Bridging Sonic Borders

Popular Music in Contemporary Dominican/Dominicanyork Literature

How music depicted in literature shapes Dominican and Dominican New Yorkers’ identities and links the homeland to the diaspora.

Music has played a large role in recent Dominican literature, whether of the island or the diaspora. Bridging Sonic Borders explores this sonic connection linking the homeland and far-flung locales-especially New York, the center of Dominican cultural production in the United States. Sharina MaÍllo-Pozo argues that literary representations of popular music delineate a shared aesthetic territory for US and Caribbean Dominicans, fostering an inclusive and transnational Dominicanidad.

Examining works written in Spanish, English, and Dominicanish, MaÍllo-Pozo focuses on Dominican/Dominicanyork writings that have nurtured a borderless aesthetics through their shared investment in hip-hop, jazz, blues, pop, rock, and merengue. For Dominican writers, popular music has become a way of exploring memory and nostalgia and a means of centering people rejected from hegemonic identity formation-the working class, those of African descent, rural and queer people. For example, many works focused on the life of rocker Luis “Terror” DÍas have emphasized the in-between identity of being both Dominican and a New Yorker. Collectively, these writings have created a space in which boundaries of nation and diaspora are revealed for their fundamental porosity.

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