Place Language And Identity In Afro Costa Rican Literature

"With the current growth of interest in Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Latin American cultural and literary studies, this book will be essential for courses in Latin American and Caribbean literature, comparative studies, diaspora studies, history, cultural studies, and the literature of migration."--BOOK JACKET.

Quince Duncan is a comprehensive study of the published short stories and novels of Costa Rica’s first novelist of African descent and one of the nation’s most esteemed contemporary writers. The grandson of Jamaican and Barbadian immigrants to Limón, Quince Duncan (b. 1940) incorporates personal memories into stories about first generation Afro–West Indian immigrants and their descendants in Costa Rica. Duncan’s novels, short stories, recompilations of oral literature, and essays intimately convey the challenges of Afro–West Indian contract laborers and the struggles of their descendants to be recognized as citizens of the nation they helped bring into modernity. Through his storytelling, Duncan has become an important literary and cultural presence in a country that forged its national identity around the leyenda blanca (white legend) of a rural democracy established by a homogeneous group of white, Catholic, and Spanish peasants. By presenting legends and stories of Limón Province as well as discussing the complex issues of identity, citizenship, belonging, and cultural exile, Duncan has written the story of West Indian migration into the official literary discourse of Costa Rica. His novels Hombres curtidos (1970) and Los cuatro espejos (1973) in particular portray the Afro–West Indian community in Limón and the cultural intolerance encountered by those of African-Caribbean descent who migrated to San José. Because his work follows the historical trajectory from the first West Indian laborers to the contemporary concerns of Afro–Costa Rican people, Duncan is as much a cultural critic and sociologist as he is a novelist. In Quince Duncan, Dorothy E. Mosby combines biographical information on Duncan with geographic and cultural context for the analysis of his works, along with plot summaries and thematic discussions particularly helpful to readers new to Duncan.

Quince Duncan is one of the most significant yet understudied Black writers in the Americas. A third-generation Afro-Costa Rican of West Indian heritage, he is the first novelist of African descent to tell the story of Jamaican migration to Costa Rica. Duncan’s work has been growing in popularity among scholars and teachers of Afro-Latin American literature and African Diaspora Studies. This translation brings two of his major novels to English-speaking audiences for the first time, Weathered Men and The Four Mirrors. The book will be invaluable for those eager to develop further their background in Afro-Latin American literature, and it will enable students and faculty members in other fields such as comparative literature to engage with the burgeoning area of Afro-Latin American literary studies.

The book you hold in your hands is an interdisciplinary study on diaspora literacy in Afro-Central America. An exploration through various imaginings of times past, this study is concerned with how oxymoron, metonymy, and multilingualism deploy pluricentrical belonging. By exploring the interlocking of multiple roots that have developed on account of routes, rhizomatic historical imaginations are unearthed here so as to imagine an other Costa Rica. A Black Costa Rica.

Costa Rica is a country known internationally for its eco-credentials, dazzling coastlines, and reputation as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on earth. Beneath this façade, however, lies an exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism bound up in the concept of the tico, as many Costa Ricans refer to themselves. Beginning by considering the very idea of national identity and what this constitutes, this book explores the nature of the idealised tico identity, demonstrating the ways in which it has assumed a white supremacist, Central Valley-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative stance based on colonial ideals. Chapters two and three then go on to consider the literature and films produced that stand in opposition to this normative image of who or what is tico and their creation as vehicles of soft power which aim to question social norms. This book explores protest literature from the 1970s by Quince Duncan, Carmen Naranjo, and Alfonso Chase who narrate their experiences from the margins of society by virtue of their identity as Afro-Costa Rican, feminist, and homosexual authors. Cinema from the twenty-first century is then analysed to demonstrate the nuanced position chosen by national directors Esteban Ramírez, Paz Fábrega, Jurgen Ureña, and Patricia Velásquez to challenge the dominant nation-image as they reinscribe youth culture, a female consciousness, trans identity, and Afro-Costa Rica onto the fabric of the nation.

