In 2002, Miriam DeCosta-Willis described the critical response to Aída Cartagena Portalatín (1918–94) as a “conundrum”: Why, wondered this pioneering scholar of Afro-Hispanic literature, have so many critics ignored the artist who has been called the most important twentieth-century woman writer of the Dominican Republic (56)? Ten years earlier, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, a Dominican feminist critic and promoter of Cartagena's legacy, suggested that no comprehensive study of her work had been written because literary criticism of her work had become too “controversial” (27). Decades have passed, but the problem diagnosed by DeCosta-Willis and Cocco De Filippis endures: although Cartagena's legacy looms large in the Dominican cultural landscape, criticism of her work remains unevenly developed in puzzling ways. On the one hand, her influence is undisputed. Laudatory summaries of her life abound, and her poems and short stories appear in numerous anthologies in several languages. On the other hand, substantive analysis of her work has been scattershot. Scholars have scrutinized some of her poetry as well as her 1970 novel, Escalera para Electra (Staircase for Electra), but there is no comprehensive examination of her life and work, and significant portions of her oeuvre are neglected.Footnote ¹

DeCosta-Willis and Cocco De Filippis note that, in her conservative homeland, Cartagena's identity as an unencumbered single woman and committed leftist intensified the air of controversy surrounding her. Equally important were her artistic choices, including her restless experimentation with style and genre and her combative approach to divisive cultural and political issues. Still, even if these qualities deterred some older critics, they attracted younger ones, including new generations of women writers who, like Cocco De Filippis, admired her defiant independence. Yet something about Cartagena continues to disturb and so to generate a persistent incongruency between her iconic status and an inadequate critical engagement with her work.

The contradictory impulses at play in her writings provide a key to the conundrum at hand: hegemonic cosmopolitanism and nationalist pride circulate, often in the same text, exposing what Mariano Siskind astutely designates “the incommensurability between the cosmopolitan desire for a universal belonging and the self-representation of the marginal particularity of Latin American culture” (120). As a further complication, she invokes notions of transnational black identity rooted in both the Négritude movement she discovered in the 1940s and the pan-African liberation movement of the 1960s. Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, Dominican nationalism (of a leftist variety), and pan-African liberation discourse thus collide in unpredictable ways.

Critics have tended to avoid this thorny complexity rather than attend to it, focusing on individual works that best conform to their preferred version of the author. Yet Cartagena's legacy can be illuminated by reading her through the lens of what I call Dominican black cosmopolitanism, a writerly performance of intersectionality that brings together these apparently contradictory ways of understanding culture, citizenship, and identity. Intimately linked to the complex history of the Dominican Republic and multivalent to the point of volatility, each of its terms—Dominican, black, cosmopolitan—may carry a different weight at different moments. The Dominican may predominate, or the black, or the cosmopolitan. The terms may also be paired: some texts explore the Afro-Dominican experience; others draw from a European cosmopolitan imaginary to conceptualize Dominican identity; still others plumb the liberating possibilities of black cosmopolitanism.

These elements converge in the 1978 collection of short stories Tablero: Doce cuentos de lo popular a lo culto (Blackboard: Twelve Stories from the Popular to the Cultured).Footnote ² But they were present from the earliest moments of Cartagena's career. At least, this is what she suggests in an autobiographical scene from her final book, the 1986 collection of essays, Culturas africanas: Rebeldes con causa (African Cultures: Rebels with a Cause). The scene describes her meeting with the French surrealist André Breton as he passed through Santo Domingo on his return voyage to postwar France. It was 1946, and the country lay in the grip of the brutal dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Cartagena had recently published her first two volumes of poetry with the Poetas Sorprendidos, or Surprised Poets, a publishing collective and literary movement whose members surreptitiously rebelled against Trujillo's brute insularism by reading widely and incorporating an eclectic range of avant-garde literary techniques into their work. It was a fellow member of this group, the exiled Spanish painter Eugenio Fernández Granell, who hosted the event, during which Breton presented Cartagena with an issue of the anticolonial Martinican literary magazine Tropiques.Footnote ³ Reflecting on this moment decades later, Cartagena described it in epiphanic terms:

Embedded in this scene are the components—Europe and Africa, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, politics and aesthetics—that make up Cartagena's Dominican black cosmopolitanism. She begins by depicting her younger self reciting the names of the European writers who have inspired her until she is interrupted by Breton's presentation of Tropiques, a publication that “nourished itself from the great motherland, Africa.” This interruption does not negate what came before; rather, it disrupts and expands her understanding of how the world is ordered in political and aesthetic terms. Politically, her discovery of the Négritude movement, founded by Césaire and the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor, awakens her to the possibility of organizing the world through transnational black alliances that do not replace national boundaries but strategically restructure their meaning.Footnote ⁵ Aesthetically, it encourages her to compare the constructive or reconstructive role of the black artist with the destructive or deconstructive impulse of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements that had heretofore nurtured her career. In this self-narration of intellectual awakening, Breton becomes the first link in a productive chain of signifiers: the sequence Breton-Césaire-Senghor-Négritude harnesses the power, as well as the ambivalence, of the ongoing encounter between Europe and Africa that gave form to so many New World places.

I ground my conceptualization of Dominican black cosmopolitanism in Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo's model of black cosmopolitanism. Nwankwo's book Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas traces negotiations made by writers of African descent in the Americas as they sought to assert a modern identity. To do so, it engages the philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism, whose focus is the exploration of the self and the local community in the context of the wider world. Introduced by the Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes (412–323 BCE), this tradition became “a crucial element of modernity” as philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Karl Marx expounded on its potentials and limitations (9). Within this context, cosmopolitanism has also served as a powerful tool to critique “the seemingly exhausted nation-state model” and “mediate actions and ideals oriented both to the universal and the particular, the global and the local,” as Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen observe (280).

