Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions(Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in Latin America. His provocative analysis traces the conceptualization of blackness in fiction and theories of the novel, and troubles the racial and ethnic categories particular to each region's literary tradition.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Coloring Latinos, Coloring the United States The Novel as Popular Culture; Race in Latin America; Latinos as a U.S. Race; The Novel in the Dissemination and Reconfiguration of Notions about Race Chapter One: Novel Concepts: The Role of the Novel in Developing Ideas of Nation and Race in the Americas Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, and the New World of the Novel; Benedict Anderson and the Novel as a Tool of National Imagination; Fredric Jameson and the Many Worlds in the Americas; Novels and the Fictionalization of Racial Attitudes Chapter Two: Enslaved Characters: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Novels and the Absence of Bi-racial Consciousness Differences between Bi-racial and Mulatto Characters; The Myth of Racial Purity versus the Dreams of a Miscegenated Paradise; The Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Racial Representations; Uncle Tom's Cabin and Bi-racial Characters in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature; sab as a Nineteenth-Century Cuban Romantic Tale about Race; The Complicit Ignorance of Cecilia Valdes; A Thin Line between Black and White in Martin Morua Delgado's sofía and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson; Race without Romance in Antonio Zambrana's El negro Francisco Chapter Three: Mulatto Fictions: Representations of Identity-Consciousness in U.S. and Latin American Bi-racial Characters Mulatto Characters as Racial and Cultural Nexus; passing the Tragic Mulatta in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature; gabriela and the Sexualized Mulatta in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature; Pobre Negro, The Violent Land and the Limits of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature; Joe Christmas and the Unmerry Existence of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature; Go Down, Moses and the Mumbled Recognition of Racial Confluence in the United States; The Bluest Eye and the Persistence of Anti-Mulatto Fiction in the United States Chapter Four: Identity Against the Grain: Latino Authors of African-European Heritage and Their Encounters with the Racial Ideology of the United States Latino Authors and the One Drop Rule; Piri Thomas, Julia Alvarez, and the Limitations of Choosing Sides in the U.S. Racial Divide; Esmeralda Santiago and Negi's Persistent Puertoricanness in the Face of the One Drop Rule Chapter Five: Choosing Your Own Face: Future Trend of Racial Discourses Latino Influence in Other Cultural Products; The Latin American Racial Ethic behind the Wigga; The Rock, Tiger Woods, and a Universal Race Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Carlos Hiraldo earned his Ph.D. from SUNY at Stony Brook and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College.