Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature (review)

Afro-Hispanic literary productions and works that configure or address the image of Afro-Latin people within narrative texts or subtexts are often marginal, if not invisible, within the broad frame of Latin American literature, culture, and history. Dorothy E. Mosby's Place, Language, and Identity is an important book that addresses the works of Afro-Hispanic, Latina, and other writers. The conceptual framework is broadly situated within gender, race, and postcolonial studies; however, its most direct contribution will be in the rapidly growing field commonly referred to as Afro-romance languages or Afro-Latin studies.

Mosby's work interrupts the traditional Hispanic literary discourse from two distinct but parallel angles that intersect at corresponding points: gender and race. This book constitutes a fresh departure and new angle in that she expands the scope of the Latin American literary terrain through a detailed examination of Afro-Costa Rican women poets such as Eulalia Bernard (old school) and the works of two younger women, Shirley Campbell and Delia McDonald (new school). While there are published articles on Afro-Costa Rican women such as Bernard and Campbell, Mosby's book constitutes one of the first comprehensive texts on Afro-Latina writers primarily focused on Costa Rica within the Afro-Hispanic literary canon. She concentrates on the "literary contributions of Afro-Costa Rican writers and how their treatment of place, language, and nation configure a cultural identity that is no longer West Indian and is in contestation with the dominant Europeanized culture of Costa Rica."

Mosby's point of departure is Stuart Hall's theory of cultural identity, which posits, "cultural identity . . . is a matter of becoming as well as being. It belongs to the past as well as to the future. It is not something that already exists transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere and have histories." Mosby argues that identity "in process" is best understood through the examination of literature: "Cultural identity changes from one that is of a dislocated West Indian population to the development and an expression of an Afro-Costa Rican one. This cultural identity did not emerge out of nowhere and in fact does have a history that we can observe in the views expressed by writers from different generations through their attitudes toward the West Indies and Costa Rica" (3). She points out that Afro-Costa Rican writers from different historical periods express their relation to place, language, and identity as a process, a transformation partly due to sociohistorical circum-stances and partly in reaction against the national myths of whiteness in the dominant Hispanic culture or the dominant ideology of "blanqueamiento that renders invisible other ethnic groups in the country" (4).

The author explores the oral traditions of the African-informed tricksters' tales, English poetry, and ethnographic sketches as a basis to establish a literary frame to examine second and third generations of writers such as Bernard, Campbell, and McDonald. Through an analysis of Afro-Costa Rican writings—poetry, prose, and fiction—Mosby asserts that as concepts these works reveal the process of West Indian cultural identity and transformation into Afro-Costa Rican and Hispanic identities.

Eulalia Bernard, born in 1935, represents "the historical trajectory of the experience of West Indian blacks in Costa Rica—from temporary foreign labor, the extension of citizenship to blacks in 1948, to struggles for visibility in the 1990s" (76). According to Mosby, Bernard's poetry is defined by the presence of exclamations, marked rhythms, and wordplay in English, Spanish, and Limonese Creole. Bernard's main body of work, which focuses on the cultural connections between Africa and the Americas, constitutes three poetry collections, Rimohéroe (1984), My Black King (1991), and Ciénaga (Marsh 2001), and her essay on political philosophy.

Shirley Campbell, born in 1965, is the most renowned of the new generation born after 1948, and she expresses "black identity and Costa Rican nationality and exposes the points of discord between...