“DominicanYork” (Dominican Transnational Cultures) is a course based on a new collaborative research project I am developing which focuses on the diasporic and transnational life of contemporary Dominican New Yorkers. The project and the class is rooted in seeing “DominicanYork” as an aesthetic, life, and identity that is a result of what Sylvia Wynter calls “transplantation.” This class proposes DominicanYork as a result of what Sylvia Wynter calls “transplantation”: the “… creation of a counterculture through the transplantation of their old cultures onto a strange soil, its reinvention in new and alien conditions. It was in this transplantation, this metamorphosis of an old culture into a new, that the blacks made themselves indigenous to their new land.”[1]This collaborative course centers DominicanYork as an aesthetic, lifestyle, art, and culture that can be seen across the work of scholars who focus on this population, as well as fashion, sounds, and social life. Throughout the course readings, cultural texts, films, documentaries, and more, students will be able to formulate what is Dominican transnational identity. Moreover, students are encouraged to examine DominicanYork as a cultural concept, identity, and aesthetic that redefines our Caribbean understandings of Latinidad.
[1] Sylvia Wynter, “Black Metamorphosis” (unpublished ms., n.d.), 46-47
“DominicanYork” (Dominican Transnational Cultures) Spring 2025 Flyer