In this analysis we are faced with a subversion pattern of the detective novel. In fact, though the various plots are constructed – according to the classic detective story – for instance in a dynamic causal relationship, from now on we will have to count on a combination of events which are at the same time physical, mystical, magical, spiritual, and traditional on the vital path of the detective, as it is the case with the tetralogy of Rudolfo Anaya’s Zia Summer (1995), Rio Grande Fall (1996) Shaman Winter (1999) and Jemez Spring (2005). The action takes place in a Chicano area, where modernity and tradition, and above all, rationality and spirituality are mixed up.
This chapter draws from Tomás Rivera’s poetry and Rudolfo Anaya’s short story “The Man Who Could Fly” (2006) to read continuities of an Atlantic world formation within the Southwest. Specifically, this essay compares paradigms of a remembered “Congo” informed by dialectics of empire concerning both Central African exploration—in the case of Rivera—and plantational Latin American and American slavery—in the case of Anaya. While this article argues that in the case of Rivera, Henry Stanley’s exploration haunts the spatialization of Rivera’s poetry, in Anaya, by contrast, Atlantic continuities are chiefly embedded in a transnational comparison with Latin American Caribbean writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier. Applying Caribbean thinker Edouard Glissant’s theorization of “Relation” to these Chicano narratives, this chapter decodes the racial geographies of the Southwest to theorize how landscape and fiction work together to memorialize subaltern Atlantic memory.
ZOONYMS: CONTEXTUAL MEANING IN LITERARY CONTEXT (BASED ON THE NOVEL “BLESS M. ULTIMA!” BY RUDOLFO ANAYA)