Identity and Alterity in the Literary Work of Francisco Moscoso Puello (1885-1959)

Abstract

Francisco Moscoso Puello is a Dominican doctor who developed his intellectual life in the first half of the 20th century. Imbued with a critical spirit, he is on the fringes of the elite linked to power during the Trujillo tyranny. Pierced by the personal experience of being a mulatto, he reflected in his literary work on the racial question in the Dominican Republic influenced by the key ideas of geographic determinism and biological racism that prevailed in the nineteenth-century social sciences. He is considered a worthy exponent of what has been called Dominican pessimism in continuity with Dominican social thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the following work, four of his literary works are analyzed from the point of view of identity, both personal and collective, and alterity, taking as a guide the concept of narrative identity of Paul Ricoeur. Based on the hermeneutical method, proposed by Stephen M. North (1986) and applied by Sánchez Escobar (2001) in the qualitative investigation of written productions, recurring patterns are analyzed and interpreted around their racial ideas and their perception of what at the time it was called the Dominican soul.