In recent decades, critics have harnessed this oppositional capacity by reexamining cosmopolitanism from the margins, even as they acknowledge that it remains inextricably linked to a hegemonic Western context. For this reason, Nwankwo argues that “people of African descent in the nineteenth century evaluated the usefulness of cosmopolitanism for their struggle to be recognized as human and equal” even as they comprehended “the Atlantic power structure's attempts to deny them access to cosmopolitan subjectivity” as well as “national subjectivity and human subjectivity and, perhaps most significantly, with an emphasis (from above) on their race, effectively determining the possible parameters of identity for people of African descent” (10). As they grappled with the limitations placed on them from without, black intellectuals, routinely reduced to the single referent of race, “had to prioritize, and choose which of the parameters denied them [race, nation, and humanity] they most wished to challenge, and by extension which referent they most wanted to have the right to claim” (10). Black cosmopolitanism thus emerged from the struggle to claim fully modern and fully human identities by affirming citizenship in the world community, a specific nation, the transnational black community, or some mix of these:

Nwankwo's model underscores the thorny relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as between Eurocentric cosmopolitanism and black cosmopolitanism. Flexible by necessity, its strategies shifted over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as they continued to be shaped by the historical and cultural contexts from which an author emerged and the rhetorical goals that she pursued.

Cartagena's context—that of the Dominican Republic—was determined by a distinctive historical trajectory that feels at once familiar and unfamiliar within a broader trans-American framework. The island of Hispaniola was ground zero for European conquest and colonization in the Americas, yet it also gave rise to the two largest populations of free people of African descent in the nineteenth-century New World. The first of these emerged in the western regions of the island, when the world-shattering events of the Haitian Revolution gave birth to the free black republic of Haiti in 1804. In today's Dominican Republic, an interrelated, but subtler, historical process was at play. As Anne Eller notes, “Spanish Santo Domingo was the oldest site of indigenous decimation and European colonial settlement in the Americas, as well as the first nucleus of sugar slavery and marronage” (2). After introducing the brutal colonial project to its shores, however, Spain largely abandoned the island, leaving its inhabitants to fend for themselves in the eastern regions while, over the course of the eighteenth century, France turned the western regions into a ruthless slave state and the world's richest sugar-producing colony. Living on the margins of the plantation order established by the European colonizing project, the Spanish-speaking population, increasingly of mixed African and European heritage, was impoverished but relatively autonomous; slavery existed but remained a peripheral rather than central institution in the colony's economy. In 1801, when General Toussaint Louverture led his rebel army into Santo Domingo, the Haitian Revolution crossed colonial borders and slavery was abolished in all of Hispaniola. Beginning in 1804, France and then Spain regained control of the Spanish-speaking part of the island and reversed Louverture's proclamation of emancipation; thousands of men, women, and children were enslaved or re-enslaved in the years that followed. They and other Dominicans of color were among those who eagerly accepted the opportunity, in 1822, to unify the island once again, this time under the government of the Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer, to ensure the permanent abolition of slavery.Footnote ⁶

Thus, by the time the Dominican Republic declared its nationhood in 1844, its mostly rural, mostly mixed-race populace had lived without slavery for more than a generation. In the process, it had developed “a political consensus” that, according to Eller, was characterized by “vigilance over emancipation outside of plantation spaces, anticolonial commitment, keen understanding of the racism that surrounded them, and discourses of community and pride they articulated in response” (15). Dixa Ramírez links this historically informed ethos to “el Monte,” the hilly terrain associated with maroon communities established by runaway slaves (17). Both Ramírez and Eller uncover the profound ways the mentality of “el Monte” has infused Dominican popular consciousness; the same mentality permeates Cartagena's artistic persona. Indeed, Eller's words—“vigilance over emancipation,” “anticolonial commitment,” “keen understanding of . . . racism,” “discourses of community and pride”—capture the combative swagger of Cartagena's twentieth-century poetry and prose.Footnote ⁷

The history I have just traced may seem strange to readers acquainted with another narrative, which pits the Dominican Republic against Haiti and paints Dominicans as intent on denying their blackness. The origins of this other narrative can be traced to the late nineteenth century when a local elite defined Dominican national identity in opposition to Haiti. They were motivated, in part, by political calculus: they saw the animosity Haiti inspired in Europe and the United States. As Nwankwo argues, “the White fear that arose in the wake of the Haitian Revolution was not only a fear of violence, but also a fear of people of African descent's embrace of cosmopolitanism” (10). The Dominican governing class responded to such fear by rewriting history to claim a nonblack identity. According to Lorgia García-Peña,

In this conception, Dominican national identity, or dominicanidad, draws from the Hispanic colonial past (Spanish language, European racial identity, Catholic religion) and, to a lesser degree, a nostalgic revival of the indigenous Taíno cultural inheritance. In this way, it distinguishes itself from the African roots of Haiti to such an extent that, as Silvio Torres-Saillant has argued, it “construes the two peoples sharing the island as insurmountably dichotomous” and configures “an equation whereby anti-Haitianism becomes a form of Dominican patriotism” (“Dominican Literature” 54–55). Analyzing anti-Haitianism in foundational literary texts, García-Peña offers this important insight: such literature should be read not only in the local context but also as “part of a larger corpus of anti-Haitian world literature that gained strength at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth” (44). That is to say, the local elite reproduced an antiblack colonialist discourse that “represented Haitians as monsters, savages, childlike, and incapable of governing themselves” to claim a more acceptable modern identity that better approximated a hegemonic cosmopolitan ideal (44). In the process, aided by their domination of the archive, they muffled the historically grounded anticolonial and antiracist consensus of the people.

To understand Cartagena's performance of Dominican black cosmopolitanism, it is important to recognize that her work represents a radical challenge to this discourse; reexamining dominicanidad and affirming its liberating potential is central to her project. At the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge the extent to which she, like the elites of the late nineteenth century, found inspiration in what we might call hegemonic cosmopolitanism, albeit of a different stripe from the anti-Haitian corpus that García-Peña describes. In a Latin American context, cosmopolitanism is most often associated with modernismo, the late-nineteenth-century literary movement frequently criticized for embracing European trends at the moment many of the continent's intellectuals were promoting literature as a tool for nation building. According to Siskind, in a context that privileged authentic articulations of the nation, modernismo served as “a shorthand for supposedly elitist, denationalizing, apolitical, antipopular, uprooted, Francophile, queer, displaced, and mobile forces in the literary field” (10). This view was challenged in the 1980s, when critics like Beatriz Sarlo and Antonio Candido argued that Latin American aesthetic engagements with Europe represented more than mimicry or escapism. Instead, they were what Siskind calls “a strategic literary practice that forces its way into the realm of universality, denouncing both the hegemonic structures of Eurocentric forms of exclusion and nationalistic patterns of self-marginalization” (6).Footnote ⁸ It is in this context that he argues that “the incommensurability between the cosmopolitan desire for a universal belonging and the self-representation of the marginal particularity of Latin American culture reinforces and reproduces its tension throughout the twentieth century” (120).

This was certainly true in Trujillo's Dominican Republic, where the Surprised Poets have long been associated with debates about cosmopolitanism. In his detailed study of their literary journal, La Poesía Sorprendida (Surprised Poetry), published from 1943 to 1947, Eugenio García Cuevas shows how its collaborators—including Cartagena from 1944 onward—positioned themselves as worldly modernizers of a national poetry that had, in their view, become an insular recycler of localist clichés. From their motto, “Poesía con el hombre universal” (“Poetry with the universal man”), to their embrace of surrealism, to their ongoing polemic with rivals who insisted on the primacy of the nation, they promoted “una poética y estética de apertura, más de resonancias heterogéneas, pero siempre en nombre de lo moderno, actual, colectivo y universal” (“a poetics and aesthetics of opening, of heterogeneous resonances, but always in the name of the modern, the contemporary, the collective, and the universal”; 196). At the time of the journal's publication, and in the decades since, critics have accused the Surprised Poets of abandoning Dominican realities in pursuit of European fever dreams.Footnote ⁹ Their defenders, in turn, have argued that they sought to synthesize the cosmopolitan with the local in service of a vigorous Dominican literature. In other words, they strove to overcome what Siskind terms the “incommensurability” between the cosmopolitan and the local. For example, alongside their own works, they published non-Dominican poetry to promote a “world literature” whose consumption would enrich the national tradition. García Cuevas's meticulous cataloging of the journal's contents shows that, in doing so, they emphasized geographic and linguistic heterogeneity: twenty-two countries are represented, and more than half of them are Latin American or Caribbean. Almost half the works were not originally written in Spanish.Footnote ¹⁰ Despite this diversity, however, European poets, especially from France and Spain, predominate, and García Cuevas agrees with other critics that the Surprised Poets ultimately reinforced a cosmopolitanism that, if not precisely hegemonic, grounded itself in an idea of the “universal” that remained essentially Western, rooted in Greco-Roman history, and oriented toward the European avant-garde (218–19).

Cartagena subtly points toward the same conclusion when she depicts her younger self reciting “names of European poets whose works were read and discussed in our meetings.” Breton's gift of Tropiques paves the way for a strategic shift, rather than a renunciation or abandonment of her intellectual roots: adding “black” to “cosmopolitan” allows her to acknowledge “the material and psychological violence of imperialism and slavery” and so to move toward “a cosmopolitanism that is rooted in a common knowledge and memory of that violence” (Nwankwo 13). However, both black cosmopolitanism and a more hegemonic cosmopolitanism continue to circulate in her writing, alongside a commitment to recover the historically grounded Dominican ethos of anticolonialism, antiracism, and pride in community.

These apparently incommensurable objectives dominate the pages of Tablero: Doce cuentos de lo popular a lo culto. The volume's main title, Tablero, can mean “blackboard” or “game board” and so suggests the calculated multivalence I associate with Dominican black cosmopolitanism: the didactic palimpsest of the chalkboard or the array of considered movements across the chessboard. Its subtitle—Doce cuentos de lo popular a lo culto (Twelve Stories from the Popular to the Cultured)—promises a heterogeneous textual journey. Indeed, the collection's stories encompass metaliterary experimentation, flash fiction, stream-of-consciousness narration, and apparently autobiographical travelogues. Geographically, they roam from the Dominican Republic to the United States and Europe, with intermittent references to Africa. Lorna Williams ties this heterogeneity to Cartagena's repudiation of traditional definitions of the short story, which emphasize thematic unity and a formal sense of closure (318). From its first pages, Tablero flaunts its rebellion against established norms, a self-conscious posture that “shatter[s] the reductive logic of linearity by redirecting the reader's attention to other models of order” (317). At the same time that Cartagena seeks to subvert readerly expectations through textual fragmentation and experimentation, the pages of her book unify around the “Dominican” in Dominican black cosmopolitanism by dissecting the nation's cultural and political identity against the backdrop of the years between Trujillo's assassination, in the spring of 1961, and Tablero's publication, in the spring of 1978, just a few weeks before the national elections that ended more than a decade of authoritarian rule by Joaquín Balaguer.

