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  • Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature
  • Maria José Somerlate Barbosa
Branche, Jerome C. Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature. Columbia and London: U Missouri P, 2006. 292 pp.

This study covers five hundred years of Luso-Hispanic cultures and literatures and comprises an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Jerome C. Branche focuses on "inscribed blackness as negative difference" (2), discusses slavery in the Americas, "the marginalization of blacks in the context of nation-making," and "racialized naming" (3). The author states that the book aims at challenging three major assumptions of the slave system: a) the Christian-based moral determinant of the purported "natural equality of all humans"; b) the question of manumissions and social mobility; c) "benign enslavement," submissiveness, and "the absence of agency" (6). To sustain his thesis, he traces the history of racism, analyzing the "cultural function of science" (13) and the role of philosophical discourses in formulating and promoting eugenics theories and institutionalizing bias concepts that served the needs of the dominant strata of society in forging definitions of national identity. The text presents an insightful analysis of the dynamics of colonization, and discusses modern race-making, the colonial legacy of disempowerment, the "libidinal economy of conquest" (84), and the "colonial anxiety of whitening" (187). It also examines the role of intellectuals (especially Gilberto Freyre, José Vasconcelos, and Fernando Ortiz) who promoted the concepts of a "racial democracy" and/or the hegemonic discourse of a "racially amalgamated collectivity" and who attempted to erase the "anxiety of belonging" (210).

The first chapter, "Iberian Antecedents," discusses Portugal's age of conquest and the African presence in the Iberian Peninsula, using the ideological-religious framework of Zurara's Crónica dos feitos da Guiné to illustrate this point. It also analyzes Spain's literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the context of the consolidation of the nation-state that led to "the elimination of Jews and Muslims and the imposition of a white male Christian hegemonic order" (49). To examine the social dynamics of slavery in Spain, the [End Page 223] author anchors his arguments in the literary and historical texts, discussing examples that range from medieval cantigas to Aguado's Entremés de los negros, and Góngora's letrilla "En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramiento." He also draws examples from Spain's Baroque literature, focusing on Vega's El negro del mejor amo and Quevedo's "Boda de negros."

Chapter two, "Slavery and the Syntax of Subpersonhood," focuses on the "textuality" of the slave body, Africans' disempowerment and the concept of "subpersonhood" that the political strategies of racial ideology fomented. It addresses the legal and commercial languages of the empire such as they appear in announcements in newspapers, notices of runaways, and royal edicts. Branche also examines the role slave women played in "the sexual economy of the colonies in their multiple role as breeders, mammies, and sexual partners of the ruling class" (110). Chapter three, "Tez de Mulato: Race Writing and the Antislavery Premise," analyzes mulato-tez and the paradoxical valorization of mulattoness in Latin America. It discusses "the architecture of whitening" (115), miscegenation, and "the quest for privilege" (161). It presents a close reading of texts from Brazil and Cuba, centering on Castro Alves' slave poems, Guimarães' A Escrava Isaura, literary criticism by the Del Monte Group, Manzano's Auto-biografia, and Avelaneda's Sab.

Chapter four, "Negrism, Modernism, Nationalism, and a Palesian Paradox" discusses the white authorial presence in poesía negroide, poesía mulata, and poesía afro-antillana (162). It examines transracial writing, the poetics of negrismo and the mulata/o purported hypersexuality. Focusing on literary criticism, cultural and social studies, and poetry, Blanche discusses how Ortiz and Guillén (Cuba), and Pedreira and Palés Matos (Puerto Rico) embraced a "rhetoric of cultural fusion" (189) and failed to convincingly resolve tensions, and/or establish an effective counter-ideology. Chapter five, "Menegildo, Macandal, and Marvelous Realism: Of Iconicity and Otherness," discusses racial tolerance, the role Ortiz played in Cuba's racial episteme, presenting a critical analysis of the "ideological biases of his early work" (215). This chapter also addresses the struggle against discrimination...

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