This talk revisits the opening chapter of Spirals in the Caribbean (2024), focusing on El Comegente, a recurring figure of racialized monstrosity that emerged in 1791 Santo Domingo amid local Black rebellions and neighboring French Saint-Domingue insurrections. Initially mobilized to justify repression, El Comegente later became a folk figure, recycled in late 19th- and 20th-century Dominican fiction and national narratives, and haunting today’s collective memories. The figure travels, shifts shape, and adapts to political agendas—sometimes reinforcing anti-Black violence, other times reversing, ridiculing, or satirizing to destabilize its meaning. Through close analysis of archival and literary sources, the talk introduces the Spiral as a heuristic for tracing how such figures reactivate and transform histories of violence. Read in this way, the Comegente reveals how narratives of monstrosity work to erase the legacy of the Haitian Revolution, silence moments of cross-island solidarity, and displace unresolved conflicts between slaveholders and freedom seekers through a culturalist paradigm of national differences.
Sophie Maríñez is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and a faculty member at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book, Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Penn Press, 2024), won the 2025 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. In Fall 2025, she was a Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle’s Institute of Advanced Latin American Studies. Her work has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Fellowship and Humanities Initiative Research Grant, and two NEH Summer Stipend awards.
