Interviews Afro-Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan. Discusses the lack of critics who are familiar with Black literature in Costa Rica; asks Duncan to compare North American and Latin American criticism of his work, asks Duncan about his latest projects and the direction of his work; and compares Duncan's work with that of Alejo Carpentier and Manuel Zapata Olivella. Also touches upon language usage, the theme of literature of combat, and Duncan's future plans.;
Los Angeles, CA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Foreword by R.S. Bryce-Laporte., 197 p, Presents an anthropological analysis of the West Indians' adjustment in Costa Rica over a hundred-year period. The book also looks at the development of the inequality that occurred as Blacks, who initially saw themselves as superior to local Hispanics, later found themselves at the mercy of a Hispanic cultural hegemony. An important contribution to the anthropology of West Indians in the Caribbean's Hispanic borderlands, the book is rich in its observations on race, class, & mobility among West Indian immigrants & lays the foundation for comparison with other such immigrant communities in other areas of the Americas.
"A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limón to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica." (author"
