Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

World Languages

Major Professor

Camilla Vásquez, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Judith Bridges-Soto, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Elaine Chun, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kiran Jayaram, Ph.D.

Keywords

Dominican Republic, enregisterment, Haitian Creole, qualia, raciolinguistics, raciosemiotics

Abstract

The present dissertation is an ethnographic and multimodal semiotic analysis of the role of signs in the daily life of Haitians in the Dominican Republic (DR). I investigate how language and other embodiments of Haitian alterity are perceived and ascribed value by hegemonic social orders. I center the analysis on the popular perceptions of the Haitian person-type or characterological figure (Agha, 2003) as (over)determiners of actual Haitian subjectivity. I investigate the ways that Haitian personhood is translated, that is, perceived and assigned value, in the Dominican context, and the implications this has on realities of Haitian immigrants. In addition to fieldwork and interviews with Haitians living in Santo Domingo, I incorporate analyses of government policies that shape national belonging, media personalities who contest Afro-Dominican embodiments, and events in local news involving ethnolinguistic nationalism. In my findings, I argue that, owing to factors such as colonialism, American imperialism, and elite and popular discourses, personhood possibilities are reduced to an “either/or” binary (Ke-Schutte & Babcock, 2023): either Haitian or Dominican. The dominant regimes of value position Haitian Creole and Haitians — the two have been co-naturalized (Rosa & Flores, 2017) — in a subordinate position in the ethnoracial and linguistic hierarchy. Given the hegemonic nature of ideologies of difference, marginalized subjects, such as Black Haitians, frequently orient to the same ideologies, even when challenging negative racial scripts. I also identify the supposed features associated with Haitian subjectivity, which include those related to speech and appearance, but also qualia, which are negra/o (blackness), pobreza (poverty), and sucia/o (dirty). These findings lead to a more profound investigation of construals of Blackness; I examine the specific signs that have been semiotically linked to a racialized Haitian identity. That is, I take a raciosemiotic approach (Smalls, 2020) to analyze the embodied attributes, such as hair styles/textures, facial features, and skin tones, that co-articulate with language to signal undesirable otherness. The last analytic chapter argues that historical anti-Haitian narratives and political discourses have rendered Haitian Creole a semiotic threat in public space. In this section, I apply Peircean sign theory to show how semiotic ideologies (Keane, 2018) instruct Dominicans to interpret Creole-use as intrusions into Dominican public space.

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