01.06.2018

Lecture: Manufacturing Precarity in Hispaniola The Political Economy of La Sentencia and Haitian Immigrants’ Rights in the Dominican Republic

Friday, June 22, 2018 , 2–4 pm
Keplerstraße 2, Raum 0.36

Prof. Dr. April J. Mayes
Pomona College in Claremont, California

La Sentencia, the decision to strip Dominican nationality away from generations of Dominican-born residents of
Haitian ancestry, is best understood as related to two intertwined processes: the transformation of the Dominican
economy and Haiti’s increased dependency on the Dominican Republic and a reassertion of Dominican sovereignty
over the country’s immigration regime. The talk provides a brief overview of the economic changes that have
swept across Hispaniola over the past few decades and will demonstrate how the Dominican Republic, in particular,
forcibly made labor a more flexible and vulnerable commodity as the state shifted from agricultural export to
export-driven manufacturing and service industries. One way that the Dominican state asserted its control over
labor was through immigration reform and by assertions of state sovereignty over its immigration regime. As this
paper will show, however, the argument for state sovereignty over immigration was enacted through the politics
of precarity, this time, the precarity occasioned by statelessness and the loss of citizenship.

Plakat