Quince Duncan is a comprehensive study of the published short stories
and novels of Costa Rica's first novelist of African descent and one of
the nation's most esteemed contemporary writers. The grandson of
Jamaican and Barbadian immigrants to Limón, Quince Duncan (b. 1940)
incorporates personal memories into stories about first generation
Afro-West Indian immigrants and their descendants in Costa Rica.
Duncan's novels, short stories, recompilations of oral literature, and
essays intimately convey the challenges of Afro-West Indian contract
laborers and the struggles of their descendants to be recognized as
citizens of the nation they helped bring into modernity. Through his
storytelling, Duncan has become an important literary and cultural
presence in a country that forged its national identity around the
leyenda blanca (white legend) of a rural democracy established by a
homogeneous group of white, Catholic, and Spanish peasants. By
presenting legends and stories of Limón Province as well as discussing
the complex issues of identity, citizenship, belonging, and cultural
exile, Duncan has written the story of West Indian migration into the
official literary discourse of Costa Rica. His novels Hombres curtidos
(1970) and Los cuatro espejos (1973) in particular portray the
Afro-West Indian community in Limón and the cultural intolerance
encountered by those of African-Caribbean descent who migrated to San
José. Because his work follows the historical trajectory from the first
West Indian laborers to the contemporary concerns of Afro-Costa Rican
people, Duncan is as much a cultural critic and sociologist as he is a
novelist. In Quince Duncan, Dorothy E. Mosby combines biographical
information on Duncan with geographic and cultural context for the
analysis of his works, along with plot summaries and thematic
discussions particularly helpful to readers new to Duncan.
