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Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.54.4.0895

1528-4212

John Maddox,

Cuban History and Society

Anonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta has taken the field of inter-American studies in his own direction. Pioneered by Earl Fitz, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Nina Scott, Elizabeth Lowe, and Sophia McClennen (to name only a few), this approach unites the Americas through the comparative method. Scholars like Lesley Feracho and Ilan Stavans have used identity politics (representations of women and Jews, respectively) to link the Americas, but Tosta has synthesized a broad scope of scholarship to show how colonialism, slavery, and immigration unite the American continent's margins and diasporas. His theoretical introduction, four chapters, and epilogue analyze and compare Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, and Japanese immigrants in countries as far removed as the United States, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada, comparing representative novels from each of these nations to Brazilian novels. This broad yet coherent approach makes the work of interest to literary and cultural studies scholars on each of these nations and diasporas. He shows that the scattering of different ethnic groups throughout the continent creates confluences of cultures—both harmonious and conflicted—between these populations and the dominant groups that define hegemonic national identities. He highlights “the novelty of—and intolerance to—‘difference’” and “otherness” (xi–xii). To support and illuminate his argument, each chapter starts with an extended overview of each social group's history in the region discussed. This not only provides the reader information regarding the latest historiography on these groups but also makes the text particularly useful for the graduate and advanced undergraduate classroom. Cultural historians can engage in the dialogue between history and literature, which his study opens. Scholars of nation, race, ethnicity, and religion will benefit from his insights.His introduction meditates on ethnicity, otherness, and transnationalism. He defines “confluence narratives” as postmodern historical novels of the latter half of the twentieth century that connect national history to world history. They exhibit Charles Taylor's “politics of recognition” (from within these groups) and “solidarity” (from without) regarding ethnicities that have fallen into hegemonic historiography's blind spots and destabilize positivist assumptions of veracity (3). Beginning in his introduction, he alludes to confluence narratives that other scholars can revisit and delve into with his insights (6). He demonstrates that these historical novels revise Eurocentric interpretations the Encounter and Colonial Period as well as the “formational fictions” of the Age of Revolutions. He adopts a hemispheric, transnational approach that keeps Brazilian confluences at the center, thus shedding needed light on the Lusophone half of South America for English readers.His chapter on hybridity in indigenous-themed novels by Brazilian Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil and Mexican Laura Esquivel brings Brasil's writing to the attention of Spanish American and Anglophone audiences and helps push readers' focus on Esquivel's work away from her world-renowned novel (1989) and film Como agua para chocolate (1992). Brasil's work has only one other essay on it in English, and Tosta is adding needed analysis. Tosta shows that indigenous peoples do not always fight off Western culture but negotiate with it and thrive in it, such as the devout Catholic Francisco Abiaru in Brevário das Terras do Brasil (1997) (55). Set during the colonial time of the Inquisition, Abiaru witnesses the violence of his faith community when in contact with Jews and Dutch protestants (66). This emphasis on religion and culture shows that hybridity is primarily cultural and power based, not racial (67). He shows that Brasil continues the tradition of Gilberto Freyre in emphasizing mestiçagem but places the native Brazilian at the center of his narrative. His analysis of Esquivel's Malinche shows that hybridity includes translation of “an ancient symbolic system” into a Western, modern worldview (73) in order to “revisit colonization from a Native American perspective” (75). I would have liked to see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discussed in this chapter, though Spivak does appear in his discussion of African Diaspora novels.Transnational history and maronage is the confluence of the next chapter. Luís Fulano de Tal, pseudonym of Luís Carlos de Santana, is an Afro-Bahian writer whose novels have not been analyzed in English. Ismael Reed is much more widely studied, but Tosta shows how the Brazilian counterpoint reveals the common trauma of slavery spans the hemisphere (100). Interestingly, French Guiana enters the analysis, partly because the modern-day narrator of De Tal's novel discovers a manuscript there on which the novel is supposedly based (110, 113). De Tal's A noite dos cristais (1999) depicts the Revolta dos Malês (1835), during which Muslim slaves attempted to overthrow their oppressors in Salvador da Bahia. Tosta claims their aim was to establish a republic (123, 125), but a caliphate or simple vengeance against their enemies may just have likely been their goal; it is hard to say, since their plot did not succeed. Tosta contemplates the uncomfortable title of the novel, which evokes the Nazi Kristalnacht. The Muslims become the “Jews” of the massacre once found out (128). Tosta, in his analysis of Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), supports the author's criticism of Harriet Beecher Stowe that she “stole” the plot of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) from Josiah Henson, who was enslaved.In “Jewish Puzzles,” Tosta provides a history of another American diaspora. He notes that Jews show the incompleteness of the “three race” vision of Brazil (European, African, indigenous) (165). He analyzes and compares the Jewish-immigrant-themed novels of Moacyr Scliar (A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes, 1983) and Ricardo Feierstein (Mestizo, 2000). His essay on Scliar moves critics' focus from the debate over Max e os felinos (1981), a likely inspiration for Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001), and Scliar's more-studied O centauro no jardim (1980) to a lesser-known but still complex novel that sheds light on the history of Jewish gaúchos in Brazil. His reading of Feierstein's Mestizo shows the huge impact of Israel on Jews' fluid, hybrid identities (193), a stark contrast to Alberto Gerchunoff's rootedness in Argentina (182).Chapter 4 bridges Brazilian Jorge J. Okubaro's O súdito: (Banzai, Massateru!) (2008) and Canadian Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981) to discuss the history of Japanese immigrants to the Americas beginning at the dawn of the twentieth century (208). In Brazil, their unique language and supposed incapacity to be assimilated made them a target of persecution, especially during the assimilationist Estado Novo's alliance with the United States, despite long-standing positive stereotypes about their work ethic (239). Kogawa depicts internment camps in Canada like those of the United States during World War II (245). Kogawa's novel was a counter-narrative to Canada's hegemonic image of singular multiculturalism (256). The critic's epilogue lists other confluence narratives that have yet to be compared and analyzed.Tosta's prose is clear, engaging, and jargon-free. Any class or study on inter-American literature could use this book, but also any study of authors and populations that were treated in isolation before (Japanese and African Americans) would benefit from this well-researched, fascinating, and interdisciplinary work of multicultural scholarship.