We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom

Yet despite this complex web of challenging claims to citizenship, sovereignty, and a cohesive national past, historian Anne Eller focuses on the period of Spanish re-annexation and resistance to meticulously untangle some of these multiple narratives of independence in the Dominican Republic in We...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Latin Americanist (Orlando, Fla.) Fla.), 2020, Vol.64 (3), p.365-367
Main Author: Manley, Elizabeth S
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Annexation
Archives & records
Citizenship
Colonization
Complaints
Freedoms
Independence
Mobility
Narratives
Public opinion
Resistance
Sovereignty
Transnationalism
War
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Summary:Yet despite this complex web of challenging claims to citizenship, sovereignty, and a cohesive national past, historian Anne Eller focuses on the period of Spanish re-annexation and resistance to meticulously untangle some of these multiple narratives of independence in the Dominican Republic in We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. When resistance to Spanish annexation finally boiled over into full, armed rebellion (later called the "War of Restoration") in 1863, Eller pieces together the "imperfect records of rebels' heterogeneous complaints and aims" (145) to provide the many personal reflections that ultimately added up to country-wide rebellion. [...]she uses a poetic epitaph to Santana ("Here lies a great idiot") to convey public sentiment toward the annexation project, or reports of seemingly minor scuffles to demonstrate rising tensions among Dominican loyalist troops (183). [...]when assessing the transnational currents that weighed in upon renewed colonization or the mobility of bodies engaged in that discourse, Eller's scholarship reminds us viscerally of the very "common winds" of freedom, as Julius Scott might put it, that networked across the Caribbean.
ISSN:1557-2021
1557-203X