Realism in Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Drama

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2015-01-01
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Rizo, Elisa
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Rizo, Elisa
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World Languages and Cultures
The Department of World Languages and Cultures seeks to provide an understanding of other cultures through their languages, providing both linguistic proficiency and cultural literacy. Majors in French, German, and Spanish are offered, and other coursework is offered in Arabic, Chinese, Classical Greek, Latin, Portuguese, and Russian
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Contemporary Afro-Hispanic drama offers a breadth of images that at first might be judged unrelated. 1 Take, for instance, the Afro-Uruguayan families evicted from their homes in Jorge Emilio Cardoso’s El desalojo en la calle de los negros (The Eviction on the Street of the Black People, 1992); the Costa Rican mestizo of humble origins trying to scale the social ladder while confronting a greedy oligarch in Quince Duncan’s El trepasolo (The Lone Climber, 1993); 2 or the Equatorial Guinean people trying to sort out the capricious rules imposed by a dictatorial regime in Juan Tomas Avila Laurel’s Los hombres domésticos (Homeboys, 1992).3 When seen together, such images provide a thematic spectrum that cuts across discourses of identity, geographic locations, and specific local circumstances. Yet, these dramas engage in a specific mode of analytical poetics that are rooted in the oral and written traditions of the African diaspora and that convey a twofold message of solidarity and solutions to problems. Through the examination of the above-mentioned plays, I submit that Afro-Hispanic drama published during and after the 1990s conveys a highly analytical form of realist depiction. While this realism is in alignment with previous models of aesthetic representation put forward by Hispanic intellectuals of African descent, contemporary Afro-Hispanic realist drama is also characterized by transethnic and transnational outlooks, that is, by a cosmopolitan perspective that corresponds to the globalized context in which these works were produced.

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This is a manuscript of a chapter from Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, Jerome Branche (ed.) University of Vanderbilt Press, 2015. 83-102. Posted with permission.

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Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2015
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