The Occupied Strike Back: Writing against Empire and Constructing Postmemory in Occupied Hispaniola

The Occupied Strike Back: Writing against Empire and Constructing Postmemory argues that the specter and experience of occupation have inextricably influenced the island of Hispaniola. The centenaries of the US Occupations of Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), which took place in 2015 and 2016, serve as a mnemonic point of departure for this work. Using a comparative approach, this manuscript analyzes narratives in French, Spanish, English, and some Haitian Creole that contribute(d) to a project of resistance against US occupation and intervention over time—spanning the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. It further avers that these narratives foment a project of postmemory, or memory by adoption or transmission rather than lived experience.