144 BOOK REVIEWS

Vicioso); Cuba (Marta Rojas, Georgina Herrera, Lourdes Casal, also from the
United States, Nancy Morej6n, Excilia Saldafia, Soleida Rios); Costa Rica
(Eulalia Bernard, Shirley Campbell); Ecuador (Argentina Chiriboga); Equitorial
Guinea (Maria Nsue Ang0e, also from Spain); and Colombia (Edelina Zapata
P6rez, Yvonne-America Truque, also from Canada). Some of them write in
more than one language, like Costa Ricans Eulalia Bernard, the "first female
griot of African descent in Latin America to be recognized by academics and
government officials" (122), who writes in Spanish, English and Mecatelio,
the Creole of Lim6n, and Shirley Campbell, whose two grandmothers are
Jamaican and who keeps writing to see if she "can make more people happy
about their own skin, whatever colour it may be" (415). One of them, Lourdes
Casal, who lived in the United States and sought to reconcile Cubans on the
island and in exile before her death in 1981, positioned herself as a woman
of African, European, and Chinese descent, and even wrote about the Chinese
diaspora in the Caribbean decades before its current popularity.
 A major objective of this anthology is to offer "critical contexts for
understanding and interpreting the literature" (xiii). This is also achieved in
the space allotted to scholars who for years have dedicated their attention
to Afra-Hispanic writers. Their literary criticism explicates at the same time
that it reinforces what everything else in this book does: it makes the reader
want to look further into the work of these and other Afra-Hispanic authors
and to wonder why writers like Beatriz Santos and Edelma Zapato P6rez,
whose sections appear without scholarly articles yet whose work is riveting,
haven't received more critical attention. The fact that the editor decided to
include them in spite of this is definitely a sign of her dedication. As she states
in her Preface, she harbors the hope that this effort will "stimulate more
extensive and sustained research on these writers and others" (xiii). Some
readers of this excellent anthology will definitely take this as an open invitation
to continue the work Miriam De Costa-Willis has so courageously begun.

 Maria Soledad Rodriguez
 University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras