Daylet Domínguez (PhD Princeton University) is an Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture, with special emphasis on travel cultures and costumbrismo; empire, nation and revolution; slavery, race and colonialism, among other topics. Her book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana 2021), studies the interplay of literature and science in nineteenth century Hispanic Caribbean. It particularly emphasizes the importance of literature for the establishment of the social sciences in the region.
Domínguez is also the co-editor of a special issue entitled Slavery, Mobility and Networks in nineteenth-century Cuba in the journal of Atlantic Studies (2021). Her articles have been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, Cuban Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Iberoamericana, among others.
She is currently working on her second monograph, Caribbean Empire: Writing, Filibustering and Annexation in the Age of the Second Slavery, which focuses on the ways in which Cuban and southern U.S slaveholders turned to each other and imagined themselves as part of the same front, united by chattel bondage, in the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War. This book project studies how writers, travelers, and planters from both regions began to envision these new geopolitical cartographies through diplomacy, written press, and filibustering. Their commitment to the future of slavery enabled them to transcend colonial and national circuits and challenge existing geopolitical borders. Domínguez was named the 2022-23 Wilbur Marvin Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University for her second book project.
Books
Ficciones etnográficas(link is external): Literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX. Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2021.
Slavery, Mobility and Networks in nineteenth-century Cuba. London/New York: Routledge, 2023. (Coeditor with Víctor Goldgel).
Articles and Journal Issue
"Alexander von Humboldt and the Cultural Invention of Cuba Among Its Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Elite". In: Unruh V, Loss J, eds. The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature. Cambridge University Press; 2024:67-81.
“Cora Montgomery, la filibustera: entre el expansionismo estadounidense y el anexionismo cubano.” El impensable Caribe colonial. Ed. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. Special Issue of Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamérica 37 (2023): 203-222.
Co-editor with Víctor Goldgel. Slavery, Mobility and Networks in nineteenth-century Cuba(link is external). Special Issue of Atlantic Studies 18:1 (2021).
“Introduction: Slavery, Mobility and Networks in nineteenth-century Cuba(link is external)” (With Víctor Goldgel). Atlantic Studies 18:1 (2021): 1-6.
“Slaveholders in the South: The Networks of Cubans and Southerners in the Age of the Second Slavery.(link is external)” Atlantic Studies 18:1 (2021): 51-69.
“The Caribbean in the U.S. Imagination: Travel Writing, Annexation, and Slavery.” Caribbean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism. New Jersey: Rutger UP, 2021. 127-142.
“Cuban Literature before 1920: Anti-slavery, Independence, Historiography and Women’s Writing.” Caribbean Literature in Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020. 309-324.
“Imaginarios antillanos: Humboldt, Haití y la Confederación Africana en las Antillas”. Revista Iberoamericana 84. 262 (2018): 45-63.
“En los límites del discurso esclavista: afectos, sensibilidad y retórica abolicionista en Los esclavos en las colonias españolas de la condesa de Merlin”. Cuban Studies 45 (2017): 252-272.
“Cuadros de costumbres en Cuba y Puerto Rico: de la historia natural y la literatura de viajes a las ciencias sociales”. Revista Hispánica Moderna 69.2 (2016): 133-149.
“Alexander von Humboldt y Ramón de la Sagra: navegación y viaje al interior en la invención de Cuba en el siglo XIX”. Hispanic Review 83.2 (Spring 2015): 143-164.
“Lectura en dos tiempos: cuerpos y subjetividades en Memorias del subdesarrollo y El Rey de la Habana”. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 45 (2011): 571-592.
“Antiintelectualismo y género policial en la narrativa cubana de los 70”. Encuentro de la cultura cubana 53-54 (verano-otoño 2009): 205-212.
“El teatro cubano actual: intertextualidad, postmodernidad y creación”. Temas 14 (abril-junio 1998): 80-97.