Since the 1960s some scholars, most of them Dominican, have been making an important contribution to the vindication and dissemination of the study and public awareness about the Afro-Dominican past or collective Black-African heritage of the Dominican people. During more than five decades and until very recently, their effort has gone rather unnoticed in the international scholarship, including the United States academia and scholarly community. Very rarely we will see their work cited or referred to in English language publications before the 2000s. The first translation into English of one of these seminal studies was released in 2015 as an initiative from inside the Dominican diaspora in the United States, namely as a joint effort of an entity like the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and a established publisher like Routledge. Franklin J. Franco’s book: Blacks, mulattos, and the Dominican Nation. New York: Routledge, 2015, is part of the “Classic Knowledge in Dominican Studies” series. (To visit an online preview of this monograph, click here.)
In the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, not all these scholars’ efforts have received the dissemination they deserve, in the midst of a scenario where the elites of neither the public sector or the private sector have embraced forcefully the promotion and awareness about the African legacy of the Dominican people. Some of the most important works, for instance, have not been reprinted, the access to them for the public considerably restrained as a result. And as of today, inside the Dominican Republic and as part of a more general scenario of a diminished number of professional historians, the number of younger Dominican scholars devoted to the rigorous study of the Afro-Dominican heritage is much smaller than the cohort of researchers that produced what we are describing here as the seminal scholarship of contemporary Afro-Dominican Studies.
Yet this foundational set of publications remain the starting point, the necessary introductory road map for any serious study that intends to further the existing knowledge about the early Black people of what is today the Dominican Republic. Below please find a list of these scholars with the seminal publications.
Carlos Larrazábal Blanco
Franklin J. Franco
Hugo Tolentino Dipp
Carlos Esteban Deive
Celsa Albert
Carlos Andújar Persinal
Fradique Lizardo
Dagoberto Tejeda
Soraya Aracena
Martha Ellen Davis
June Rosenberg
To contact the project’s team, please write, call, fax or email the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute,
The City College of New York, North Academic Center (NAC) 4/107, 160 Convent Avenue at 138th Street, New York, NY 10031
Tel: 212-650-7496, Fax: 212-650-7489, Email: [email protected], Website: www.ccny.cuny.edu/dsi
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