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Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo
March 20, 2022 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a virtual lecture about the representation of Dominican women. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In her book, Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media reward, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class.
Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today’s young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world. PURCHASE BOOK HERE
About the Author
Rachel Afi Quinn is an associate professor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston, where she is the Director of the Graduate Program in Anthropology. She earned her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Professor Quinn’s transnational feminist cultural studies scholarship focuses on mixed race, gender, and sexuality in the African Diaspora. In 2015 she was part of the filmmaking team that produced the documentary film, Cimarrón Spirit, about contemporary Afro-Dominican identities. She is committed to feminist collaboration, and she is a co-founder of the social justice feminist collective South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU). She is passionate about Black art and visual culture. Her work has been published in The Black Scholar, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and Burlington Contemporary. Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo, is her first book.