Passionate about Black art and film, CLASS Associate Professor Rachel Quinn, Ph.D. is hailed for the publication of her first book, “La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo,” and its winning of the 2022 Isis Duarte Award from the Haiti/Dominican Republic Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Quinn also achieved the Schlomburg Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship to begin research for her second book in New York.
Working in collaboration with the department of comparative cultural studies and the women’s, gender, & sexuality studies program, Quinn is an interdisciplinary scholar and joint UH faculty member with research targeting mixed race identities in the African diaspora, primarily in the U.S. and Dominican Republic, transnational feminisms and visual culture.
“My book joins a conversation about blackness and Dominican identity that has been ongoing in Dominican studies among scholars such as Silvio Torres-Saillant, Lorgia García Peña, Frank Moya Pons, Milagros Ricourt, Carlos Andújar, Ginetta Candelario, April Mayes and Dixa Ramírez.” It ethnographically examines how visual media portrays Dominican women and how women represent themselves through a transnational feminist cultural lens in their creative endeavors.
While living in Santo Domingo in the 2010s, Quinn investigates the Dominican female construct and the unique ability of women to transform themselves to fulfill necessary roles of gender, race and class for the means of the culture. How women conduct themselves in their activities in response to existing stereotypes, racial ambiguity and color hierarchy are key factors in identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic, each working to transform experiences and perspective.
“With this book, I argue that the possibility of misinterpretation is also true for how we see and understand the world visually. We assume others are seeing the same things that we are seeing, that they interpret social signifiers in the same ways that we do, but this is not the case,” Quinn said. Language barriers and differences in race, culture and gender prompt chasms for discrepancy and misunderstanding.
Quinn merged the analyses of 40+ research interviews, held primarily in Spanish, with college-educated, middleclass Dominican women discussing their everyday experiences to provide a fresh take on a Caribbean society. Asking, “Is there room for alternate ways of thinking about race, gender and sexuality that a next generation of Dominicans in Santo Domingo wants to bring to the table?” Quinn delves into complex concepts of Afro-surrealism, an Afro-futurist cultural movement and Dominican identities in a transnational world.
“I came to study Dominican culture and society because of my interest in the experiences of other Black women, particularly those who (like me) are racially mixed of African descent and living transnational lives,” Quinn stated. “Because Dominican society on the island is so mixed and because racial identity is heavily constructed through the visual, I realized it was important to analyze the visual culture of the context in which Dominican women were forming identities.”
Quinn will spend the upcoming academic year researching at the Schlomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, a renowned research library devoted to African American, African Diaspora and African experiences. Her next book is a Black feminist biography centered on journalist and child prodigy Philippa Schuyler.
If interested in further information about Quinn’s research on how visual culture is shaping the lives of Dominican women and its effects on their identities, conversations about the book and further insight can gained by listening: the presentation to The Baton Foundation March 20, 2022); interview with Reighan Gillam, Ph.D. for the New Books Network podcast (Nov. 10, 2022); University of Houston Book Launch with LeConté Dill, Ph.D. (Oct. 18, 2021); interview with Bryce Henson, Ph.D. and the Association of the Worldwide African Diaspora (Sept. 24, 2021).
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— Presentation to The Baton Foundation (March 20, 2022).
— Interview with Reighan Gillam, Ph.D. for the New Books Network podcast (Nov. 10, 2022)
— University of Houston Book Launch with LeConté Dill, Ph.D. (Oct. 18, 2021)
— Interview with Bryce Henson, Ph.D. and the Association of the Worldwide African Diaspora (Sept. 24, 2021)