After generations of being rendered virtually invisible by the US academy in critical anthologies and literary histories, writing by Latin Americans of African ancestry has become represented by a booming corpus of intellectual and critical investigation. This volume aims to provide an introduction to the literary worlds and perceptions of national culture and identity of authors from Spanish-America, Brazil, and uniquely, Equatorial Guinea, thus contextually connecting Africa to the history of Spanish colonization. The importance of Latin America literature to the discipline of African Diaspora studies is immeasurable, and this edited collection provides a ripe cultural context for critical comparative analysis among the vast geographies that encompass African and African Diaspora studies. Scholars in the area of African Diaspora Studies, Black Studies, Latin American Studies, and American literature will be able to utilize the eleven essays in this edition to enhance classroom instruction and further academic research.

Philosophizing the Americas establishes the field of inter-American philosophy. Bringing together contributors who work in Africana Philosophy, Afro-Caribbean philosophy, Latin American philosophy, Afro-Latin philosophy, decolonial theory, and African American philosophy, the volume examines the full range of traditions that have, separately and in conversation with each other, worked through how philosophy in both establishes itself in the Americas and engages with the world from which it emerges. The book traces a range of questions, from the history of philosophy in the Americas to philosophical questions of race, feminism, racial eliminativism, creolization, epistemology, coloniality, aesthetics, and literature. The essays place an impressive range of philosophical traditions and figures into dialogue with one another: some familiar, such as José Martí, Sylvia Wynter, Martin R. Delany, José Vasconcelos, Alain Locke, as well as such less familiar thinkers as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Hilda Hilst, and George Lamming. In each chapter, the contributors find fascinating and productive matrices of tension or convergence in works throughout the Americas. The result is an original and important contribution to knowledge that introduces readers from various disciplines to unfamiliar yet compelling ideas and considers familiar texts from novel and prescient perspectives. Philosophizing the Americas stands alone as a representation of current scholarly debates in the field of inter-American philosophy. Contributors: Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Jacoby Adeshei Carter, Nadia Celis, Tommy J. Curry, Hernando A. Estévez, Daniel Fryer, James B. Haile III, Chike Jeffers, Lee A. McBride III, Michael Monahan, Adriana Novoa, Susana Nuccetelli, Andrea J. Pitts, Dwayne A. Tunstall, and Alejandro A. Vallega

The volume Celebrations and Connections in Hispanic Literature is itself a celebration of a tradition of scholarly dialogue in a relaxed, festive atmosphere. The articles included here began as papers presented at the 25th Anniversary Edition of the Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, held in Baton Rouge Louisiana, February 23-24, 2006. Each of the authors responds in innovative ways to the idea of connecting texts, contexts, and genres, as well as to the disconnect that is often present between what we perceive as “Hispanic” identity and the experience of those left on the margin. Topics include “Celebrating and Rewriting Difference: (De)colonized Identities,” “Word and Image in the Spanish Golden Age,” and “Latin American Literature and Politics,” among others. The collection is demonstrative of current trends in Hispanic literary and cultural criticism, which are increasingly less bound by traditional regional and temporal constructs. While each author’s research is rooted in a specific socio-historic context, their combined contributions to the present volume provide a far-reaching perspective that expands the notion of “text” to go beyond the literary and engage a multitude of disciplines. “…it emphasizes the often illuminating connections among literary and cultural texts which can be drawn when one conceives of Hispanism and its literary and cultural fields as shaped by trends and issues, rather than divided by periods and regions (...) What strikes me most is the newness of each piece. While each is very well informed, none rehearses old historical or theoretical ground more than is absolutely necessary, but rather presents either a new or overlooked text or offers a new approach.” Leslie Bary, University of Louisiana, Lafayette “An impressive array of well-established and younger scholars has produced a volume whose scope is the entire Hispanic world extending from the Golden Age to the contemporary era. (...) This volume will be of interest to all scholars and critics of Hispanic literature as well as to historians and political scientists. Many of the essays challenge traditional assumptions about the colonization of the Hispanic world as well as the motivations for the revolutions for independence whose influence is still strongly alive in contemporary treatments of fundamental questions of national identity, race, class, and gender.” C. Chris Soufas, Jr., Tulane University