Writing from El Nié: Exile and the Poetics of Dominicanidad Ausente

This chapter analyzes performances by Dominican American artist and writer Josefina Báez in dialogue with twentieth-century Dominican narratives of exile by Juan Bosch and Pedro Vergés. Exploring the various ways in which a poetics of dominicanidad ausente has emerged as a dialectic process of transnational interpellation of the official national narration of dominicanidad solidified during the Trujillo regime, this final chapter demonstrates that marginality becomes a transnational experience for Dominican Americans who are the same poor, black, marginal subjects who have been historically oppressed and exiled from the nation-state. In the diaspora, they find ways to contradict exclusion.