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 MartÃnez-Vergne
Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History by Richard Lee Turits
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment