In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

8 Race, Ethnicity, and Nation in Manuel Zapata Olivella’s ¡Levántate, mulato! Rethinking Identity in Latin America Laurence Prescott . . . It is only by regaining the possibility of active conduct that individuals can dispel the state of emotional tension into which they are forced as a result of humiliation. Alex Honneth (cited by Jorge Larraín) Literature is one area of human endeavor that can be appreciated for its own sake as well as for the insights it offers on cultural production, knowledge, and power. In Latin America the essay is particularly valuable in this regard, perhaps also because, as Nicolas Shumway points out, of all the genres it “is the least defined and can include texts as diverse as letters, biographies, speeches, newspaper articles, political decrees, and philosophical treatises” (1996, 556). Traditionally, college and university courses, anthologies, and studies dealing with the Latin American versions of this flexible genre have focused primarily on those writers who are read and lauded as its founders and major representatives. These canonical authors have been predominantly male, white or mestizo, middle- and upper-class individuals whose gender, racial identity, class standing, educational and travel privileges, and other social and economic advantages afforded them opportunities not usually available to persons of different backgrounds. Consequently, awareness and study of texts by authors whose profiles do not match that of the privileged tend to be uncommon. One writer who falls within this latter group is Manuel Zapata Olivella of Colombia. Born in 1920 in the Caribbean coastal town of Lorica and raised in Cartagena, Manuel Zapata Olivella, who died in 2004, has garnered much scholarly attention in recent years, largely because of his epic novel (or saga, as he preferred to call it), Changó el gran putas, which was published in 1983 and received Brazil’s Premio Literario “Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho” for Latin American Fiction in 1985. Zapata Olivella, however, was the author Race, Ethnicity, and Nation / 223 of numerous publications, which not only include novels, short stories, and plays, but also essays, travel narratives, scholarly studies, and hundreds of articles in newspapers, magazines, and books.1 A cursory examination of Zapata Olivella’s literary production reveals that identity has been a constant concern of this prolific author.2 His book¡Levántate mulato! “Por mi raza hablará el espíritu,” published originally in 1990, which, like Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845), combines or partakes of different genres (for example, history, biography , sociology, memoir or autobiography) while simultaneously transcending them,3 is also concerned with identity. Unlike Sarmiento (1811–88), however, Zapata Olivella belongs to and identifies with the historically disadvantaged masses of color (black, Indian, mulatto, mestizo, zambo) that Sarmiento and other privileged Creole writers, intellectuals, and leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries too frequently disdained and dismissed as culturally backward, racially inferior, and politically unfit for full participation in the construction and development of Spanish American national life. The critic Richard L. Jackson has described ¡Levántate, mulato! as the author’s “most important statement on the Afro-Hispanic identity as well as a personal search for his own identity” (1994, 59). While this may be true, it is important also to note that Zapata Olivella has regarded all of his work as a search for identity (see Zapata Olivella, 1967). Besides Jackson, other scholars—Marvin Lewis (1997) and Dina de Luca (2001), for example—have written illuminating studies on ¡Levántate, mulato ! as autobiography. Perhaps another useful way to understand the significance and writing of Zapata Olivella’s multi-layered or pluri-discursive text and the implications it has not only for peoples of African descent in the Americas but for others as well is to read it as an essay within the context of writers and texts that have shaped both the Spanish American literary canon and the ways in which Latin Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and nation. Zapata Olivella himself leads us toward this approach when he informs the reader in the introduction of ¡Levántate, mulato! that several “intellectuals, poets, politicians, and philosophers” (1990, 17) influenced his thinking. In addition to the already mentioned Sarmiento, whose program of national construction included education, European immigration, and annihilation of the indigenous population, Zapata Olivella cites four other major contributors to the Latin American essay of ideas. The first is the Mexican writer José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), whose provocative essay “La raza cósmica” (1925) offered a concept that, in the words of the critic...

Share