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The Poet’s Prose and Other Essays: Race, National Identity, and Diaspora in the Americas offers a wide-ranging compilation of essays, literary commentaries, and reviews that aim to engage New World thought and writing and contribute to a more critically integrative and comprehensively embracing perception of cultural life and production in the New World. This volume underlines the importance of the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American dimension of hemispheric history and experience, and how failure to consider or properly integrate this dimension marks one of the central problems facing Caribbean, Latin American, and Latin@ Studies today.Bringing together important literary works from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and even Peru, among other locales, the collection is composed of three key sections: the first focuses on three of the region’s iconic figures—José Carlos Mariátegui, Oscar Lewis, Nicolás Guillén—and the impact of their contributions on discourses of culture, race, and national identity; the second centers entirely on Caribbean themes, across both French and Spanish language zones, exploring the creative and intellectual landscape of the region as a whole; and the final section addresses the unique features and textures of the experience of Latin@ communities in the United States, beginning with a review of New York as modern embodiment of an authentically "Hemispheric City."... "Roberto Márquez has a long and distinguished career as a specialist in Latin American, and, above all, Caribbean and U.S. Latino literature, with a strong emphasis on issues of race and racism in both literary and broader cultural and social relations. He is also a remarkable stylist whose every page and sentence shines. All of his best qualities come forth in this collection, because whether he is writing a review, a commentary or a full-fledged essay, Márquez displays the wide-ranging knowledge base and intelligence that have made him such a major voice in his field. Although a varied collection of materials, this book has an underlying unity marked by Márquez’s insistence on the importance of the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American dimension of hemispheric history, and the way failures to consider this dimension, to underplay or evade it through conscious or unconscious racist attitudes, mark one of the central problems facing Latin American, Latino, Caribbean, and indeed world literary and cultural studies. The opening essays on Mariátegui, Guillén and Oscar Lewis are prime examples of Márquez’s capacity to analyze texts dealing with Latin America, the Caribbean and Latino literature; they also provide a virtual platform for the shorter review essays and 'cameos' which constitute the rest of the book—texts which as narrow or occasional as they may first seem, follow through with the analytical modes and lines set forth and show how an authoritative critic and researcher like Márquez can bring to bear the full weight of his rich understanding on any particular object that draws his attention. In one essay after another, Márquez deepens his underlying critique, showing how to treat each work in function of his overall perspective. Indeed, the analyses stand as models for any student of the kind of knowledge and the proper modes of analysis one needs to read Caribbean and other diasporic texts. Scholars can turn to the essays and reviews herein as modelic illuminations illustrating how a broad theoretical, historical and literary background can inform any essay and even the most seemingly narrow review or commentary—indeed, Márquez shows us what kinds of knowledge and evaluative modes might best aid a student of literary works, movements, and themes evoked in or related to those presented in this book.In sum, this is a sobering, brilliantly written look at the question of race in Caribbean, as well as Latin American and Latino, cultural and literary studies."—Marc Zimmerman, Professor Emeritus in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and in World and Hispanic Culture and Literature at the University of Houston...
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