Balaguer's presidency is often called the Twelve Years, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Tablero, as its subtitle announces, contains precisely that number of stories. An intellectual architect of the Trujillo regime, Balaguer ascended to power in 1966. Although he projected an image of bookish pragmatism, he used his predecessor's violent tactics. According to the Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons, he “won the elections with the support of Trujilloist army officers, who sponsored a terrorist campaign” that resulted in the murders of more than 350 political activists in the first half of 1966 (390). By 1974, that number had increased to 3,000 (392). Balaguer's embrace of authoritarianism and state violence returned the nation to the dark days of dictatorship. His rhetoric also reinforced the values of that period. As Jonathan Hartlyn notes, Balaguer “continued to link Dominican nationalism to what he viewed as its Hispanic, Catholic essence and to anti-Haitian themes” (101). That is to say, he drew from and reinforced that nineteenth-century invention that imposed a homogeneous Hispanic identity on a nation with deep multiethnic and multiracial roots. In doing so, he continued along a path forged by Trujillo, whose decades of centralized rule had engrained this notion of dominicanidad in the national consciousness. The dictator's assassination represented an opportunity to reassert the historically grounded, liberatory consensus of the Dominican people. Instead, Balaguer's Twelve Years further entrenched the nineteenth-century elite's conception of national identity.

In 1961, Cartagena had thrown herself into the work of dismantling Trujillo's legacy through literary intervention. Six months after the assassination, she launched a literary journal, Brigadas Dominicanas, which was published from 1961 to 1963. Unlike La Poesía Sorprendida, this project was explicitly political, its pages filled with fiery editorials and testimonies denouncing the dictator's atrocities. Like that previous publication, however, this one also encouraged its readers to cultivate a cosmopolitan approach to literature by reading essays and poems by international writers, including Latin Americanists like Pablo Neruda and pan-Africanists like Césaire, alongside a variety of French and Spanish poets.Footnote ¹¹ Cartagena ceased publishing Brigadas Dominicanas months after the reformist social democrat Juan Bosch was elected president in 1962. Less than a year later, Bosch was ousted. On 24 April 1965, the country was plunged into civil war. With the dubious stated objective of preventing a “second Cuba,” the US military intervened and organized the elections that resulted in Balaguer's first term. It was at this juncture that Cartagena turned to prose: from the 1968 publication of her short story “Los cambios” (“The Changes”) until the 1981 debut of her epic poem Yania Tierra (Yania Earth), Cartagena abandoned verse in favor of the novel, the essay, and the short story.Footnote ¹² Tablero, published in 1978, would be her final work of prose fiction.Footnote ¹³

What provoked this temporary but momentous aesthetic shift? Certainly, it is notable that Cartagena's prose period overlaps with the so-called Boom in Latin American literature, which stretched from the late 1960s through the 1970s and allowed writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa to earn international acclaim. Although the short story featured in the Boom, the novel reigned supreme: One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Time of the Hero, and other now-canonical texts ushered Latin America onto the world literary stage. With Escalera para Electra, Cartagena enjoyed modest international success of her own when her manuscript became a finalist for the 1969 Biblioteca Breve Prize, bestowed annually by the Barcelona-based publishing house Seix Barral to an unpublished Spanish-language novel.

While their production cannot be separated from their author's enduring desire for cosmopolitan belonging, however, Cartagena's novels and short stories remain inextricable from the national political and artistic context in which she dwelled. Indeed, her prose period (1968–78) coincides almost precisely with Balaguer's Twelve Years (1966–78), a dark era that stimulated more than one Dominican writer to embrace experimental prose storytelling as a means of resistance. As Magdalena López has argued, not only Escalera para Electra (1970) but also other seminal Dominican novels, including Marcio Veloz Maggiolo's De abril en adelante (From April On; 1975), and Pedro Mir's Cuando amaban las tierras comuneras (When They Loved the Communal Land; 1978), responded to this urgent moment by creating “national counternarratives” that rejected the rigid discourse of the Trujillato without abandoning the nationalist sentiment undergirding that discourse. Instead, they sought to craft new descriptions of the nation that condemned US imperialism and challenged the divisive rhetoric of Dominican authoritarianism by rejecting binary categories of belonging and embracing fragmentation, ambiguity, and open-endedness (121). Like Escalera para Electra, Tablero seeks to disrupt autocratic definitions of dominicanidad by employing the strategies of Dominican black cosmopolitanism.Footnote ¹⁴ Because it takes the form of the short story collection, however, the fluctuations of those strategies from tale to tale can be pinpointed with considerable nuance.

The collection opens, for example, with “La llamaban Aurora (pasión por Donna Summer)” (“They Called Her Aurora (a Passion for Donna Summer)”), a story that tackles the theme of blackness in a Dominican context. Perhaps Cartagena's most explicit analysis of Afro-Dominican identity, it explores intersections of race and class in the Dominican Republic and embeds those local themes in a black cosmopolitan ethos that emphasizes social justice. Only six paragraphs long, the story is dense with meaning. Its narrator and protagonist, Colita García, is an Afro-Dominican high school student who excels in her studies but struggles with a society that sees her intelligence as incompatible with her blackness. She begins her tale by rejecting her given name, Aurora, which Sarah, the wealthier and presumably lighter-skinned patron or sponsor with whom she lives, has foisted upon her. Her mother had called her “Colita”—a diminutive of cola (“tail”)—a playful nickname that seems less dignified but that the narrator prefers, especially because Sarah invokes “Aurora” to mock her in a racist fashion: “No voy a perdonarle esa risa burlona que mastica cuando me llama Aurora . . . porque quien me puso así ‘nunca ha visto amanecer’. . . . No. Noo. ¡Y Noo!” (“I'm never going to forgive her the way she laughs sarcastically when she calls me Aurora . . . [because she who named me ‘has never seen a sunrise’]. . . . No. Noo. And Nooo!”; Tablero 13; “They” 27 [bracketed trans. mine]). Colita emphasizes the alienation generated by an imposed name, a practice associated with the institution of slavery. She also alludes to a Spanish-language refrain about a dark-skinned woman named Aurora: “quien te puso Aurora nunca ha visto amanecer” (“whoever named you Aurora has never seen a sunrise”). The meaning of this saying hinges on the racist equation of light skin with beauty and intellectual illumination and dark skin with ugliness and ignorance. Colita recognizes that, by derisively calling her Aurora, Sarah alternately erases and mocks her blackness and her intellectual acumen. In response, Colita combatively declares, “No. Noo. ¡Y Noo!” Repeated, with light variation, five times in as many pages, her negation resists the racist structures that debase her and, in doing so, affirms her identity as a black woman intellectual.

