Inter-American Literary Dialogues: Mixing Race, Mixing Culture

The ensuing essay offers a wonderfully informative survey of the theme of miscegenation as it has been redefined in late-twentieth-century and contemporary literature of the Americas, including the Haitian-Canadian satirist Dany Laferrière's sardonic Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985); Maryse Condé's revisionist-historical novel Moi, Titube, Sorcière de Salem (1986); Ana Castillo's mythical-realist hybrid novel Sapogonia (1990); the English Canadian writer Thomas King's novel of Native identity, Green Grass, Running Water (1994); the Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon's family saga, A república dos sonhos (1984); and, finally, John Updike's retelling of the legend of Tristan and Isolde in his parodie historicalallegorical novel Brazil (1994). Other clusters formed within this collection include the trenchant responses of Françoise Lionnet and Michèle Praeger to the notorious masculinism of the Martiniquian créolistes Patrick : Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphael Confiant in the section "Métissage and Counterdiscourse" (section I); the critical memoirs of two self-identified mixed-race scholars, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and Louis Owens ("Sites of Memory in Mixed-Race Autobiography," section V); the multiple and dynamic registers of theoretical hybridity, from what Rafael Pérez-Torres calls "strategic mestizaje" of Chicano cultural production to what Kaup calls "the unfolding process of métissage and mestizaje" that she explores in a comparative study of Mexican American and Métis Canadian discourse ("Hybrid Hybridity," section IV); and interracial love in the nationalist novels of U.S. and Andean literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, explored in essays by Priscilla Archibald, Rosenthal, and Susan Gillman in "Indigenization, Miscegenation, and Nationalism" (section III). Gillman ] takes as test cases two post-Reconstruction U.S. authors, George Washington Cable (The Grandissimes and Old Creole Days) and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It?) and, reading their work hemispherically, argues that they have each "reshaped the dominant national cultural icons of Americanization at their time, from the romance of reunion to nostalgia for the passing of the Southern, Mission, and Indian (fantasy) pasts, into tools of critical internationalism and types of imagined international communities."