Remapping Afro-Caribbean Landscapes: Embodiment and the Sensory Aesthetics of Dominican Tourism Space

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography of the ways that Afro-Dominican women in the port city of Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic experience spatial change amid a large-scale urban restoration program. It pays close attention to how multigenerational, embodied experiences of shifting material landscapes prompt critical spatial imaginaries, involving the look, sound, and feel of decayed Victorian-style architecture and local building materials, such as mahogany wood (caoba), marble (mármol), and brick (ladrillo). Based on eighteen months of multimodal research, the study brings into focus perceptions of cracked building facades, worn wood panels, fleeting images, and spatial traces to highlight how these material qualities emerge as vibrant sites for engaging the ever-shifting meanings of social pasts and shared possibilities. The dissertation foregrounds multigenerational stories of place-making to explore how the materiality of domestic architecture becomes socially perceived in sensory registers that animate new ways of relating to the past and alternative practices of care, hospitality, and kinship.

Whereas prior research on spatial change has underplayed the sensory dimension of bodily experience, this dissertation bridges studies of the senses, affect, and materiality to argue for the significance of sensory phenomena to the ways Afro-Dominican women forge spaces of imagination, refusal, and non-normative kinship. By focusing on embodied practices of everyday movement and storytelling, it proposes that the expressive acts of Afro-Dominican women unsettle the dominant narratives of kinship, race, ethnicity, class, and gender that pervade the organization of space and domestic designs in a Historical Center undergoing restoration.

Since the late 1990s, coalitions among state actors, private entities, and cultural managers have endeavored to remake the city center—a grid-plan settlement with a central plaza ringed by civic institutions and Victorian-style wooden houses—into a cultural heritage zone that boasts the urban form as a symbol of 19th-century liberal urbanity. Adapting a new tourism model to the city center, renewal practices today repackage colonial-era ideologies of progress by regulating spatial and aesthetic norms. While city officials elevate the aesthetic form of domestic architecture, the material properties of built structures have become vehicles of affective politics and local claims to space. Following the contested politics of urban preservation, this study examines how the city promotes an idealized image of its architectural past, as the materialities of houses catalyze sensory and affective perceptions of the landscape that challenge traditional displays of the nation, which systematically efface black diasporic histories foundational to the region. This dissertation shows how racial projects of the nation and historically specific fields of racialization shape the built environment and how everyday forms of place-making chart new maps of Afro-Caribbean pasts and futures.