How nineteenth-century Black Dominican leaders used archives and visual culture to build political authority
This book offers a new interpretation of the Dominican Restoration War of 1863–1865 by showing how Black Dominican leaders used documentary practices as tools of political action. Focusing on the lives of Gregorio Luperón, Ulises Heureaux, and Pedro Francisco Bonó, Wendy Muñiz challenges histories that portray these figures primarily as military leaders, politicians, or intellectuals. Instead, Muñiz reveals how they built political authority through the production, circulation, and preservation of letters, memoirs, newspapers, photographs, passports, and ethnographies that shaped historical memory and public life in nineteenth-century Hispaniola.
Based on research in archives and libraries across the Dominican Republic, the United States, Spain, and France, the book reconstructs dispersed collections that have only recently become available. By reading visual and textual sources together, Muñiz shows that archives were not simply repositories of the past but active arenas where debates over race, citizenship, sovereignty, and Black political authority took shape. In highlighting visual culture, documentary practice, and embodied memory, the book also places the Dominican Republic within broader traditions of Black Atlantic humanist thought, tracing connections among the Haitian Revolution, Haitian unification, the Restoration War, and the wider Caribbean.
Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
