Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from Our America: Noteworthy Protagonists (Literatures of the Americas)

Intellectual discussions have fallen short of developing a truly hemispheric view of the Americas thus far. With eye towards filling this gap, Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from Our America, written by a professional musician turned literary scholar, offers a one-of-a-kind approach to exploring American homologies while taking account of national and regional differences. Based on an interdisciplinary Cultural Studies approach, this new methodology brings rigorous musicianship and critical literary theory to consider relationships between musical protagonists from Colombia, Cuba, and the United States in novels by Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Okada. In addition to providing useful ideas for inter-American studies, this book opens up new ways of reading texts related to Latin American, African American, and Asian American studies.