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American Literature 76.4 (2004) 871-886



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Comparative Literary Studies of the Americas

University of Iowa
Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie. By Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 2003. xiv, 141 pp. $30.00.
Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary. By Paul Allatson. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2002. 367 pp. $70.00.
The Contemporáneos Group: Rewriting Mexico in the Thirties and Forties. By Salvador A. Oropesa. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 2003. xiv, 175 pp. $37.50.

A common assumption among scholars of Latin American literature is that English professors view Gabriel Garcâa Márquez and magical realism as the sum total of Latin American letters.1 My recent move from a faculty position in Spanish to one in English, advertised as a "literature of the Americas" job, has revealed some truth to the stereotype. In my first year, no fewer than three undergraduates asked me to advise honors theses on magical realism in DeLillo and Garcâa Márquez. Those requests brought to mind some of the skeptical opinions I had encountered from colleagues about my job change: "Literature of the Americas" is another name for half-hearted literature in translation courses; for neoliberal "dialogues" among English, foreign languages, and ethnic studies; and for the fashionable Anglo-American mea culpa that strives to think globally while controlling the terms, and language, of the debate. After recovering from my initial shock, I returned to the more moderate, provisional stance that has guided me through my own work. The emerging transnational interdisciplinary rubrics are too new and diverse in orientation to be dismissed by these generalizations. For those of us working in these areas, it is important [End Page 871] to specify the different interests that may motivate disciplinary shifts as well as their impact on existing fields, both inside and outside the U.S. academy; to recognize that emerging rubrics may bring attention to underrepresented objects of study while possibly displacing other creditable ones; and, to distinguish the historical, aesthetic, and political rationales that inspire the new wave of transnational scholarship.

While some recent research on the Americas undertakes the study of a single transnational phenomenon, such as migratory circuits or commodity production and consumption,2 many studies depart from implicitly comparativist premises, as they place formerly disconnected texts, objects, peoples, or geographies in relation to one another within a unifying framework. Rubrics such as New World studies, transatlantic studies, postcolonial studies, and transnational ethnic studies not only challenge colonial and Cold-War area designations, they also introduce new axes and terms to a comparativist armamentarium that has traditionally featured national canonical literatures in synchronic historical frames, genealogies of literary influence, and formal textual analysis.

The three works under review here all complicate comparative literature's conventional reliance on the national as a default container for literary texts. Aldama's Postethnic Narrative Criticism and Allatson's Latino Dreams, for example, highlight the expansiveness of ethnicity and race as comparative analytic categories vis-à-vis relatively intransigent national boundaries. Aldama's study proffers "magicorealist" aesthetics as a "comparative matrix" for drawing together "U.S. ethnic and British postcolonial literatures, fictionalized autobiographies, and films" (13, xiii). Allatson draws on theoretical work in Latin American literary studies to consider how narratives from "Puerto Rico and the three largest Latino sectors" have diversely engaged "the state that contains them" (12). Even Oropesa's comparatively traditional study of the Mexico City–based avant-garde movement, the Contemporáneos Group, features eclectic geographical and temporal coordinates that challenge linear models of cultural diffusion from center to periphery. Oropesa places the movement at the genealogical intersection of seventeenth-century Spanish and New World Baroque literature and twentieth-century U.S.-based mass culture. The first two works are of potential interest to Americanists because they highlight the extent to which their U.S.-produced objects cannot be isolated from international or transnational phenomena if [End Page 872] they are to be adequately studied. The third is important for the opposite...

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