1 In Juan Poblete’s Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (2003) Frances Aparicio declares,
“The appearance of the ‘border subject,’…the most important concept that Latin[a/]o studies has contributed to cultural studies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America” (13). Since the turn of the century, border thinking developed in the US in the 1980s has gone global, and today Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizations of the US-Mexico border from her famous Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) provide theoretical models for scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences worldwide. A global search on the library database WorldCat, for example, bears this out as mestizaje, a key term in the work of Anzaldúa, appears in thousands of articles and volumes published in multiple languages worldwide. For Anzaldúa the borderlands is a space defined by mestizaje—a unique term from Spanish without direct equivalent in English that is nevertheless akin to miscegenation, transculturation, or hybridization. Mestizaje is embodied by the new mestizas, “Chican[a/]os [who] no longer feel that [they] need to beg entrance, that [they] need always to make the first overture—to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latin[a/]os,
apology blurting out of [their] mouths,” (Anzaldúa 20).
2 C.L.R. James famously positions Haiti’s revolutionaries as avatars of the Enlightenment in the
New World (1938). Laurent Dubois identifies Haiti as one of the birthplaces of human rights in his introduction to Avengers of the New World (2004). Nick Nesbitt addresses the issue in Universal Emancipation (2008) arguing that Haitians took enlightenment ideals to their logical and most radical conclusion: the universal emancipation and equality of all human beings.
3 Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 1.
4 Numerous scholars document how the US, Europe, and Latin America marginalized Haiti
politically and economically in the wake of Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804. The US, Great Britain, and France imposed trade embargoes on the newly independent nation that would last two decades and most nations refused to recognize Haiti diplomatically. France only
officially recognized Haiti in 1825 and required that Haiti pay 150 million gold francs in indemnification for French planters’ losses of slaves and other properties. Fearful of free, black Haitian diplomats visiting the US and slave revolts spreading to the US South, US Senator Robert V. Hayne of South Carolina said during debates on US foreign policy on Haiti in the 1820s that, “Our policy with regard to Haiti is plain. We never can acknowledge her
independence,” (Bender). Hayne’s position took the day for almost half a century; the US officially recognized Haiti in 1862, a year into the US Civil War. Despite Haitian assistance to Simón Bolívar and the independence of former colonies in South America, Latin American nations also delayed official recognition of Haiti. Brazil was the first Latin American nation to send official envoys to Haiti in 1865, and Mexico established official relations with Haiti in 1934 (Baur 410). For details on the complicated interests that drove US foreign policy on Haiti in the nineteenth century see Tim Matthewson’s “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti” 22-48. For a global, comparative perspective on Haiti’s isolation after independence see Arthur L.
Stinchcombe’s, “Class Conflict and Diplomacy: Haitian Isolation in the 19th-Century World System,” 1-24.
5 Polish mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in 1975 to describe geometric
shapes composed of one repeating pattern. Because of the repetition inherent to the generation of fractals, the fractal is self-similar, meaning each of its parts on any scale is fundamentally similar in shape and structure to both other parts at other scales and to the fractal as an overall structure. Here is a simple example of a fractal: take an infinitely long line, halve it, then halve the halves, and so on ad infinitum. This simple operation creates a shape infinitely textured both as it grows larger and as it shrinks smaller. For more on fractals see Benoit Mandelbrot’s Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension (1977).
6 Ette, Ottmar. “Islands, Borders and Vectors: The Fractal World of the Caribbean,” 113-114. 7 Quijano, Aníbal and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the
modern world-system,” 551.
8 Escobar, Arturo. “Beyond the Third World: Imperial Globality, Global Coloniality and Anti-
Globalisation Social Movements,” 210.
9 Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 25, 35.
10 Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 19. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “El
Mundo Zurdo,” 196. Fanon, Frantz. Les damnés de la terre.
11 DeGuzmán, María. Buenas Noches American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night, 69-70;
hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
12 Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking, 84; hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
13 Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking, 84. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. “Bridging Islands: Gloria Anzaldúa and the Caribbean,” 276-277.
14 Aparicio, Frances R. “Latino Cultural Studies,” 13.
15 Viego, Antonio. Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies,123-124. See
Yarbro-Bejarano “Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject.” and Embry, Marcus “Cholo angels in Guadalajara: The politics and poetics of Anzaldúa's borderlands/La Frontera.”
17 Bosch, Juan. De Cristóbal Coloń a Fidel Castro: El Caribe, Frontera Imperial, 9; hereafter
cited in parentheses in the text. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this dissertation are my own.
18 Mir, Pedro. Tres Leyendas de colores: Ensayo de interpretación de las tres primeras
revolutiones del Nuevo Mundo, 285; hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
19 Though the volume problematically treats race as a scientific reality in extended discussions of
phenotype among humans as markers of either evolutionary progress or antiquatedness, I would argue Mir nevertheless understands the problematic, constructed nature of Latin American myths, such as “la raza cósmica” developed by Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos, valorizing and idealizing the ethno-racial hybridity of mestizos as a source of Latin American unity. As I understand it, Mir, argues that these three revolts shaped Latin American colonial institutions, legal and bureaucratic, and set into motion repressive regimes of race that favored Spanish and criollo peoples as citizens.
20 Since the 1990’s in the US the Haitian-American population has more than doubled and the
Dominican-American population has almost quadrupled. For statistics on Haitian-American immigration see Nwosu and Batalova “Haitian Immigrants in the United States” and Camarota “Fact Sheet on Haitian Immigrants in the United States.” For statistics on Dominican-American immigration see Grieco “The Dominican Population in the United States: Growth and
Distribution.”
21 Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary, 77; hereafter cited in parentheses in the text. 22 Mandelbrot, Benoit. Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension, 1.
23 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern
Perspective, 72; hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
24 Glover, Kaiama L. Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, viii;
hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
25 Ette, Ottmar. “Islands, Borders, and Vectors: The Fractal World of the Caribbean,” 115. 26 In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy describes numerous
diasporic phenomena as fractal. The black Atlantic itself along with the “patterns of cultural and political exchange and transformation,” international “trajectories” of music, “patterns of cultural and political affiliation,” and “communities of interpretation, needs, and solidarity” that make the black Atlantic, all have, for Gilroy, “a fractal form.” (4, 15, 76, 88, 122, 236).
28 Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia
Rose,” 736.
29 Bould, Mark. “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF,” 181.
30 Ramírez, Catherine S. “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art