The Mestizo as Crucible

The Author: Interested in the recent changes in Europe, Christine de Lailhacar, of German and French background, shares her time between the US and Europe (Paris, Berlin) where she is engaged in the study of relations between Europe and the former «Third World». She taught as associate professor at the State University of New York, Maritime College. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is the author of several chapters in collections of essays, including General Literature/Comparative Literature (Lang, 1992), as well as numerous articles in professional journals.

"'The Mestizo as Crucible' could only have been written by a polyglot and polymath. Christine de Lailhacar's book is a polyphonic paean to cultural, ethnic, and poetic hybridity. Her range is immense, as is her voracious and unabashed eclecticism. Truly inspired by the marvelous melange in the crossovers and overlays of her mestizo subjects, Christine de Lailhacar elevates the labors of intertextuality; cross-cultural psychology, and contrapuntal reading to a very high order. Her lexical alertness verges on synesthetic passion and poetic edginess. Her immense familiarity with classical and modern prosody and her encyclopedic assimilation of our critical discourses clearly come through in the critical daring and intellectual generosity with which demanding poetic registers are brought into contrapuntal harmony. An enthusiastic exercise in poetic/prosodic exegesis and lexical parsing, this is a model study in comparative poetics that cuts across the verbal panoply of oral and written traditions." (Djelal Kadir, Editor, World Literature Today)
"We live in a period of ethnic, national, and tribal conflicts raging not only in the Third World and especially Africa, plagued by natural and human calamities, but in the very heart of Europe, supposedly the land of civilization and progress. In Christine de Lailhacar's 'The Mestizo as Crucible' we find a quasi-seismographic sensitivity to this kind of ancestral and contemporary tremors. Yet, there is a more rare phenomenon: the 'mestizized', literally 'interwoven' text reflects the very condition of her subject, namely the human cross-breed as poet, so cumbersome, because he/she is atopic, without a place in any of the symbolizing systems produced by a history of bigotry....'The Mestizo as Crucible' is a work of compelling timeliness." (M. Emile Malet, Director of Publication, Passages)