Sarah recognizes Colita's intellectual gifts, sends her to school, and gives her a place to live; but she treats her like a servant and subjects her to racist maltreatment. Allegorically, Sarah and Colita's sadistic relationship reproduces the particular kind of antiblackness that structures the elite-generated discourse of Dominican identity, which denies an African-descendant identity in favor of a whitened or hybrid national family. Cartagena drives this home by insistently asserting Colita's black identity: some form of the word negro, or black, is used to describe Colita and other African-descendant people nine times in the story. This is noteworthy because, as García-Peña argues:

Cartagena forces her reader to imagine black identity in a Dominican context, without discarding the other injustices and inequalities that structure her society. She does this through her use of the word negro and her multiple references to the plantation past of the New World, as when she alludes to the practice of renaming enslaved people. At the same time, she invokes black cosmopolitanism—the possibility of transnational alliance with other oppressed black people—as a strategy for breaking free from the violent cycle of antiblack racism.

The latter strategy is most apparent in descriptions of Sarah's and Colita's responses to Donna Summer, the US superstar and “Queen of Disco,” whose voice imbues the text with a complex black cosmopolitan soundtrack. Sarah takes pleasure in Summer's voice while reducing her talent to a degrading stereotype: “algo deben hacer los negros, que está bien que diviertan a los blancos” (“Negroes must have something to do, and it's just fine for them to entertain whites”; Tablero 14; “They” 28). Aída Heredia argues that the pleasure produced by the sensual beat of Summer's music allows Sarah to fantasize about her own sexual liberation in the privacy of her home (36). Yet Heredia notes that this imagined liberation is in fact complicit in existing structures of antiblack oppression. Colita also enjoys Summer's music, but her expression of pleasure coincides with her determination to leave Sarah: “Me complace esa música sinfín de la Donna Summer, garrapateando, aullando sin cesar, o cayendo como una cascadita vibrante y excitante. Pero no es cierto que doña Sarah me va a guardar para siempre dentro de su caja de música excitante” (“I like Donna Summer's never-ending music, all that nonstop wailing and howling, cascading like a vibrant and exciting waterfall. But it's not true that Mistress Sarah is going to keep me forever inside her thrilling jukebox”; Cartagena, Tablero 14; Cartagena, “They” 28). Drawn to the life-affirming rhythms, Colita rejects Sarah's appropriation of them. In this way, Summer's music connects Colita's Afro-Dominican identity to a global black tradition of artistic expression.

Colita escapes Sarah's home by accepting a position as a maid in New York City. On the way to the airport, she stops in Haina, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, where the smell of sugarcane—another subtle allusion to the plantation past—and the sound of Summer's voice permeate the air:

Summer's voice again frames Colita's articulation of her identity as a black woman: she defends her decision not to straighten her kinky hair while condemning the discrimination shown by those who recognize her intelligence but still belittle her. After reiterating her rejection of Dominican antiblackness—“No. Noo. Y noo. ¡NO!”—she articulates racism as a global problem: Sarah mirrors white people in other countries who similarly take pleasure in Summer, the singer, while upholding ideologies that deny the humanity of Summer, the person. Colita underscores racism's global and historical dimensions by invoking other black artists, including Louis Armstrong, from the United Sates, and Zenzile Miriam Makeba, from South Africa. Summer becomes part of a chain of signifiers—Armstrong-Makeba-Summer, not unlike Breton-Césaire-Senghor—that provokes vital questions about the place of the black artist and intellectual in the context of what Nwankwo calls “a hegemonic cosmopolitanism, exemplified by the material and psychological violence of imperialism and slavery” (13).

Following this powerful moment, Colita's arrival in New York feels anticlimactic, as she realizes that migration to the ironically named “Mundolibre” (“Freeworld”) does not offer escape. Sarah may be an abusive bigot, but Colita's American employer—pointedly, the wife of the manager of a Dominican sugar plantation—exploits her “como a una esclava” (“like a slave”; Cartagena, Tablero 16; Cartagena, “They” 29). When Colita witnesses the police beating of a homeless man, she realizes that the state violence that infects her homeland exists on a global scale: “[C]IAs por todo el mundo, violencia diaria, tortura, como golpean por simple conjeturas a ese tipo sin empleo, desclasado, con apariencia de somnoliento drogado, y el desclasado se deja pegar, esto no es ser macho en dominicana” (“CIAs all over the world—daily violence, daily tortures—an unemployed, homeless guy, dazed as if he was high, beaten up just because he's acting funny, and he lets them beat him up, that's not the way Dominican machos behave”; 16; 30). Colita's decision to return home thus coalesces in nationalist terms rather than racial ones. By contrasting the homeless man's passivity with “the way Dominican machos behave,” she gestures toward the heroism of patriots who fought during the 1965 civil war and US occupation, a theme Cartagena returns to elsewhere in the collection.

Back in her “thrilling jukebox,” Sarah continues to dance to Summer. Colita, however, nurtures a vision of political resistance rooted in black cosmopolitanism by devouring newspaper accounts of South African students protesting apartheid. Her resultant pride causes her sponsor to explode with incoherent rage. The final sentences read: “La señora Sarah me toma por las greñas, grita en forma descomunal: disparatas, disparatas, me arrastra hasta el tocadiscos donde sube todo el volumen. Ahora ni mi llanto lo oigo. Donna Summer, mi negrita querida, llena con su voz y excita con su ritmo la casa de la señora Sarah” (“Mistress Sarah grabs me by [my kinky hair], and she screams as hard as she can: you're talking nonsense, you're talking nonsense. And she drags me to the record player, and raises the volume as high as it will go. Now I can't even hear myself cry. And Donna Summer's voice, her [beloved] black woman's voice, fills Mistress Sarah's house, jolting it with its rhythm”; 17; 30). In New York, Colita's Dominican identity is sharpened when she witnesses the homeless man's passive response to brutality. Here, the reader witnesses Colita's beating and must decide how to respond, because the story ends before the conflict is resolved. Heredia reads the scene as one of stagnation, in which Sarah's sadism is met by Colita's final resignation to her dehumanization (45). But this is not the only possible interpretation.

