REVIEWS


potentially with the rise of Latino Studies in the U.S. Scholarship in
the English islands, on the other hand, has only emerged within the
past forty years or so and has been restrained (as Mohammed, Reddock
and Lewis comment on in their respective articles) due to limited re-
sources and uncooperative or disinterested government bureaucracies.
Though much sociological and anthropological research on the Carib-
bean is generated in the U.S., Roger N. Lancaster reminds us in "The
Use and Abuse of Ethnography" that one must always keep in mind the
big picture which is also "a question of the politics and the uses of
knowledge." For him, researchers must consider what use an ethnog-
raphy can be put to, and ask themselves if it is helpful to solving or
managing problems, such as the prevention of HIV/AIDS. Additionally,
he shows that these efforts must be based on cultural understanding:

 ...one cannot understand conceptions of manhood apart from
 womanhood apart from global markets apart from colonial histories.
 One cannot even understand manhood in, say Central America without
 understanding something of how conceptions there are shaped both
 in light of and resistance to conceptions from North America.

This is a timely collection giving scholars of Latin America/the Carib-
bean/ Plantation America/the New World a useful overview of the lat-
est work on gender and sexual systems, and more importantly -meth-
ods and paradigms for much-needed future studies in these areas.

 Sally Everson
 University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras




Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez.
Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the
Puerto Rican Diaspora.
New York: NYU Press, 2001.
B oricua Literature traces the lineage of Boricua authors to situate
 them both within Puerto Rican history and within the
 transnational context of U.S.-Latino relations. As she discusses
writers of Puerto Rican studies, Lisa Sanchez-Gonzalez explores the
ways in which Boricua literature is Puerto Rican, American, and nei-