PRESENTING: THE INAUGURAL RELEASE OF THE CUNY DSI ONLINE RESEARCH MONOGRAPH SERIES

The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Research Monograph Series is becoming available online beginning with the Second Edition of Silvio Torres-Saillant’s Introduction to Dominican Blackness, thus filling a gap in digitized discourse.

The Institute’s Research Monograph Series in Dominican Studies began in 1999 with an unbound, stapled printout of Jorge Duany's Quisqueya on the Hudson: the Transnational Identity of Dominicans in Washington Heights, the first piece of scholarship sponsored by the CUNY DSI. At the time of Duany’s research, Washington Heights was the home of the largest concentration of Dominicans residing in the U.S. Duany, a trained anthropologist from Berkeley and a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, was the first visiting scholar of Dominican Studies at the City University of New York and at the City College of New York.

The Research Monograph Series (RMS) subsequently changed in outer form and appearance, acquiring its trademark plain orange paperback design; but the content, and the fundamental ethos that undergirds the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute’s approach to scholarship, have remained unchanged:  the Institute’s publications are the fruits of pioneering, challenging, unconventional, and audacious research. This approach to research has continued to draw accomplished scholars to City College, such as Frank Moya Pons, and up-and-coming young academics, such as Irmary Reyes Santos, for the purpose of cooperation with the Institute and implementation of its select research agenda.

Torres-Saillant’s Introduction to Dominican Blackness was first published as a working paper, a publication of the Institute that disseminates ideas and research at their early stages. Demand for Torres-Saillant’s monograph has, however, remained breathtakingly high throughout these years, keeping us busy with successive re-printings. The new version, substantially revised by the author himself, presents ideas and views that have matured and have now generated a school of thought concerning blackness and the Dominican people.  Its second edition inaugurates the online Research Monograph Series at an opportune moment, as it dovetails with and joins current conversations about race and Dominicans’ self-perception, i.e., where our people see themselves on the racial continuum and others’ beliefs of how they/we perceive themselves/ourselves in it. Both Torres-Saillant’s new revision and the online edition of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute RMS edition also serve as a prelude to the forthcoming long-awaited website First Blacks in the Americas, a research project of the CUNY DSI.

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DOWNLOAD:

Torres-Saillant, Silvio
Introduction to Dominican Blackness [PDF]
2012, 64pp.

This study is a reflection on the complexity of racial thinking and racial discourse in Dominican society.

This first download is available free of charge. However, we humbly ask for a donation of $7.00 in exchange for each additional download to help defray the costs of our work and support the Institute’s mission.

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