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ABSTRACT
Focusing on a multimedia digital performance art exhibit as curated by Dominican intellectual Alanna Lockward, this article considers how the curation of performance on internet platforms interacts with (trans-)national spaces through the digital representation and reorganization of those spaces. The multimedio features a collective online performance of the mid-twentieth century Dominican poet Jacques Renaud Viau using Google+ Hangouts, which infuses Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, with the poem’s invocations of transnational belonging. This article analyzes questions of access and digital smoothness, the performance of listening on the Google+ Hangouts platform, and identification of performers’ locations in order to show how the networked solidarity performed in the online collective reading gestures towards a reterritorialization of contemporary Haitian and Dominican geopolitics. Given twenty-first century hyperterritorializations of Dominicanness, this curation of performance art on the Internet resituates where Santo Domingo is located with regards to its relationship to Haiti and its imaginaries of national belonging.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jeannine Murray-Román is an Assistant Professor of French and Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida State University. She is the author of ‘Twitter's and @douenislands' ambiguous paths’ in SX archipelagos as well as the monograph Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age (University of Virginia Press, 2017). Her current research interests include walking, figures of partial death in Caribbean writing, and the debt crisis in Puerto Rico.
Notes
1 In the e-misférica's table of contents, Lockward's dossier is listed in the ‘Multimedio texts’ section https://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj; in the Hemispheric Institute's description of their ‘core projects,’ including the online journal e-misférica, they list ‘online multimedia artist presentations’ as one of the journals features, which this would seem to be https://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/core-projects.
2 As she explains in footnote 4 in the last essay of the multimedio, ‘Healing the Dual Wounds,’ Lockward chooses Saint-Domingue to refer to the entire island. Other scholars use the terms Hispaniola or Kiskeya/Quisqueya to do the work of identifying a geo-political space that contains two interdependent sometimes-somewhat-sovereign nations.
3 First published in Apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporeanea desde El Caribe. CENDEAC: Murcia, 2006. Included in Haití Dominicano (221-233), also translated into English and published in Small Axe, October 2007 as ‘Pares & Nones (Evens & Odds): Invisible Equality’ with selected photographs. The exhibition in 2006 was the first of its kind and as of 2015, when she pointed to ‘Pares & Nones’ as an important predecessor to ‘Blesi Doub,’ it remained the only exhibition to have explicitly brought together Haitian, Dominican, and diaspora photographers.
4 This text is a version of an essay that Lockward initially wrote for the Centro León's edited volume on Dominican art, Trenzando una historia en curso: arte dominicano contemporáneo en el contexto del Caribe (2010), where Lockward entitled it ‘Arte desde Santo Domingo: ecos diaspóricos en el 'continente de la conciencia Negra’ (181-238), ‘Art from Santo Domingo: Diasporic Echoes in the “continent of black consciousness.”’ In this version of the essay, every page of text is flanked by a large color photograph of the art work being discussed. The title shifted in Un Haití Dominicano to ‘La herida doble de los Marassá en el imaginario artístico de Saint-Domingue’ (273-304), ‘The dual wound of the Marassá (vodou twins) in the artistic imaginary of Saint-Domingue’ to acknowledge its new context, an edited volume emphasizing the bilateral relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and also to emphasize how her journalistic writing collected in this book doubled with her fiction writing, notably in her novel Marassá y la nada. This version of the essay has no accompanying images of the artworks discussed. Finally, she used much of the material from this essay as the closing ‘multidimensional text’ in e-misférica, where it is entitled ‘Healing the Dual Wounds. Body Politics in/and Saint-Domingue.’ There, images of the art discussed are included as thumbnails and the text is studded with hyperlinks to artists' home pages and to news agencies' reports on political figures and events.
5 In its English revision as the ‘multidimensional text’ at the end of the multimedio in e-misférica, Lockward renders the phrase in English in a footnote 15 as, ‘after the constitutional ruling 168/13, I have defined myself as an epistemic Haitian and a Dominican in transit.’ This translation does not identify the gendered aspect of national belonging in una haitiana y una dominicana.
6 Shipley contrasts the treatment reserved for Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic to that of Dominican emigrants to the United States, who ‘the Dominican Republic actively engages in efforts to provide social services’ (Citation2015, 482–84).
7 In her evaluation of museum digital collections curators in 2014, Sonia Macedo comments that their primary role is to preserve and manage digital collections, which can include digitized images of analog works as well as digital artwork. Very rarely are they also charged with developing online and offline exhibits (as quoted in Carvahlo and Matos Citation2018, 44).
8 ‘I wanted to tell you of my country, / of my two homelands, / of my Island / divided long ago by men / there were people came together to create a river’ (translation into English by Raj Chetty and Amaury Rodríguez published in The Black Scholar, 63).
9 Since the ruling, there have been official deportations, summary removals, and what are sometimes termed ‘self-deportations.’ Javiera Alarcon reported for Foreign Policy in Focus that as of July 2016, 70,000 persons had left the Dominican Republic voluntarily—a term that does not address the social climate of fear and repression, but only whether the state was directly involved in a person's removal. The Haitian government has officially protested the ruling at the Organization of American States, receiving support from other Caribbean nations, as Jacqueline Charles reported for the Miami Herald on July 8, 2015. In these negotiations, the Haitian government challenged official Dominican modes of determining ‘Haitian nationals,’ however, the Dominican Republic is not under any obligation to negotiate with the Haitian government, and has rejected any international pressure to soften this stance. The debate remained at a semantic level with the Dominican officials seemingly refusing responsibility for having made Dominicans ‘stateless,’ but instead identifying those persons as Haitians who had not yet been ‘regularized’ by the Haitian state.
10 ‘Chez Viau, les langues, les rythmes et les paysages des deux pays se donnent la main, se rejoignent, s'alternent dans un va-et-vient fulgurant’ (Citation2015, 77).
11 In the last essay of the multimedio, Lockward briefly mentions Jochi Muñoz's performance piece consisting of public readings of Viau throughout Santo Domingo.
12 The language used changes with each set in a sequence that does not privilege the language in which the poem was written (the order in both videos is French, English, Spanish, French, English, Spanish, French).
13 The standard screen configuration for the multiparty video chat supported by Google+ Hangouts contains a strip at the bottom with the thumbnails of each of the participants' screens, a main screen featuring the current speaker, and a text chat-box for participants' written comments in a vertical column on the right side. In the February 16, 2015 collective reading, both the text chat-box and the thumbnail strip of participants were edited out. In the February 18, 2015 collective reading, the text chat-box is edited out but the bottom strip with the screens of all the other participants remains, leading to the differing materialization of virtual space in each of the two videos.
14 This work was presented at the Hemispheric Institute's 2009 Encuentro in Bogotá, Colombia and is documented at https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/enc09-performances/item/56-09-sayuri-guzman.html.