Mixing Race, Mixing Culture

"I have nothing but praise for this book. It is well conceived, it shows that it was not put together hastily, it incorporates the latest scholarship, and it engages in the latest contemporary debates in the field... Its 'Pan-American' approach is one that reflects the cutting edge of the field of Latin American and Latina/Latino Studies." -- Rolando J. Romero, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

An examination of the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas.

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.