On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, written by Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Long a site of outrages, the Haitian-Dominican border is once again drawing international attention.Fleeing threats of deportation and violence in the Dominican Republic, some 3,000 Haitian-Dominican refugees have been abandoned to their fate, like so much human refuse, in squalid conditions and legal limbo in the southwest of Hispaniola's borderland.The catalyst was the decision of the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Court in September 2013 to strip Juliana Deguis, who had been born in the Dominican Republic in 1984 to Haitian parents, of her birth-right citizenship.Concomitantly ruling that birth registries dating back to 1929 should be reviewed for "erroneous" registrations of Dominican citizenship, the Court's decision affects more than 250,000 Dominican citizens of Haitian ancestry, leaving them stateless and without juridical personality.On the Edge offers an extended consideration of literary and cultural responses to what we might consider the long background to this most recent iteration of human immiseration in this borderland.Under examination are over 30 fictional and nonfictional literary texts, including novels and short stories, biographies and memoirs, plays, poetry, and travel writings that have "the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic at their core" (p. 1).These textual materials are complemented by film, photography, sculpture, paintings, and graffiti.The multifarious assemblage emphasizes works produced by Haitians and Dominicans and places them in dialogue with works by writers and artists "born in Europe, the rest of the Americas, Algeria, New Zealand, and Japan who have also dealt with both the politics of borderline-crossing and the poetics of borderland dwelling" (p.14).The historical purview is as extensive as the primary materials are diverse, stretching from the early modern period through the twenty-first century.The book excavates the troubled history of the "longest and most significant land boundary in all the Antilles" (p. 1) and, following Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes (1992), argues that it constitutes a "complex 'contact zone' characterized by conflict and violence but also by many collaborative linkages, often established against the directives of the central colonial, national, and occupying authorities" (p.2).It thus adds nuance to the history of Haitian-Dominican animosity while also challenging dominant Dominican nationalistic discourses that rely on Haiti as a "negative foil."The falsity of this construct is revealed by attention to the porosity of the frontier: "the borderland has traditionally been identified as the site where this particular version of Dominicanness ('not Haitian') is most under threat" (p.9).By tracing the "complex

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