One might note, for example, that Sarah's racist invective disintegrates into unintelligibility—it is she who is “talking nonsense”—as Summer's powerful yet ambivalent voice takes center stage; or that, while Colita the protagonist succumbs, Colita the narrator remains in control. We know that the experience of migration prodded the protagonist to claim her Dominican identity. Her naming of Summer as “mi negrita querida” (“my beloved black one”) transforms a racist insult into a tender affirmation of shared African roots. Her attention to the anti-apartheid struggle underscores a resolve to action. “La llamaban Aurora” presents a range of possibilities for Colita and, by extension, Afro-Dominican identity: the status quo embodied by Sarah and Colita's relationship; a tradition of black cosmopolitan artistic expression and concomitant history of appropriation and degradation symbolized by the chain of signifiers Armstrong-Makeba-Summer; and a demand for revolutionary change personified by the South African protestors. Resistance through negation—“No. Noo. Y noo. ¡NO!”—expands into a black cosmopolitan vision when it connects local experiences to a global antiracist struggle that is both aesthetic and political. “La llamaban Aurora” offers tools to understand dominicanidad in the context of, and in concert with, a transnational black community. By approaching dominicanidad through blackness—an apparent non sequitur if we consider “that ‘black,’ as an ethnically differentiated segment of the population, does not exist in the Dominican imagination”—it offers black cosmopolitanism, or cultural and political alliances with other oppressed communities around the globe, as an effective strategy for resisting oppression from within (the state) and without (US imperialism).

“La llamaban Aurora” centers a black/white dichotomy that, although all too familiar in a New World context, has not been endemic to the Dominican imagination. Most of the stories in Tablero, however, do not invoke blackness in the same way. Instead, they focus on the economic and political oppression of Dominicans by forces both local and global. Torres-Saillant has argued that “to measure the living conditions of Dominican blacks and mulattos would mean no more than to assess the social status of the masses of the people, which would correspond more fittingly to an analysis of class inequalities and the social injustices bred by dependent capitalism than to a discussion of ethnic oppression” (Introduction 25). If we take this critique seriously, we understand how Tablero, after the opening story, extends the strategies of Dominican black cosmopolitanism into a symbolic realm that may be less familiar to a reader who conceptualizes race in terms of the black/white dichotomy but more familiar to one in search of a language capable of reclaiming the values of “el Monte.”Footnote ¹⁵

The first seven stories in Tablero take place in the Dominican Republic. Like “La llamaban Aurora,” several have scenes set in New York City that highlight the struggles of migrants. In every case, migration fails as a strategy because the United States, represented by New York, epitomizes exploitation. In addition to its direct political interference in 1965, by the 1970s the United States’ cultural and economic influence had begun to alter everyday mores and practices in the Dominican Republic. In reaction, according to Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, many declared the consumption of US goods and culture to be unpatriotic: “The imitation of North American commercial culture, the desire to consume new styles, and drug addiction were palpable threats to local popular culture. This was reason enough for patriots to oppose them” (85). A dramatic increase in migration compounded these problems. Fewer than 10,000 Dominicans entered the United States as immigrants in the 1950s; in the 1960s, that number increased to almost 100,000. “By the 1970s,” according to Ernesto Sagás and Sintia Molina, “Dominican migration was reaching diasporic proportions . . . with 148,135 individuals legally admitted during that decade. If the death of Trujillo was the spark that ignited Dominican migration, Balaguer's social and economic policies were the fuel that propagated it” (14). Cartagena's grim vision of New York is thus integral to her critique of the local and global forces that conspire to oppress the Dominican people.

The invasive omnipresence of the United States even infiltrates stories that take place entirely inside the boundaries of the nation. “Los cambios” (“The Changes”), for example, seems to be about a protagonist who betrays her nation by embracing foreign products and trends. Originally published in 1968, it opens with a metaliterary dialogue between a woman author and her male friend, who asks how quickly she can finish “esto” (“this”). Noting that his question is posed “pérfidamente” (“treacherously”), she replies that “this” is an already completed novel (Cartagena, Tablero 51). The story, posing as fragments of this novel, unspools a tale of political intrigue that begins with the autopsy of a young man assassinated by government agents while distributing subversive flyers and then follows the nameless protagonist, the dead man's lover. A modern-day femme fatale, she absurdly wears green corduroy pants and a yellow wool sweater in the summer in Santo Domingo, “como oriunda del West Side en invierno” (“like a native of the West Side in winter”; 53). Embodying an unpatriotic imitation of US culture, she rides a Honda 90 motorcycle, eats hot dogs, drinks Coca-Cola, and dances the Watusi. Yet the foreign objects that seem to define her also place her actions in the post-Trujillo era: the Honda 90 was manufactured from 1964 to 1969 and the Watusi dance craze began in 1962. This chronology is presented alongside snippets from the flyers distributed by her murdered lover, which condemn “los mismos métodos” (“the same methods”; 55) deployed by an unnamed government in which “la dictadura se acentúa cada día” (“the dictatorship deepens every day”; 56). Taken together, these details reveal “Los cambios” to be a protest against Balaguer's rise to power.

