Jacob Brown

This article explores evolving representations of the Dominican colloquialism and concept tíguere in academic scholarship and Dominican national and diasporic culture. Phonetically, the word tíguere is a “Dominicanized” pronunciation—with one extra syllable added in the middle—of tigre, the Spanish word for tiger. Instead of purporting an exhaustive analysis of every utterance of tíguere in the vast archives of Dominican culture (a Quixotic affair for a single encyclopedia entry), this article observes how scholarship in the last forty years has approached the “tíguere” as a Dominican cultural expression. While academic books and articles on Dominican culture vary insofar as their discussions of the origins of the term and to whom it applies (whether they be men or women; “straight” or queer; black, white, or mixed), they also show continuity in reinforcing the basic characteristics of tigueraje (wit, grit, and resourcefulness; cunning, confidence, and showmanship; stoicism, style, and fierce determination) as expressions of dominicanidad, or Dominican-ness. This article does not pretend to be an exhaustive study but rather shows some of the ways in which authors and academics have spotted and studied tígueres in the milieu of Dominican cultural production. While the growing fields of contemporary Dominican scholarship, media, and literature have gradually deconstructed and adapted the tíguere within critical, queer, gender-inclusive, racially conscious, and transatlantic methodologies, in doing so it has also played a role in reinscribing the tíguere’s place in Dominican culture, both at home on the island and across oceans.

Contemporary cultural media illustrates the vampire as an important symbolic figure in the Brazilian imaginary. For example, in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian fiction, television, and political discourse, vampires have risen from their supposedly European origins as expressions of urban decay, comic excess, and government corruption in Brazil. Beyond these representations, I focus on three contemporary novels in which the vampire also plays a starring role. O vampiro que descobriu o Brasil (1999) by Ivan Jaf, Aventuras do vampiro de Palmares (2014) by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Dom Pedro I Vampiro (2015) by Nazarethe Fonseca stand out from other creative reimaginings of the vampire within a Brazilian cultural context. Exploring fiction’s potential for rewriting dominant national narratives, they cast vampires as historical actors in order to protagonize indigenous and black “Others” in Brazilian history. However, at the same time as they rewrite both the nineteenth-century European literary origins of the vampire and the history of Brazil, they also reinscribe the modern myths of racial mixture, or mestiçagem, and cannibalism, or antropofagia, popularized by Gilberto Freyre and Oswald de Andrade, respectively. In this way, the novels exemplify the complex tension between revising and perpetuating cultural stereotypes in fictional retellings of Brazilian history.