Poet's Prose and Other Essays

Roberto Márquez is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Mount Holyoke College. He is a graduate of Brandeis University, and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. An accomplished translator of Latin American poets and writers, Márquez is a recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Centennial Commemorative Medal in recognition of his "outstanding contributions" as translator and scholar of that poet’s work. He is Editor of the bilingual collection Latin American Revolutionary Poetry, and is also the editor-translator of Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times. The first collection of its kind, with the broadest historical scope yet available in English, it was awarded the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) 2008 Prize for Translation. He is Founder-Editor of Caliban: A Journal of New World Thought and Writing (1975-1981), and his most recent volume, A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, was published in the fall of 2010 to a positive critical reception. He has traveled, lived, studied, and worked in various parts of Spain, South America and the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Cuba, Brazil, Panama, Colombia, and Nicaragua.

• Acknowledgments – Foreword – Culture, Race, and National Identity – José Carlos Mariátegui: Towards an Intellectual Portrait – Ah, de La Vida: Oscar Lewis’s Anthropology of the Wretched – The Poet’s Prose – Caribbeing: Island Latitudes and Spaces – The Specter of Races – Caribbeing – The Fresh Oases of Fraternity – Pedro Mir’s Countersong of Ourselves – The Stuff of Fiction – Puerto Rican Literature: A Bibliography – Isabelo Zenón Cruz’s Narciso Forty Years On – Of Diasporas and Latinidades – Hemispheric City – The Tempestuous Intimacy of Márgara Russotto – Our Afro-Latin Thing – An Island Heritage – Index.

"Roberto Márquez has a long and distinguished career as a specialist in Latin American, and, above all, Caribbean and U.S. Latino literature, with a strong emphasis on issues of race and racism in both literary and broader cultural and social relations. He is also a remarkable stylist whose every page and sentence shines. All of his best qualities come forth in this collection, because whether he is writing a review, a commentary or a full-fledged essay, Márquez displays the wide-ranging knowledge base and intelligence that have made him such a major voice in his field. Although a varied collection of materials, this book has an underlying unity marked by Márquez’s insistence on the importance of the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American dimension of hemispheric history, and the way failures to consider this dimension, to underplay or evade it through conscious or unconscious racist attitudes, mark one of the central problems facing Latin American, Latino, Caribbean, and indeed world literary and cultural studies. The opening essays on Mariátegui, Guillén and Oscar Lewis are prime examples of Márquez’s capacity to analyze texts dealing with Latin America, the Caribbean and Latino literature; they also provide a virtual platform for the shorter review essays and 'cameos' which constitute the rest of the book—texts which as narrow or occasional as they may first seem, follow through with the analytical modes and lines set forth and show how an authoritative critic and researcher like Márquez can bring to bear the full weight of his rich understanding on any particular object that draws his attention. In one essay after another, Márquez deepens his underlying critique, showing how to treat each work in function of his overall perspective. Indeed, the analyses stand as models for any student of the kind of knowledge and the proper modes of analysis one needs to read Caribbean and other diasporic texts. Scholars can turn to the essays and reviews herein as modelic illuminations illustrating how a broad theoretical, historical and literary background can inform any essay and even the most seemingly narrow review or commentary—indeed, Márquez shows us what kinds of knowledge and evaluative modes might best aid a student of literary works, movements, and themes evoked in or related to those presented in this book.In sum, this is a sobering, brilliantly written look at the question of race in Caribbean, as well as Latin American and Latino, cultural and literary studies."—Marc Zimmerman, Professor Emeritus in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and in World and Hispanic Culture and Literature at the University of Houston