“[A] carefully detailed and focused discussion of Afro-Latina/Caribbean women writers from Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Colombia. Duke discusses strategies of resistance, recuperation of memory, and rewritings of history, centering her reading of Afro-diasporic women’s literature transversally within Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American Literature Studies. It is a much-needed repositioning . . . ‘Enhorabuena,’ Dawn Duke. As an Afro-Boricua writer, I celebrate Mayaya Rising. Latin American and Caribbean Literary Studies need more books like this.”
- Mayra Santos-Febres (author of La amante de Gardel) “Mayaya Rising tells the stories, and the stories of telling the stories, of an incredible set of previously ignored Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean women. It makes clear the iconic potential of these women, the work that icons do, and the work it takes to productively iconize Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean women.”
- Keja Valens (author of Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature) “Dawn Duke’s study of black women writers in the Hispanic Caribbean-its continental components included-breaks important new ground. Its intersectional stress on race and gender illuminates the path of authors who draw strength from feminist and anti-racist legacies owed to iconic ancestresses. The cultural and linguistic diversity of this literary corpus pulverizes homogenizing assumptions about ‘Spanish American’ literature.”
- Silvio Torres-Saillant (co-author of The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat) “Mayaya Rising is a nuanced continuation of Duke’s 2008 work, Literary Passions, Ideological Commitment, wherein the author critically examines the nationalist practices that impede self-actualization of Black female historical representation in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Colombia. . . . That which Duke accomplishes with this work is critically establishing a female-centric revisionist history located within the contributions of Afro-descendant cultural practitioners whose literary, artistic, and activist endeavors continue to shape and enrich national narratives in these countries.”
- Antonio Tillis (editor of Critical Perspectives on Afro-Latin American Literature)
