The overall picture is an exciting mosaic of significant scholarly contributions to ongoing critical debates.

America es una sola aunque pocos lo crean, un dia por encima del Pentägono y las bananas y el petr6leo los hombres comprenderän la imbecilidad incurable de los nacionalismos. Julio Cortäzar Ultimo Round The essays collected in this volurne arose out of a workshop at the 1992 Conference of the European Association for American Studies in Seville. The overall theme of that conference was "The American Colurnbiad: 'Discovering' America, Inventing the United States. " Feel­ ing somewhat ill at ease with the clarification of this theme in the EAAS Newsletter of October 1990, which explained that the "central concern" of the conference would be to study the "making of a country which is more than just a country, but also and quintessentially a dream, a fic­ tion, a continuous creation . . . ", we decided to organize a workshop that would focus on literary texts which implicitly or explicitly stand in opposition to the concept that the making of the North American nation is "quintessentially a dream. " While for many representing a dream, the making of the American nation deferred and destroyed at the same time the dreams of many others. The texts that interested us would therefore be such as foreground the hegemonic and power-related aspects that that making entailed and entails. The title that we chose for our workshopwas "Deferring a Dream: Literary Sub-Versions of the American Colurnbiad. " The hyphen in sub­ version is not entirely accidental.

After a long and painful transatlantic passage, African captives reached a continent they hadn't even known existed, where they were treated in ways that broke every law of civilization as they understood it. This was the discovery of America for a good number of our ancestors, one quite different from the "paradise" Columbus heralded but no less instrumental in shaping the country's history. What finding the New World meant to those who never sought it, and how they made the hostile, unfamiliar continent their own, is the subject of this volume, the first truly international collection of essays on African American literature and culture. Distinguished scholars, critics, and writers from around the world gather here to examine a great variety of moments that have defined the African American experience. What were the values, images, and vocabulary that accompanied African "explorers" on their terrifying Columbiad, and what new forms did they develop to re-invent America from a black perspective? How did an extremely heterogeneous group of African pioneers remake themselves as African Americans? The authors search out answers in such diverse areas as slavery, the transatlantic tradition, urbanization, rape and lynching, gender, Paris, periodicals, festive moments, a Berlin ethnologist, Afrocentrism, Mark Twain, Spain, Casablanca, orality, the 1960s, Black-Jewish relations, television images, comedy, and magic. William Wells Brown, Frank Webb, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Etheridge Knight, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Charles Johnson are among the many writers they discuss in detail. The result, a landmark text in African American studies, reveals, within a broader context than ever before, the great and often unpredictable variety of complex cultural forces that have been at work in black America.