Writing “In Transit”: Literary Constructions of Sovereignty in Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife

Abstract

The 2013 Tribunal Court ruling (TC-0168-13), known in the Dominican Republic simply as la sentencia, effectively stripped the citizenship of an approximate 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent. The ruling, from the Dominican Republic’s highest court, reinterpreted the constitutional use of the word “in transit” to claim that the term describes the descendants of any undocumented residents in the country, thus thrusting these individuals into statelessness. This chapter focuses on an analysis of Dominican American Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife (2020), examining how the novel reinterprets and radically remaps terms such as “in transit” to arrive to a nuanced understanding of global sovereignty and belonging. It considers different representations of migration in Alvarez’s novel and applies Katherine Zien’s framing of “sovereign acts” in her analysis of Panamanian literature and performative acts to this Hispaniola-rooted, diasporic text. The chapter critically approaches how Afterlife both centers and decenters global sites of “contested sovereignty” and how the various interpretations of Dominican (American) women as well as undocumented workers in Vermont relate to gendered constructions of nation and citizenship. A close reading of the novel enables an in-depth consideration of the Caribbean tropes of femininity that travel to and in diasporic spaces; Alvarez gives space to female voices to enable or inhibit “sovereign acts” and offers a unique and diverse female-led depiction of Hispaniola’s female “in transit” subjects both on- and off-island.