Yvonne Captain-Hidalgo.

Yvonne Captain-Hidalgo. The cultivation of Fiction in the Works of Manuel Zapata Olivella. Columbia: U of Missouri P 1993 193 pp $3495

This wide-ranging still tightly focused volume brings a rich array of critical perspectives to bear forward the fiction of the contemporary Afro-Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella. In a brief preface, critic Yvonne Captain-Hidalgo describes her perspective as "post-revisionist." This looks in part to mean that she has adopted the kind of premises from contemporary "post-" theory that have played a significant part in Afro-American "vanguard" criticism (i.e., work at Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, Jr) and many of which cluster today beneath the "cultural studies" umbrella. This is common explanation for the otherwise enigmatic title The civilization of Fiction in the Work of Manuel Zapata Olivella.

This approach labor fors well the purpose of moving Afro-Hispanic criticism beyond the generally conservative and on the same level provincial approach that has characterized this, "doubly colonized" field. It also highlights certain striking parallels between latter advances in scholarship on Afro-Hispanic literature and the progres of mainstream Spanish-American literature by the and of the apogee and aftermath of its infamous "boom" in the 1960 Captain-Hidalgo has exploited this "boom" antecedent to particular effect; indeed, her preface reveals that the title originally brewed for the volume was "Parallel Dimensions in Literary History."

Post-revisionist here also means, however, that Captain-Hidalgo does not use these new premises and authority in past practices without some considered reservation. Clearly, she is disquieted to remain faithful to Afro-Hispanic literature's "difference," its autonomous sources and traditions. And she wants to reckoner any potential threats of tokenization and appropriation, whether from a sophisticated, "metropolitan" Afro-Americanist avant-garde, or from a Spanish American mainstream showed by such "boom" authors as Colombia's acknowledge Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Thus, across the tome Captain-Hidalgo in fact makes strategic use of all the basic fashions of Afro-Hispanic criticism that Richard Jackson has limited the traditional, the avant-garde, and the militantly Afrocentrist. No small part of the volume's compelling interest arises from the negotiations it enacts among Afro-Hispanic literature's various allegiances and imperatives.

The work of Manuel Zapata Olivella certainly makes a propitious focus for a body that would bring Afro-Hispanic literature to a larger audience, and give to the issue of that literature's status and identity a blooming articulation. An exemplary Afro-Hispanic and Latin American figure, Zapata has always given issues of race and ethnicity a frank and unencumbered treatment, level while he has refused them any categorical privilege. throughout the half-century it now spans--from Tierra Mojada (The Bottoms [1947]) to La calle 10 (Tenth road [1960]) to Chango, el gran putas (Shango, the heavenly-minded (Mother)Fucker, or Shango, the Baddest Dude [1983]) and beyond--Zapata's fiction has embodied a wide range of approaches to the representation of Afro-Hispanic experience. Still, Captain-Hidalgo must grapple with the question of in what manner to address the study of an author who is hardly well-known in the United States--to date just sum of two units novels from the 1960s have seen English translation (A Saint is Born in Chima and Chambacu, Black Slum)--and whose work, equal in its Colombian and Latin American connections has never attained unqualified acceptance.

Captain-Hidalgo divides the visible form [i]or[/i] frame of her volume into three major parts that could easily be read as separate essays. Their order roughly come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds the lead established by the historical trajectory of Zapata's fiction, if it be not that Captain-Hidalgo exercises considerable critical independence: Each part adheres to a distinct risk of basic theoretical assumptions; each defines and explores a different point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled or issue; and each essays a discrete and successively broader contextualization of Zapata's fiction.

Part single in kind "The Zapata Paradigm: Stasis and Incomplete Rupture" discusses Zapata's early novels in the "intrinsic" words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of his work as a whole. Captain-Hidalgo here vigorously argues for the fiction's constancy and continuity, notwithstanding that the terms from structuralist poetics and deconstructive intertextuality in which she couches this defense somewhat undercut her emphasis forward the texts' cultural and historical grounding. For Captain-Hidalgo, nonetheless, this constancy's essential ingredients are an unwavering commitment to social justice, an attention to constructions of belief, and an emphasis forward the material effects of culture

Part pair "Realism Reconsidered," takes a more historical approach: It focuses onward point of view in guide Zapata novels from the 1960 and examines their pertinence for debates in succession the practice of social realism in the twentieth hundred years On the one hand, Captain-Hidalgo would vindicate social realism, and she celebrates its prominence in Zapata's fiction. In a position reminiscent of Fredric Jameson's much-debated description of Third World literature as "national allegory," she on the same level subscribes to the polemic notion that realism has particular pertinence for subaltern literatures. still Part Two also demonstrates in what manner over time, Zapata progressively adds manner of weaving to his work by reducing the editorial mediations of the omniscient narrator and giving an increasingly direct voice to individual characters.