priests from above & below (note #1)

Three more titles I'm working through will have direct bearing on this personal project. Introductions and the initial chapters of these are telling similar stories about the early 20th C. history of the Dominican Republic. The history concerns how a rural nation of stubborn, unorganized, runaway peasants would slowly be brought under control of a state and into modernity, from above. This wouldn't come about without the bloody, despotic application of order. Before the despot, though, there were intellectuals. Powerless priests suffering a Platonic complex? Possibly, but certainly a handful of men from the city, educated abroad in Europe in the latest thinking. Their project was to apply their metropolitan formation and liberal ideals to cultural improvement of the peasants in the name of progress. From above. I think I'd enjoy seeing a strand of my project develop into a sort of jiu-jitsu reversal of theirs. Those untamed peasants were my grandparents, and my parents the migrants to the modern metropolis. Now, from below, can I apply 'new' thinking of my own amongst my fellow untamed proles? The turn of the century, the pre-war period, has other significance I'll develop later alongside an explanation of what an old German philologist have to do with it. Oh these are the titles:

A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
Nation and Citizen in the Dominican Republic, 1880-1916 by Teresita Martínez-Vergne
Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History by Richard Lee Turits

Introduction

This blog will be a journal of a personal project embedded within my larger intellectual projects. In short here I will house reflections on more technical and academic readings around identities. Entries on these readings will be interspersed with entries in the same vein which are personal interpretations, readings of and exegetics on novels and mystical material. The identities being grappled with are in particular my positions as a Dominican-American in New York City, a Latino, an individual of tri-racial heritage, and a Catholic. I feel this is all captured in the blog title, Hellenized Post-Antillean. Post-antillean is a reference to being a product of the Caribbean, source of my Latino and tri-racial heritage. Along with hellenized it is a reference to having been raised in the heart of the modern empire, exposed to a (post?) modern education, well assimilated to the ways of the core. Hellenized also makes explicit the thread connecting anyone with a philosophical bent back to Athens, along with all the associated implications there. However the word hellenized is also a thread back to Jerusalem; to the diasporic Jews who first spread Christianity from the peripheral province of Judea to Rome.

I do not have much in the way of high level education on textual interpretation or cultural criticism. I have a fair background in Latin-American/Caribbean history. My main background and professional experience is in economics and finance. The entries will be very rough and not heavily edited, consisting of initial reactions and only occasionally deeper re-readings. Despite being rough and very personal I'm not making this a private journal, however neither will I publicize it for mass viewing by my friends or family. If you do find your way here commentary is of course welcome. Finally to give the best sense of where I hope to take this here are the titles I'm currently reading which will most directly inform my expressions here:

The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective by Antonio Benítez-Rojo
Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean by José F. Buscaglia-Salgado
An Intellectual History of the Caribbean: New Directions in Latino-American Culture by Silvio Torres-Saillant
Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida by Alan Megill