Drugs, Pharmacy, Healing Rites, and Ethnobotany: Therapeutic Writing in the Foundational Narratives of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic

Foundational narratives from the Hispanic Caribbean were involved in projects of political modernization and relied on stylistic novelty and political disagreement. Turn-of-the-century Puerto Rican and Dominican intellectuals prioritized three areas of political modernization—decolonization, emancipation of women, and some sort of racial justice. They looked at pharmacy for ways of structuring their literary imagination and proposed psychoactive writing to boost agency. My dissertation relates their approaches to pharmacy to their political goals. Eugenio María de Hostos abandoned the politics of harmonization and invested in narco-analysis to make colonial traumas accessible to the reader on the cognitive and emotional level. Hostos required stimulants to counteract inertia of the colonial subject and to disclose the implication of Creole elites, like himself, in the hegemonic regime. I connect his psychoactive writing and its effects on the body to the post-Hegelian dialectic theorized by Nietzsche and Jean-Luc Nancy. From a comparably elitist perspective, Amelia Francasci sought to legitimize her work by suggesting parallels with the institution of pharmacy, consistently suspect of quackery at the turn of the century. I claim that Francasci opposed the discourse of the sick woman. I frame her pharmaco-writing within global feminist struggles to regain access to pharmacy, for which I build on Larry Duffy’s study of the nineteenth-century institutional transformations of chemistry and pharmacy in France and examine their repercussions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Two other writers I interpret—Francisco Gregorio Billini and Federico García Godoy—were more directly involved in Dominican politics and the state apparatus. They attempted to resolve what they perceived as national problems by assuaging racial tensions while exacerbating ethnic differences with Haiti. Billini and García Godoy incorporated Afro-Dominican healing rites into the national imagery yet misattributed them to European folklore. I suggest that such cultural appropriation of Afro-indigenous ethnobotany devalued Afro-indigenous connections.Ph.D