Voices Out of Africa in Twentieth-Century Spanish Caribbean Literature
is a compelling exploration of how authors of the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico) have incorporated the cultural legacy of Africa into their narrative fictions. This richly articulated study decodes and explores hidden layers of African-derived myths and symbolisms found in many of the major Spanish Caribbean works of prose fiction. Julia Hewitt ranges from the Afro-Cuban short stories of Lydia Cabrera and the historical novels of Alejo Carpentier, to the representation of the figure of the runaway slave—a foundational archetype of the Spanish Caribbean since the sixteenth century—to the contemporary salsa music-inspired narratives of the Puerto Ricans Edgardo Rodríguize Juliá, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Ana Lydia Vega, and the provocative narratives of the contemporary Cuban writer, Zoé Valdés. Voices Out of Africa is an erudite, yet accessible and exhilarating, account of the multiple layers of the region's cultural expressions. In its scope, it does justice to the wealth and complexity of Caribbean culture; at the same time, it is a work of scholarship and theory that offers a near-encyclopedic perspective on Spanish Caribbean culture. Voices Out of Africa is the sort of book to which scholars and interested laypersons can return again and again to rummage through its pages in search of insights into Afro-Caribbean symbolism, myths, and cultural practices.