Blacking Out the Archive in Jasminne Mendez's City without Altar

Abstract: This essay introduces readers to a recent choreopoem, or a play that is choreographed as a poem, by Afro-Latiné author, poet, playwright, performer, and educator Jasminne Mendez, titled City without Altar . The choreopoem centers the transhistorical experience of a massacre of Afro-Dominican and Haitian populations that occurred on the northern Dominican border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the town of Dajabón. I name it as transhistorical because of Mendez's intuitive and intersubjective mode of writing that connects her experiences with disabilities, which resemble those of el corte, with the afterlives of the victims themselves. I argue that Mendez provides a genealogical and aesthetic study of el corte that centers a Afro-Dominican femme interior life that is structured by the particularity of its afterlife.