Toward the conclusion, the femme fatale's true nature is revealed: far from traitorous, she acts in solidarity with her murdered lover. Alongside another man, she distributes more flyers and so forces the regime to reveal its true nature by amplifying its merciless reprisal: “Seis plomos serán mañana sesenta plomos. Seiscientos plomos. Seis mil plomos. Sesenta mil plomos. Seiscientos mil plomos. Seis millones de plomos. Son los cambios” (“Six slugs will be sixty slugs tomorrow. Six hundred slugs. Six thousand slugs. Six hundred thousand slugs. Six million slugs. These are the changes”; 57–58). The story's title, “Los cambios,” thus seems tragically ironic: nothing has changed, except that the violence has escalated. Yet the femme fatale, despite her perfidiously gringa appearance, is part of a growing resistance that persists even in the face of government reprisals.

The final paragraphs return to the friend of the opening dialogue, who has finished reading: “termina diciendo que es una novela. Acomodado en el ilimitado hueco del libre albedrío posiblemente se hace cómplice al confirmarlo, sin sospechar que ha interpretado el discurso de la obra abierta” (“he ends up saying that it is a novel. Seated in the limitless gap of free will, he possibly becomes complicit upon confirming this, without suspecting that he has interpreted the discourse of the open work”; 58). Like the femme fatale, the friend is not a traitor after all. Despite his initial resistance, he has become an interpreter, not only of the story's condemnation of Balaguer but also (unwittingly, perhaps) of the author's strategy to force open “the limitless gap of free will” through her combative “discourse of the open work.” As Rey Andújar observes, Cartagena makes the reader complicit in her political and aesthetic project by drawing him (and us) into an open-ended dialogue that subverts the demagoguery and static binary logic characteristic of state-controlled discourse (65). In “La llamaban Aurora,” the North American voice of Donna Summer opens the door for a productive black cosmopolitanism, even as Colita's negative experiences in New York stimulate her desire to return home. In “Los cambios,” the femme fatale embraces foreign styles and products but risks her life in the anti-Balaguer movement. Both stories employ strategies of Dominican black cosmopolitanism to trace the ambivalent transnational circulation of people and products and to explore how that circulation can produce obstacles to, as well as openings for, acts of solidarity and resistance.

Most of Tablero takes place within the nation, which forms the framework for its condemnation of authoritarianism, its critique of exclusionary discourses of identity, and its denunciation of US imperialism. But four stories toward the end of the book transport the reader to cosmopolitan European settings in which, unlike in the unremittingly hostile New York City, Cartagena can consider questions that, while not entirely separate from that of the nation, expand the scope of inquiry into the realm of human creativity and artistic production—themes she links to cosmopolitan desire. In the first three European stories, she considers the place of the black artist and intellectual—previously intimated by the chain of signifiers “Armstrong-Makeba-Summer”—in the Eurocentric cosmopolitan order. “Tête-à-Tête con Teresa en Ávila” (“Tête-à-Tête with Teresa in Ávila”), “La del piso 7” (“She of Flat Number 7”), and “Tire el juego” (“Throw the Game”) are narrated by a woman writer who, like Cartagena, is a well-read and well-traveled Caribbean intellectual.Footnote ¹⁶ Boasting that she is on her sixteenth trip to Europe (Tablero 71),Footnote ¹⁷ the narrator journeys to Spain to chat with the sixteenth-century mystical poet, Teresa of Ávila, about birth control, space travel, and pre-Roman art. She spends time in Crete pontificating on Homer's The Iliad and Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons. She strolls through Paris like a flaneur, mentally lecturing Ernest Hemingway on Greek literature, US imperialism, and his betrayal of Gertrude Stein. In short, the mixed-race woman poet from an obscure Caribbean island claims mastery over and belonging in the European cultural sphere and, by extension, Western civilization.

Still, she hints at the ambivalence of this claim when she addresses Hemingway: “aprovecho para decirle cosas que me complacen. Me exprimen, pero me complacen. Me aturden, pero me complacen. También me aturden y me complacen Esquilo, Sófocles, Eurípides y usted, Mr. Hemingway” (“Let me take this opportunity to talk to you about the things that give me pleasure. They torment me, but they give me pleasure. They disturb me, but they give me pleasure. Just as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and you, Mr. Hemingway, torment and please me”; 87). With these words, Cartagena lays bare the contradiction she confronts as a Dominican woman writer of color: she finds pleasure and purpose in an intellectual tradition that does not recognize her humanity, much less her capacity for artistic creation. Strategic as always, she uses the verb exprimir to describe her conundrum: literally “to squeeze” or “to wring out,” it can also mean “to use up,” “to exploit,” or “to squander.” Hegemonic cosmopolitanism crushes the black artist in its embrace, wrings her dry, and leaves her emptied and exhausted. Yet, just as Summer goes on singing, she continues to write.

While she unflinchingly examines the contradictions generated by her engagement with the West, she remains committed to her small nation, to which she always returns, as in the final sentences of “La del piso 7”: “Aire es aire. Regreso. Mi-tierra-micasa-misilla-mimesa-mivaso-milibro-micuarto-mistresmilquinientosañosderecuerdosquetraigoconmigo.” (“Air is air. I return. My-land-myhouse-mychair-mytable-myglass-mybook-myroom-mythreethousandfivehundredyearsofmemoriesthatIbringwithme”; 82). She begins with the suggestion of universality: air is air, regardless of your location in the world. Then, she moves to the particular: “My-land” and “myhouse.” Finally, she rearticulates the universal in cultural-historical terms by claiming ownership of millennia of memories that constitute what hegemonic cosmopolitanism calls civilization. On a graphic level, the replacement of spaces with hyphens, which subsequently disappear, creates a signifying chain—redolent of those of Breton-Césaire-Senghor and Armstrong-Makeba-Summer—that links “myhouse” to “my-land” to the cosmopolitan world through space (air) and time (3,500 years). Audaciously, in this moment, the narrator asserts her right to inhabit all the places that define the subject as articulated by European modernity: domestic, national, and universal. Approaching the text as complicit readers, we might also note that the memories she claims date back to 1500 BCE, when Africa, not Europe, was the center of the civilized world.

