Ángela Castro, a visiting assistant professor in CC’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is one of 12 contributors to the edited volume “Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean.” Castro’s article is titled “Haitian and Dominican Resistance: A Study of the Symptom in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘The Farming of Bones.’ ”
Her article proposes that “The Farming of Bones” portrays Dominican-Haitian history through a symptomatic trauma imprinted through bodily and mental traces that also can be seen in recent interactions between the two nations. Castro’s current project explores representations of “beyond-blackness” in the Panamanian writer Melanie Taylor’s edited anthology, “Camino a Mariato.”
“Racialized Visions,” edited by Vanessa K. Valdés with Suny Press, is the first volume in English to explore the cultural impact of Haiti on the surrounding Spanish-speaking nations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.
As a Francophone nation, Haiti is seldom studied in conjunction with its Spanish-speaking Caribbean neighbors. “Racialized Visions” challenges the notion that linguistic difference has kept the populations of these countries apart, instead highlighting ongoing exchanges between their writers, artists, and thinkers. Centering Haiti in this conversation also makes explicit the role that race — and, more specifically, anti-blackness — has played both in the region and in academic studies of it.
Castro’s research areas include 20th-century Afro-Caribbean female writing, Afro-Caribbean bodies, and diasporic studies. She earned a B.A. in literature from the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
