No abstract

The Dominican American community in New York is perhaps one of the best examples of how processes of transculturation are affecting traditional definitions of ethnic identification. Given the intense economic, social and cultural transnational exchanges between the island and the USA from the 1960s, Dominicanyorks have been challenging the illusion of homogeneity in the definition of Americanness for decades, creating transnational social networks that transcend traditional national and ethnographic boundaries. The theatrical works of Josefina Báez, a Dominican American performer living in New York, and Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso, a Dominican poet and playwright who lived and worked in the US metropolis for decades before moving back to the Dominican Republic, lyrically explore issues of diaspora, identity and migration and the impact these phenomena might have in the lives of migrant Dominican women. Presenting diasporic experiences from two differing but interconnected locales – New York and the Dominican Republic – these plays offer two complementary views on the ways in which ethnicity, race, social class, age and geopolitical location interact in the formation of transcultural identities, thus contributing to develop a hemispheric approach to the study of identity formation in the Americas.

No abstract

No abstract

The field of Atlantic Studies has acquired renewed interest as a result of a paradigm shift in the study of history, literature and culture in the last twenty years. Even though in its inceptions Atlantic Studies scholarship dealt almost exclusively with tracing economic and socio-cultural interconnections between Britain and the US after the latter's independence from its former colonizer, the field has expanded to include a body of works that follow what has been called a 'circum-Atlantic' perspective. Shifting towards a multidirectional approach, the Atlantic paradigm seeks to bring to light the multiplicity of economic and socio-cultural transnational connections that have existed between Europe, the Americas and West Africa from early modern times. Within this supranational framework, Atlantic History developed as a discipline aimed at providing adequate description of historical events happening at the same time in different locations across the Atlantic Ocean, from the first encounters in the15 th and 16 th centuries, marked by attempts of the European imperial powers to establish a European civilization in the Americas up to the present day. It includes the development of trade routes between Africa, Europe and the Americas during the 16 th and 17 th centuries, and the exchange of ideas associated with the Enlightenment during the 18 th and 19 th centuries that contributed to the process of independence of the different colonies throughout the Americas and the Caribbean (Bailyn 2005: 62-107). Carmen Birkle and Nicole Waller's "'The Sea Is History': Exploring the Atlantic" (2009) brings together a set of articles by scholars like Bernard Bailyn,