Archive Nightmare

Cultural Memory and the Uses of Silence in the Dominican Republic

Series: 

In August 1865, Javier Angulo Guridi arrived in Santo Domingo carrying four loads of documents from the Restoration War—crossing swollen rivers by broken canoe, over fifty leagues of trail with no inn in sight. Within a year, those archives had vanished—one of many such losses this book sets out to understand. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished documents and rare images, from nineteenth-century archives to modern metro maps, this book reveals that what gets erased and who gets silenced was rarely left to chance—offering a new lens for understanding how institutions of memory across Latin America have been built as much to suppress as to preserve the past.
Copyright Year:
2026
E-Book (PDF)
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Not Yet Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-76709-6
Publication:
24 Sep 2026
Hardback
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ISBN:
978-90-04-76708-9
Publication:
15 Oct 2026
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Médar Serrata is a Fulbright scholar whose work focuses on memory, silence, and the politics of the archive in the Dominican Republic. He has published a monograph, as well as several scholarly volumes and journal issues.
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Note on Translations
Note on Previous Publication
Introduction

1 Javier Angulo Guridi, or the Archive as Nightmare
 1 The Fragility of Archival Memory
 2 The Torments of Memory
 3 The Quest for a National Literature

2 Relics, Archives, and Reversed Scenarios of Discovery
 1 Columbus’s Remains and the Battle for Historical Authenticity
 2 Welcoming Columbus
 3 Church, State, and the Struggle for Custody
 4 Upending the Scenario of Discovery

3 The Construction of Santo Domingo’s City-Archive
 1 The Devaluation of a Colonial City
 2 Travelers, Stables, and the Crisis of Legibility
 3 Satire, Decrees, and the Policing of Ruins
 4 The Pedagogy of Ruins
 5 Strolls, Disillusion, and the Return of the Repressed

4 The National Museum and the Performance of History
 1 Between Anti-Imperialism and Modernity
 2 The Museum as an Antidote to the Archive Nightmare
 3 The European Gaze
 4 Blueprint for a “Civilized” Nation
 5 The Spectacle of Order
 6 The Rituals of Seeing and the Hermeneutics of Reverence
 7 The State Appropriates the Script

5 Trujillo’s Archive as a Synoptic Machine
 1 Building the Machine (1935–1941)
 2 Writing the Nation in Advance
 3 The Technocrat’s Labyrinth
 4 The Pawnshop of History
 5 The Synoptic Machine in Action

6 The Racial Logic of Institutional Erasure
 1 Manufacturing Oblivion
 2 Ritual Failure and the Management of Recognition
 3 The Invisibility of Blackness
 4 Museums, Material Culture, and the Missing Narrative
 5 The Meaning of Shackles
 6 Two Findings, One Archive

7 The Blank Page and the Afterlife of Censorship
 1 Balaguer’s Blank Page as Theoretical Object
 2 The Phenomenology of Absence
 3 The Other Empty Spaces
 4 The Limits of Deferral
Epilogue: the Empty Frame
Bibliography
Index
Scholars and graduate students in Latin American and Caribbean studies, cultural and memory studies, literary history, archive and museum studies, race studies, and postcolonial studies. Essential reading for specialists in Dominican history and culture.
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