The final European story returns the focus to the nation and, to a lesser extent, the transnational black community. “Mambrú no fue a la guerra” (“Mambrú Did Not Go to War”) is narrated by Claudio, a Dominican expatriate. In contrast to the heroic “Dominican macho” whose memory inspires Colita to return home, Claudio is a coward who fled to Paris because he did not want to fight in the 1965 civil war. The title plays on a children's song about young men leaving for war: “Mambrú se fue a la guerra / ¡y no sé cuándo vendrá!” (“Mambrú went off to war. / And I don't know when he'll come back!”). But, as Williams notes, Cartagena “negates the heroic paradigm” and “replaces the timeless realm of childish war games with a historical moment”—namely, the 1965 civil war and US occupation (318–19). As the story progresses, Claudio narrates his failures: just as he abandoned his nation, he has recently abandoned his lover, Lila. In the earlier European stories, the narrator boldly roamed cosmopolitan streets, “adonde lo pide el cuerpo . . . donde lo desea el deseo” (“where my body asks . . . where desire desires”; Cartagena, Tablero 71). Claudio, in contrast, emphasizes his alienation, humiliation, and boredom as he drifts through the city. A group of androgynous teenagers irritates him, the prices advertised in a restaurant window remind him of his failure as a wage earner, and headlines trumpeting African liberation strike him as a mundane reprise of yesterday's news: “desde hace décadas el Africa negra lucha y quiere ser totalmente libre” (“Black Africa has been wishing and struggling for its freedom for decades”; 94; “Mambrú” 52).

The theme of African liberation reemerges when Claudio recalls his anger at Lila's passionate response to Z, the 1969 French-Algerian film about the assassination of the democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis. He bitterly describes how Lila stood and cheered alongside African students—rumored, he notes, to be members of the Algerian National Liberation Front—at the dramatic moment when the military police who committed the assassination were sentenced. Resentfully, he observes: “mi naturaleza se rebela contra esos tipos que claman por la liberación de tal o cual región o país. . . . ella no debía olvidar que salí huyéndole a la guerra del 65 en Santo Domingo” (“my nature rebels against these types who clamor for the liberation of this or that region or country. … she shouldn't forget that I fled the war of 1965 in Santo Domingo”; 98; 54–55). This passage captures the complexity of Cartagena's Dominican black cosmopolitanism; it refers to a French movie, filmed in Algeria, whose condemnation of the right-wing military government in Greece is celebrated by African students in a Parisian cinema. Claudio, in turn, links all of this to his own small nation's civil war (even if emphasizing such linkages is the opposite of his intention). The connections made here are intricate, even elegant; yet the underlying critique is grim rather than hopeful, since in 1969, the year of the story's setting, Greece was under military rule, much of Africa still struggled to free itself from the legacies of colonialism, and the Dominican Republic lay in the grip of Balaguer.

In the final sentences, Claudio comes clean: “quedo en mi propia y débil naturaleza y me reconozco un fracasado” (“I feel revealed in the nakedness of my own weak nature and I must accept that I'm a failure”; 100; 56). Then he, and the story, conclude: “No sé, pero algún día alguien terminará esta historia y la llamará Mambrú. Mambrú no fue a la guerra. Ahora no puedo continuarla” (“I don't know, but one day someone will finish this story and call it Mambrú, Mambrú didn't go to war. I can't continue it now”; 101; 56). Like Colita's narrative, Claudio's ends in uncertainty. But while Colita the narrator remains in control, Claudio the narrator surrenders—just as he did when he fled his homeland or abandoned his lover. In refusing to finish his tale, he cedes control. But to whom or to what? Again, a range of possibilities emerges. Perhaps cosmopolitan Paris (or ruthless New York) will regurgitate Claudio's story, too late, in a meaningless newspaper headline. Maybe his nation's authoritarian rulers will interpret his silence as a sign that the people have retreated. Alternatively, he might relinquish his voice to the women who populate Tablero's other stories, like Colita, who dreams of revolution, or the femme fatale, who goes on distributing flyers.

I began this article with a conundrum: How to explain the critical gaps that surround an artist many call the most important Dominican woman writer of the twentieth century? Cartagena offers her own answer, of sorts, in the European stories that address her complex relationship with hegemonic cosmopolitanism. She returns to the issue again in Tablero's final entry, a microstory titled “Sus personajes” (“Her Characters”). Like “Los cambios,” “Sus personajes” begins with a metaliterary reference to a reader—this time, not a treacherous male friend, but a girl: “La niña leyó y releyó este libro” (“The girl read and reread this book”; 103). As the girl reads, she searches for familiar characters from universal childhood stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White.” She does not find them, and the four-sentence tale concludes: “Finalmente, se convenció de que eran otros cuentos. Y se despidió de papamamá para dormir” (“Finally, she became convinced that they were other stories. And she said goodnight to daddymommy and went to bed”; 103). This “allegory of reading,” as Williams aptly calls it (327), imagines an ideal reader: a bookish girl (like Colita) who approaches the text with expectations that flow from the cosmopolitan traditions that have shaped her. A nimble interpreter, however, she is quick to acknowledge the “other stories” that confront her. Her acceptance, and concomitant dismissal of “daddymommy,” suggests her willingness to challenge authority, wipe clean the tablero (the blackboard or the game board), and start anew. The narrator defiantly engages the center from the margins to protest injustice and articulate new solidarities, including transnational African alliances, that might transform her nation, which is always at the forefront of her project. At the same time, as she acknowledges in her conversation with “Hem,” she remains fascinated by a cosmopolitan imaginary that wrings her out even as it brings her pleasure. The girl, perhaps, represents a different future: a reader, and maybe a writer, who turns her back on the old tales to embrace other stories, new narratives, tales yet to be told.