Athens and Sparta of the New World: The Classical Passions of Santo Domingo

This chapter reconstructs the reception and appropriation of ancient Greece and Rome in the Dominican Republic, tracing the long arc of classical reception from the foundation of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to the politics of the twenty-first-century nation-state. Two interlocking appropriations of classical Greece are documented and scrutinized: the glorification of colonial Santo Domingo by postcolonial Dominican elites as the “Athens of the New World,” and the celebration of the modern nation-state as the “Sparta of the New World” during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61). Both modes of scripting hispanophone Hispaniola as classically Greek turn out upon closer examination to derive their impetus from a racialized—and racist—cultural and nationalistic program whose imprint on Dominican debates about statehood and race remains visible to this day.