What role, if any, do language, bilingualism and translation play in your work?

I don’t know a world in which language, bilingualism, and translation doesn’t play a part. I’ve had to deal with translation since immigrating to the U.S. as an eight year old who didn’t speak English. That I majored in Comparative Literature—a major in which translation and language is central—is not surprising.

Some of the main Spanish-language authors I chose to write about in Colonial Phantoms have not been translated and so I translated most of the works I discuss in my book, including poetry by Salomé Ureña and prose by Aurora Arias. I see translating as an accessibility issue; I want my English-speaking audience to have access to some of these amazing works.

Back in 2003, when I started doing research on Dominican literature as an undergraduate, I was largely on my own. Part of this is my own ignorance about who on campus could have helped me since my focus was on Japanese literature and history. However, a huge part of it was that Dominican literature was not very widely studied in the U.S. because a lot of it hadn’t been translated. Frankly a lot of it wasn’t even easy to find in Spanish on the island. In these early years, I relied on the important work that scholars like Daisy Cocco de Filippis took on to expand U.S. knowledge and access to Dominican literature.

Things are changing though. Just last week I saw that a translation of short stories by José Alcántara Almánzar was published. My syllabi have changed drastically since I started teaching in 2013 with the publication of The Dominican Republic Reader and translation of some of my favorite books such as Rita Indiana Hernández’s Papi. I have also been part of an important Routledge initiative which seeks to translate into English and publish works by Dominican scholars. Another huge event which we cannot ignore is that in that time Junot Díaz exploded in a global literary scene, which led to greater academic interest and investment in Dominican studies.

What topics/ histories remain unexplored within the field of Dominican Studies?

So many! I’m currently working on a book about el monte and “blackness in the hills” as an aesthetic in both the D.R. and the U.S.

Because I’m a literary scholar, I want more work on aesthetics, genre, and theory. Beyond that, more people have also begun working on the Dominican relationship to the Haitian Revolution and the absolutely fascinating and understudied idea that these two countries were, in the nineteenth century, reviled and feared throughout the Americas. I wanted Colonial Phantoms to be a contribution to this endeavor. This island was a black hole (no pun intended) on the map—a presence that people sought to absent lest the whole world gets sucked into its terrifying orbit. I yearn for more work on colonial Santo Domingo beyond Spanish dominion. I also yearn for more work on Dominican popular culture beyond nationalist or even folkloric celebration. I think that scholars, writers, and artists (including social media and visual artists, performance artists, and musicians) have already started to do a lot of this work, which is really exciting.