Chapter Notes: Derby — The Dictator's Seduction See main entry: derby dictators seduction trujillo

Chapter Notes: Derby — The Dictator's Seduction See main entry: derby dictators seduction trujillo Preface Derby announces the book as a cultural history of the Trujillo regime experienced through the microcosm of Santo Domingo. The choice to focus on Ciudad Trujillo is deliberate: Santo Domingo was the official stage of national civic life; the provinces largely modeled their public life after it. Methodological stance The book diverges from the "event history" that privileges the exile invasions and the Mirabal sisters assassination (the regime's set-piece crises) in favor of incidents that ordinary people remember as central: the San Zenón hurricane, the 1955 World's Fair, denunciation as everyday terror Most people lived "in a space of ambivalence and complicity, of passive action in the subjunctive mood" — what Blanchot calls "equivocal dissimulation" People narrated the regime embedded within "social fields of force": fellow family, neighbors, friends — not the regime as abstraction.