Race mixture in nineteenth-century U.S. and Spanish American fictions : gender, culture, and nation building /

Rosenthal (John Carroll Univ.) compares novels from Latin America (Ecuador, Peru, Cuba) with US works that deal with racial issues, either of indigenous or native populations or from the slavery experience, offering a fascinating examination of "the nature of ‘race' as a social and an identity category." At the book's core is thematic and ideological analysis of seminal novels that initiated literary trends and exploration of the racial "other." Of particular interest is discussion of racial terms: e.g., Rosenthal contrasts "miscegenation" with "equivalent" terminology in Latin American social structures ("creolization" or mestizaje). Rosenthal includes chapters on the indianista novel in Ecuador and Peru and its US counterpart, the literature of the "pro-Indian" movement with its native protagonist. She also looks at Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda's classic Cuban anti-slavery novel Sab (1841) and at some US authors who dealt with postbellum black issues (Lydia Maria Child, William Dean Howells, Margret Holmes Bates, Alice Morris Buckner, and Frances Harper), focusing particularly on the sexual tensions inherent in relationships between races. Of particular interest to scholars of African American and Latin American studies, this is a carefully researched book that deals with theoretical matters across various disciplines. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. Ocasio Agnes Scott College