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Michael Nieto Garcia. Autobiography in Black and Brown: Ethnic Identity in Richard Wright and Richard Rodriguez. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2014. 240 pp. $42.75.
The title of this book immediately caught my eye since it focused on two writers whose work I have admired for many years. But I soon became puzzled about how these two figures could be productively compared in a book-length study because they came from such different backgrounds and seemed opposed to each other in terms of how they envisioned literature and politics. To further complicate matters, Rodriguez had relatively little to say about Wright throughout his career, although he has made many illuminating observations about African American culture and literature.
But these initial misgivings about the book quickly disappeared as I began reading it. Garcia provides a highly original and penetrating reassessment of both writers, as well as a careful study of how Hispanic and black American literatures are integrally related to each other. This important area has never been adequately examined by scholars and, hopefully, Autobiography in Black and Brown will initiate new research into this underdeveloped field.
From the publication of Hunger of Memory in 1982 to Darling in 2013, Rodriguez's work has been sharply criticized for what has been called "hyper-individualism"; that is, valorizing his own...