Introduction

By the turn of the century, scholarship on Dominican literature was starting to become less of a rarity in North American academic circuits. There were fierce efforts coming from the pioneers of Dominican studies before that time, namely Silvio Torres-Saillant and Daisy Cocco de Filippis. And one cannot forget the tenacious work of Rei Berroa, who edited a dossier on Twentieth-Century Dominican Literature for the Revista Iberoamericana (Pittsburgh) in 1988; Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Consuelo López-Springfield as guest editors of the special issue of Callaloo on Dominican Literature and Culture published in 2000; and Ramona Hernández and Anthony Stevens-Acevedo’s monograph issue of Camino Real, a journal of the Franklin Institute (University of Alcalá, Spain), in 2011. These important anthological projects showcased the vibrant literary production from the Dominican Republic, which had been inexplicably overshadowed by the prevalence of scholarship on Cuban and Puerto Rican literatures. Certainly, if we consider the context of the North American academy before and in the first years of the new millennium, an examination of the curricula of the departments of Hispanic Studies in the major universities of the United States and Canada in that period would reveal a minuscule percentage devoted to the study of Dominican literary production. Likewise, a quick glance at the main academic publications in the field of Latin American literature up to that point uncovers a Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 106, Vol. 56, No. 1, 2023, 3–6