Miscegenated segregation: On the treatment of racial hybridity in the North American and Latin American literary traditions (Brazil, Venezuela, Dominican Republic)

My dissertation explores how the presence of African peoples have influenced the national and literary identity of American countries that have a significant black population, but do not imagine themselves primarily as black, like the United States and Latin American nations, such as Brazil, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. It traces how such nations incorporate, reject and/or deny the numerically and culturally significant presence of African peoples through their literary imagination by sketching the differences and similarities developed in the ways these societies define and stratify racial categorizations through their respective literatures.; Formerly, cultural studies specialists assumed that Latin American societies, with their wide spectrum of racial categories, had a more benevolent approach to racial confluence than the racially polarized United States, which marks as black anyone with traceable Sub-Saharan, African ancestry. Consequently, literary critics viewed Latin American works as reflecting a benevolent attitude towards Latin Americans of African and native ancestry and celebrating the liaisons of individuals from these groups with lighter Spanish and European Latin Americans. My work highlights examples---Nella Larsen's Passing, William Faulkner's Light in August and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye---that partly confirm the traditionally perceived differences between the two literary regions in the construction of race relations. These kinds of North American works have been perceived as condemning hybridity, standardizing depictions of a world where the races are happiest if pure and distinct. My research also complicates the popular notion that race relations are more benevolently constructed within mulatto Latin American societies than within the more hierarchical North American. Exemplary texts in this direction include Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdes, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Jorge Amado's Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon.; My dissertation concludes with an exploration of the struggles of Latino authors of mulatto Latin American extraction to define themselves and their respective communities racially in a polarized United States. Literary works, such as Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, elucidate this on-going struggle by Latinos to redraw the racial boundaries of the United States as they seek racial self-definition.