Faculty: Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Eva Woods Peiró

Department: Hispanic Studies

Location: Vassar College, New York Public Library, Library of Congress, among others

Duration: Eight weeks

Project Start Date: 06/01/2015

Project End Date: 07/24/2015

Project Description:

This “video-book” project seeks to more fully understand the media personae of legendary Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (1909-1965) through the vast assemblage of media artifacts that documented his career and legend from the 1920s to the present.
Known for his suave, seductive charm, Porfirio Rubirosa died early on July 5, 1965 when he crashed his dashing Ferrari into the trees at Paris’ Bois de Boulogne after all-night celebrating and heavy drinking at “Jimmy’s,” the well-known Paris club. Rubirosa’s death was emblematic of his peripatetic life. The 1950s’ Latin lover par excellence, an international symbol of masculinity and sexuality, had died in the city of his greatest sexual exploits, at the wheel (he had been, after all, a well-known race car driver), and following a glittering late-night party honoring the winning team in the Coupe de France polo cup, a sport in which he had attained world-class player status. Rubirosa’s life ended “fittingly” according to the New York Times. Yet for Langston Hughes, perhaps then the United States’ leading African American writer, news of the death finally opened up the possibility of addressing that crucial race question:  Rubirosa was “a front page face out of international news, one of the famous playboys of the Western World. And not white!”

Although questions of race surfaced peripherally during Rubirosa’s twenty-five year career as the world’s most famous lover, it is precisely his race that most interested and concerned Hughes and which forms the basis of the study for which we seek the support of a Ford Scholar. Our study looks at Rubirosa’s hyper-masculinity and problematically racialized subjectivity, emphasizing the proliferation of meanings at play in the non-Dominican (U.S. and European) perspective of Rubirosa’s iconicity. Our aim is to address Rubirosa’s status as a Latin American icon through three interrelated lenses. First, as an icon that indexes complex discourses of racialization in the Dominican Republic, the States and internationally, and which propelled Rubirosa’s movement both socially and physically through the spaces of international modernity.  Secondly we will conceptualize Rubirosa’s mobility, his association with technologies of movement and speed (his career as race-car driver and amateur pilot) and contiguously, a globe-trotting Donjuanism he deployed through a sexuality of conquest (as seen through the series of high-profile affairs with celebrities and heiresses).  Finally, we will consider the persistent reverence in which he is still held as an icon of Dominican maleness. This discussion of Rubi’s body, and by extension, of his ability to pass or not into the invisibility or naturalness of whiteness, can help us critically approach and reengage the representations of a man who has come to represent the international—“macho’s macho.”

We seek to explore Rubirosa’s career through a “video book” or e-book using the Scalar platform developed by the University of Southern California. This innovative platform allows writers to integrate visual and audio material (media clips, images, sound recording, interviews, etc.) into scholarly writing in order to create new “texts” that introduce innovative forms of reading. We hope to work in collaboration with a Ford Scholar to collect, organize, process, and edit the digital materials needed for the book “manuscript”.  These materials include thousands of photographs, numerous cinema newsreels (mostly from Pathé), and countless newspaper and magazine articles to which we seek to add approximately 30 interviews produced with the help of our Ford Scholar.

Anticipated Project Activities:

Through this unique project the student will acquire first-hand experience working with original, primary resources.   S/he will help lay the crucial foundation for an e-book publication in consideration with Amherst University Press and will have the opportunity to work in a number of important US archives.

This project welcomes a deep commitment to creativity, an interest in exploring multi-media formats, and enjoyment of alternative “writing” styles. Much of the research work will take place at Vassar’s campus and in collections in New York City and the Library of Congress. The work for this project entails locating, classifying, analyzing and summarizing a range of intertextual forms found in film magazines, newspapers, and film and photographic archives. We will expect the Ford Scholar to work closely with us in identifying and retrieving the information needed for the project. In addition, we will expect the student to aid in securing permission to use the materials selected for inclusion in the project.

Preferred Student Qualifications and Skills

Intermediate (or above) reading proficiency in Spanish would be helpful but not essential. Good organizational skills. Ability to summarize arguments, images, pictures with rich description
Technical Skills: Familiarity with MS Word, Excel, scanning, photocopying, PowerPoint and small digital cameras to take high resolution photos; capturing images from the internet; Dropbox and Google Drive. Ability to search online databases.

Anticipated Follow-up Teaching/Professional Activity for Student

Leading a class discussion on the topic in the fall 2015. The talk can describe briefly the project and then characterize Rubirosa’s career according to the interpretive frames discussed over the summer.
Possible Presentation of an 8-10 page paper at a professional or graduate student conference in Summer or Fall 2015
Potential inclusion in a chapter or section of the e-book.