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The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (American Encounters/Global Interactions)
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About The Dictator's Seduction: Politics And The Popular
Product Description The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist. Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power. Review “Beautifully written and meticulously researched, The Dictator’s Seduction is essential reading for scholars of repressive regimes and the machinery of violence that keeps dictators in power. Rafael Trujillo insinuated himself into his citizens’ public and private lives. Lauren Derby connects Trujillo’s backstage political machinations and private obsessions with his public image and spectacles.”— Denise Brennan, author of What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic “Lauren Derby turns much of the conventional wisdom about Rafael Trujillo on its head, and she backs up her revision with powerful archival evidence. This fascinating book will also be regarded as a masterwork of comparative research on authoritarianism and the politics of innuendo, spectacle, and symbolism.”— Eric Paul Roorda, author of The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 “The character of dictatorship—with its paradoxical reliance on coercive excess and pandering to the demos—has fascinated generations of Latin America’s most exciting fiction writers, from Miguel Ángel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier to Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The Dictator’s Seduction is an historian’s counterpart to this literature. Lauren Derby develops the ideas of these writers, takes further insights from anthropologists who have worked on state magic, and produces a methodologically innovative and entirely fresh history of the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo. This is one of the most exciting works in contemporary Latin American political history.”— Claudio Lomnitz, author of Death and the Idea of Mexico “Lauren Derby’s book changes our understanding of Rafael Trujillo’s infamous dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. . . . This is a creative, original, and ambitious book. It is full of insights and wonderful ideas. . . . Derby turns received historical interpretations upside down. She does not shy away from controversy; indeed, she seems to seek it. In my view that is what it takes to be a very good historian.” -- Elizabeth Dore ― American Historical Review “[T]his is an ambitious historical ethnogra
