“The Tam-Tam of Drums from the West”

Chapter 5 argues that although Haiti's presence is relatively absent in much of Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s work, when Haiti is visible, it signals an important transformation in Cartagena's thinking about Dominican national identity; Russ shows that Cartagena eventually breaks loose from the discursive structures that define Dominican nationalism in twentieth-century Dominican literature and twentieth-century Dominican poetry as fundamentally anti-black and anti-Haitian.