Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature, and: The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness (review)

In Place, Language, and Identity, Dorothy Mosby examines the neglected literary tradition of Costa Rican authors of African descent. These writers trace their ancestral movement to Latin America from Jamaica, which serves, instead of Africa, as a fading, idealized homeland. Mosby's first two chapters helpfully contextualize this subgenre of Costa Rican literature and establish an interpretive framework of cultural identity, postcolonial, and whiteness studies. Unlike Knadler's theoretically engaging The Fugitive Race, Mosby's remaining chapters rarely intervene in current academic discussions of minority and majority interaction. Instead, her study serves as a solid introduction to a distinct and intriguing literary tradition and an appealing invitation to other researchers to a treasure trove of forsaken material.

As Mosby explains, people of African descent first entered Costa Rica from the West Indies in 1872 and then came in subsequent waves, but their descendants were not granted citizenship until 1948. Costa Rican national identity and consciousness have long been cast in Eurocentric terms, as white Hispanic and Afro–Costa Ricans remain an underacknowledged minority community. In the work of early-twentieth-century writers Alderman Johnson Roden and Delores Joseph Montout, Mosby finds counterhegemonic strategies, including the incorporation of firmly retained remnants of West African oral and West Indian calypso traditions and the decision to write in various forms of early Afro–Costa Rican English. Mosby focuses on contemporary writers—especially poets Shirley Campbell and Delia McDonald—who continue to pay homage to a collective past, now based in Limón province rather than Jamaica. Racism remains a vexing presence in their work. Like many contemporary Afro–Costa Ricans, these writers were raised in the capital city of San Jos», and their fuller cultural integration is expressed perhaps most fully by their use of a standardized Spanish. Mosby demonstrates convincingly, if unsurprisingly, that these shifts in place and language have fundamentally shaped literary expressions of cultural identity.

In addition to successfully delineating a discrete literary tradition that deserves broader recognition in West Indian canon formations, Mosby demonstrates that a larger audience would find scholarly and pedagogical value in many of these works, including English translations of those in Spanish. However, I often wished for more thorough engagement with the vigorous discussions that have arisen around Mosby's ostensible points of contact with this literature—place, language, and identity. Mosby's study might have been enhanced by a more solid involvement in the kinds of discussions Knadler's study offers, but her work nonetheless succeeds on its own introductory and groundbreaking terms.

In The Fugitive Race, Knadler joins a growing number who have taken up Toni Morrison's call in Playing in the Dark (1992) to examine the ramifications of racial whiteness in American literature. Morrison delineated a range of typical white authorial uses of an "Africanist" other. In The Fugitive Race, Knadler takes something of an opposite approach, examining the handling of white characters in works by an eclectic range of ten minority writers (including Harriet Wilson, Abraham Cahan, Younghill Kang, Richard Wright, and Arturo Islas) in order to "better understand the ways that the reciprocated gaze of the other has acted upon the various articulations of whiteness from the very beginning" (xiv). Knadler's arguments draw effectively from a wide range of recent theoretical work, especially in performance and queer studies, critical race theory, and the new whiteness studies.

Firmly in line with a primary impetus in recent ethnic studies toward recognizing assertive (rather than simply victimized) minority subjectivity, Knadler consistently finds in these authors and their characters aggressive enactments of "interventionist agency" (xiii). His general finding is that American whiteness has been a "fugitive race" that hides from awareness of its ontological, epistemological, and teleological dependence...