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Mindy Badia and Bonnie L. Gasior. Crosscurrents: Transatlantic Perspectives on Early Modern Hispanic Drama. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. 175 pp.
Crosscurrents is a collection of seven articles and an introduction written by the two editors. All contributions deal with transatlantic topics in a sample of Hispanic dramatic and allegorical works written or performed on both sides of the ocean divide. The introduction to the volume spells out the guiding theoretical principles that give coherence to the volume. All authors are interested in transatlantic and/or postcolonial approaches, which are applied to Early Modern Spain and its colonial territories. The main concern of the collection is to contest notions of cultural fixity by identifying literary scenes that would seem to "deconstruct" or subvert identity, gender, and forms of hierarchical power sustained by the elites at the time. The majority of the articles show more interest in how notions of identity and empire are subverted, rather than how drama helps sustain a status quo. A series of metaphors such as crosscurrents, bidirectional flow, intersection, negotiation, and mutuality are articulated in the context of cultural encounters in order to pursue cases of subversion. A strong notion of subjectivity constituted by means of a close contact with otherness is also operative in many of the pieces included in the volume. Although the two editors announce that the book is divided into four categories, these are absent from the table of contents and the articles do not follow exactly the order that is given to the reader in the introduction.
The first article, written by Yolanda Gamboa, studies the consumption of chocolate as a "consumption of the colonized self and at the same time as an activity that produces identity through a contact with the other. Gamboa defines the identity of the elites as very fragile and in constant need of a...