Word Up welcomes Rachel Afi Quinn and Zaida Corniel to discuss the recent translation of the critically acclaimed Being La Dominicana (Siendo La Dominicana).  Rachel Afi Quinn investigates the ways Dominican visual culture portrays Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes.

The Spanish edition will be available at the event for purchase. 

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals how 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Afi Quinn is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. Her transnational feminist cultural studies scholarship focuses on mixed race, gender and sexuality in the African Diaspora. Her first book, Being La Dominicana: Race and Gender in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo was published in 2021 and is now available in Spanish as Siendo La Dominicana. She was a 2022-2023 Schomburg Fellow and received a 2023-2024 NEH fellowship for her next book project on black feminist biography on mixed race journalist Philippa Schuyler. She was part of the team that produced the 2015 documentary Cimarrón Spirit about contemporary Afro-Dominican identities. Her writing on race, gender, art and African diasporic identities can be found in Small Axe, The Black Scholar, Sinister Wisdom, Burlington Contemporary and Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Dr. Zaida Corniel is a Lecturer at the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. Her academic work focuses on Latino studies, touristic discourses, and representation of the Caribbean subjectivities in contemporary narratives. She is the author of the short story collection Para adolescentes, premenopáusicas y especialistas de la salud (Arte Poética Press, 2019) and the play Ay Fefa, Where is the Wind? ( NoPassport Press, 2023). Her articles and creative work have been included in Review, Guaraguao, Estudios Sociales and Caudal, among other publications.