Trujillo Regime Essay

Tags: S. Ann Soetoro DissertationKey Sections Of A Business PlanResearch On NewspapersHelp On EssaysWriting A Strong EssayMla Style Thesis CitationNursing Clinical Decision Making EssayUniversity Of Leicester Thesis Word Limit

We use cookies to offer you a better experience, personalize content, tailor advertising, provide social media features, and better understand the use of our services.

To learn more or modify/prevent the use of cookies, see our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.

(2007) is a complex text, at the core of which is an historical narrative about the Trujillo regime and its after-effects.

By expanding on the previous scholarly discussion, this essay provides a comprehensive look at the roles of the fantastic in this novel, arguing that it serves as a tool for (re)presenting the incomprehensible violence of the dictatorship and mediating the cultural complexities that arose from the Dominican diaspora in the United States. The first describes how multiple intertextual references to comic books, fantasy literature and science fiction create a framework that facilitates the reader’s comprehension of the cultural disparities in the novel.

The same criticism may apply, as well, to the book’s final chapter, which attempts to explain the rapid and seemingly self-defeating fragmentation of the regime in terms of the broader argument about state formation and paternalist populism.

That is, it seems that the “insanity” of the Trujillo state’s twilight years continues to defy systematic explanation.The Trujillo regime is a military dictatorship, and while the novel depicts its stanglehold on the country and the fear by which it rules, it more particularly depicts it as patriarchal--ruled by a man by force, reflecting the sort of cruelty and power relationship also seen in a patriarchal marriage.Trujillo is a womanizer; he uses young women as a way to assert his masculinity and power, which coincides with the way he runs the...While compelling in this light, these combined material and cultural factors seem less suitable to explain the role of the 1937 “Parsley Massacre”, in which the Trujillo regime turned suddenly and violently against Haitian immigrants on the frontier.In a work as carefully structured and logically argued as , the section on the massacre seems to find Turits in a stretch to make the reckless incoherence of the massacre fit into a coherent framework.Turits explains the gradual crumbling of the Trujillo government between 19 as a result of the dictator’s sudden turn away from paternalist peasantism toward state sugar capitalism, along with a loss of support from both the Catholic Church and the U. To do so, he lays out the longue durée history of the nation’s rural people, mainly descendants of enslaved Africans who carved out an independent, pastoral existence in the Dominican hinterlands after the colonial sugar economy went bust in the late-sixteenth century.The unique structural and environmental conditions in the Dominican Republic—which suffered from little agrarian pressure and was spared the horrors of large-scale plantation agriculture after the initial bust—worked to produce a mobile, independent, and pastoral peasant population which consistently thwarted Dominican elites’ attempts to form a modern nation-state.It should be noted, too, that Truijllo’s peasant-centered modernity required negotiations with both peasants and private landowners—foreign and domestic. A young Raphael Trujillo (Image courtest of Wikimedia Commons) Nevertheless, Turits’ shows that the Trujillo state created lasting, though ambivalent, bonds with rural people that served to preserve an especially undemocratic regime for three decades.Turits’ explorations of these negotiations reveal a regime that pursued an ad-hoc, equivocating policy of support of the peasantry and often failed the latter when it was up against powerful U. In many ways, this paradoxical support for a widely reviled and unquestionably ruthless dictator, which has lingered into contemporary memories of the trujillato, provided the impetus for the work in the first place.For further information, including about cookie settings, please read our Cookie Policy .By continuing to use this site, you consent to the use of cookies.