For
my final paper, I am interested in applying many of the theories that we have
learned this semester in order to study an event that has global and local ties
and that has been spurred by the transnational lives of its population. Over
the past month, the Dominican Republic and many Dominican communities in the
United States has seen mass protests over fiscal reforms to decrease the
government deficit my taxing citizens at a higher rate. The Dominican
Republic’s fiscal protests are interesting because they are not just the
complaint of present and historic corruption charges. I propose to investigate
their reason for occurring, their proliferation over transnational ties and
their linkages to past and current protests against a government seen as irresponsible
and badly administered.
One
of my guiding inquiries is why these protests have provided a space of
identification for both citizens who protested the military regime in the
Dominican Republic, as well as young Second and Third generation activists in
Providence, Rhode Island. Is it a question of their methodology? Or a question
of identifying with and encountering an imagined national cause from a
transnational and diasporic space? How do these protests become affirmation of national
and transnational identity, or Dominicanness? My preliminary thesis is that the
many dissenting voices (the protests are about corruption, but also against the
past administration and the violence against women the government fails to
address) in both a local and translocal context seem disjointed, but are
actually united due to of the hauntings and community imagination of corruption
in the past and in the present and a vision for a different national future.
The connection is being made about these mass mobilizations
in the capital city to protest against military dictatorship in 1965, as well
as to those of the Arab Spring. There have been many other protests in the
past, but the way that the current protests are aesthetically framed resonate
both with the actions of the past, and with the images of the methods of the
Arab Spring (social media, mass occupation of public plaza, etc). On the other
hand, the global meets the local, but not just the present local in itself, but
also a haunted local that resonates with the explosive power of the people
finally allowed to mobilize after a thirty year dictatorship. Global and Local
connections are being interlinked to historical ‘hauntings’ of the disappointments
occurring during and after our own military dictatorship. Using Berlant’s
notion of cruel optimism and impasse, I want to explore how these protests may
have become an outlet for activists and citizens in the D.R. and U.S. to
express their frustrations at being attached to a universal idea of transparency
and basic rights that are not always met by the Dominican government.
Sections and Texts (some I will draw
heavily from, others are less central):
I)
Introduction and theory: Dominicans,
a Transnational Imagined Community (Benedict Anderson: Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.)
II)
Communication Technologies and
Transnational Activism (Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cell
Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” Public
Culture 15.3 (Fall 2003): 399-425
Mark Granovetter, “The Strength
of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78:6 (May 1973):
1360-1380.
III)
Imaginings and Hauntings of Corruption: Lauren Berlant, Cruel
Optimism and Anna Tsing Friction.
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