"A River Filled With Ghosts:" The Massacre River in Diasporic Memory
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2024
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Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges). Department of Environmental Studies
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
This paper revisits the memory of the 1937 Massacre of Haitians, Afro-Dominicans, and rayanos in the Dominican borderlands in light of recent increased border militarization by reading for representations of the Massacre River in Freddy Prestol Castillo’s El Masacre se pasa a pie, Edwidge Dantica’s “Nineteen Thirty Seven” and Roxane Gay’s “In the Manner of Water or Light.” I argue that the Massacre River represents multiple contradictory meanings – both a border/boundary and a threshold, a place that generates both life and death – but ultimately in diasporic memory exists as a place for necessary reckoning with the legacies of colonialism. I also argue for the continued study of river-borders in the context of Black diasporic studies and border studies, as an expansion of theories related to the Black Atlantic.