Overview

How music depicted in literature shapes Dominican and Dominican New Yorkers’ identities and links the homeland to the diaspora. Music has played a large role in recent Dominican literature, whether of the island or the diaspora. Bridging Sonic Borders explores this sonic connection linking the homeland and far-flung locales-especially New York, the center of Dominican cultural production in the United States. Sharina MaÍllo-Pozo argues that literary representations of popular music delineate a shared aesthetic territory for US and Caribbean Dominicans, fostering an inclusive and transnational Dominicanidad. Examining works written in Spanish, English, and Dominicanish, MaÍllo-Pozo focuses on Dominican/Dominicanyork writings that have nurtured a borderless aesthetics through their shared investment in hip-hop, jazz, blues, pop, rock, and merengue. For Dominican writers, popular music has become a way of exploring memory and nostalgia and a means of centering people rejected from hegemonic identity formation-the working class, those of African descent, rural and queer people. For example, many works focused on the life of rocker Luis “Terror” DÍas have emphasized the in-between identity of being both Dominican and a New Yorker. Collectively, these writings have created a space in which boundaries of nation and diaspora are revealed for their fundamental porosity.

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9781477331545

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Reviews

Bridging Sonic Borders delves into the vibrant intersection of popular music and Dominican literature. Sharina MaÍllo-Pozo introduces the concept of ""sonic literary texts,"" illustrating how sound weaves together the insular and diasporic Dominican experiences. Through the lens of ""sonic archives,"" she highlights how collective histories and cultural expressions are embedded within key works of Dominican literature. This pioneering study invites readers to explore the transformative role of music and sound in shaping Dominican identity and culture, offering a compelling new perspective on the cultural dynamics that inform the Caribbean imagination. - Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, University of Miami, author of Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context Moving beyond traditional divisions between Dominican culture on the island and in the diaspora, MaÍllo-Pozo’s broad-reaching and much-needed study argues convincingly for the transnational nature of dominicanidad. Highlighting the links between popular music and literature, she ably compiles a diverse archive of sonic narratives to show how recent cultural production deconstructs hegemonic narratives of national identity even as it centers music as a social institution intimately connected to Dominican ways of being. - Emily A. Maguire, Northwestern University, author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography

Author Information

Sharina MaÍllo-Pozo is an assistant professor of Latinx studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia. She is the coeditor of Embodiment and Representations of Beauty.

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