“[A] border that exists beyond maps”

Jenna Grace Sciuto

“[A] border that exists beyond maps”: Contextualizing State-Sponsored Violence in Contemporary Haitian American and Dominican American Literatures

Dominican American authors Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario—as well as Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat—all wrote historically-grounded works of fiction predominately in English in the 1990s and 2000s, engaging with the legacy of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, who was in power from 1930 to 1961. In this lecture, Dr. Sciuto will use representations of the Haitian Massacre of 1937 as a test case essential for distinguishing the approaches and positionings of each novelist, in addition to exploring the relationship between these Caribbean diasporic novels, national belonging, and the tension between History with a capital h (or official written accounts of the past) vs. personal individualized histories.

Jenna Grace Sciuto is Associate Professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the United States of America. Her first book, Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2021.

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