Studying the logic and social bases of twentieth-century dictatorships in the Caribbean and Central America recently has attracted a small coterie of sophisticated historians. Some of the most innovative focus on the “sultanic” regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (Eric Roorda, 1998; Richard Turits, 2003; Christian Krohn-Hansen, 2009). Lauren Derby’s long-awaited study of the symbolic cultural politics of Trujillo’s rule greatly enhances our understanding of the construction of hegemony and the meshing of coercion and consent during his 30 years in power. This is a pathbreaking work in the cultural history of politics that should be read by all scholars interested in approaches to analyzing the state and expressions of authoritarian populism.
Derby focuses on how Trujillo endeavored to establish legitimacy and communi cate with his subjects through the idioms of patronage and social mobility with gender and race connotations. Trujillo arose out of problematic circumstances to which...