that the Dominican and Haitian elites whose wealth gave them easier to access to government are the book’s main players, with comparatively less detail on the more typical citizenry throughout this period; she explained that the former had richer documentation. (I’m not too mad about it. She is not the one to write that story.)
As a government nerd into political and diplomatic history, this was a good read. It not only provided insight into one island’s history but, to varying degrees, the entire Caribbean’s, whether independent or still under foreign control. Elitist motivations to stress a nationalism that was “deafeningly silent racism and slavery”, that promoted an independence movement more closely intertwined with privileged light-skinned leaders than pivotal emancipation wars, were not only a Dominican story. In current climes, when Arundhati Roy asks if we are truly post-colonial, it pushes one to reconsider what freedom means for us in the 21st century.
Reading 19th to mid-20th-century Caribbean history is like looking through a sunlit fog into a lost dream. Any war fought against European/US hegemony was in part sustained by the collaboration, cooperation, and encouragement of a country’s Caribbean neighbours. The official understanding of Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s history is divisive: one country negatively defines itself against the other, at times violently. In We Dream Together, Anne Eller looked at La Española in the mid 19th century, from the end of Haitian Unification in 1844 to the War of Restoration’s end in 1865, to complicate that story.
Eller began by elucidating how the name changes revealed the competing narratives. In 1822 when Jean-Pierre Boyer, the Haitian president, emancipated Santo Domingo a second time on a “wave of Dominican support” was it a Unificación, as it was known then or Ocupación Haitiana, as it is now? When a “small movement” overthrew Boyer’s weak government in 1844 was that a Separación or Independencia? If the latter, how should we understand the War of Restoration? Dominicans of all classes and colours, from all corners of it and other islands as far as Curacao, supported the fight in the harshest circumstances. Yet it is positioned as a comparatively minor blip to the year-long power contest amongst a few factions which led to the first republic (1844-61). Who or what was behind these changes? Eller gives no definitive answer but her research presents a perennial group of wealthy elites who, in identifying with Spain’s civilizing ideals, are dogged in their insistence to forge a nationalism founded in race and slavery’s erasure.
Birthing a nation in one island amongst competing visions is difficult enough. Imagine the clusterfuck when busy body outsiders of all sorts insist on meddling. Spanish officials in Cuba and Puerto Rico, unenthused about another emancipated neighbour, take advantage of the troubled Separation government. They find a powerful collaborator with then Pedro Santana–the kind of “Come Taste and Buy” sellout with whom we are too familiar–and succeeded in making the DR a Spanish protectorate. The delusional Frenchies were eager to reconquer Haiti, capture the rest of the island as brawta, and get them both to pay the indemnity. The British kept things low key throughout, interested in a peace that allowed them to profit. And we got a baby USA sponsoring gung ho filibusters, eager to Monroe Doctrine the Americas into its own personal playground.
Eller ably presented her thorough research–half this book is endnotes, y’all–in a straight forward no frills manner. Each chapter focused on a defining moment, issue or concept which Eller fleshed out with relevant analysis of the various movements, politics, and diplomatic intrigue both on the island and in the wider Americas, recharting timelines as she saw fit, to convey the story’s scope. The major caveat is that the Dominican and Haitian elites whose wealth gave them easier to access to government are the book’s main players, with comparatively less detail on the more typical citizenry throughout this period; she explained that the former had richer documentation. (I’m not too mad about it. She is not the one to write that story.)
As a government nerd into political and diplomatic history, this was a good read. It not only provided insight into one island’s history but, to varying degrees, the entire Caribbean’s, whether independent or still under foreign control. Elitist motivations to stress a nationalism that was “deafeningly silent racism and slavery”, that promoted an independence movement more closely intertwined with privileged light-skinned leaders than pivotal emancipation wars, were not only a Dominican story. In current climes, when Arundhati Roy asks if we are truly post-colonial, it pushes one to reconsider what freedom means for us in the 21st century.
Displaying 1 of 1 review