On August 4, 1865, the Alexandria Gazette happily reported some good news for city residents eagerly awaiting a return to normalcy after the Civil War. Under “Virginia News,” subscribers learned that the corn crops in Rockingham County look “very promising” while the crops of oats and hay appear “very heavy”; county election results in areas east of the Blue Ridge indicate that “the old officers have generally been re-elected”; and in some areas “pic nics, balls and tournaments are ‘all the go,’” with the tournaments proving to be “specially in favor.” Southerners were deeply invested in tournaments, and Virginians especially so. Their love affair with these chivalry-laden medievalisms began as early as 1840 when the proprietors of the Fauquier White Sulphur Springs, inspired by the pageantry of Lord Eglinton’s 1839 tournament, introduced their guests to a “novel scene of amusement.” Unlike armor-encased knights crossing lances with one another in Scotland, knights in the United States began riding, sans armor, at a quintain. According to a notice printed in the Alexandria Gazette on September 7, 1840, knights aimed to knock the figure to the ground decisively or face the consequences of an ineffective strike – a sprinkling of meal and a whip lashing as the rider passed by. Hearing that the tournament had “caused a great deal of sport,” the paper’s editors wanted more information and requested a spectator to “give an account” for “it would be an admirable offset to the Eglintoun affair.” The difficulties of defeating the quintain were significant; enough so that the following year, tournament organizers jettisoned the dummy and suspended a ring 9 feet in the air as the new target of attack. Program rules in 1841 now instructed a knight at the fashionable springs to ride three times at the ring, at full speed, over a distance of at least 75 yards, with the goal of capturing the ring upon his lance “in chivalric triumph.” Resort staff also made another notable innovation to the South’s budding tournament tradition by dispensing with a pre-selected Queen of Love and Beauty. The triumphant champion now claimed the privilege of placing the chaplet upon the regal brow of “the Lady of his choice.”

In perhaps the best-crafted of his later short stories, “Dayspring Mishandled,” Rudyard Kipling transposes his readers back into the London of the early 1890s and presents them with a nostalgic glimpse of the loves of a group of young writers who gather once a week for supper at a popular café. All of them are talented and ambitious but impoverished and glad to write pot-boilers for the magazines of a new-style entrepreneur who supplies them with basic ideas, plot-outlines, and characters for the work. Among these young writers are the story’s protagonists, Manallace and Castorley. Castorley is a “mannered, bellied person” with a “high affected voice” and “gifts of waking dislike.” Manallace is “a darkish slow Northerner of the type that does not ignite but must be detonated.” On the occasion during which we meet both of them, Manallace admits that he has produced nothing for the syndicate this week. He had been given a batch of prints to weave a story around – stereotyped medieval subjects, “a knight, a castle, a young girl,” but they “have turned to poetry in his hands.” Only the narrator of the story, who takes the drunken Manallace home that night, learns that the poetry he was bragging about was Chaucerian verse. In a parallel development, Castorley leaves the syndicate. He has come into money and devotes himself to gentlemanly scholarship with Geoffrey Chaucer as his chosen subject.

In their youth, both men had loved the same woman. She, however, La Bohème-style, had loved a third man, rejecting alike Castorley’s attempt to get her to bed and Manallace’s declaration of love. Castorley never forgives her and, when she becomes paralyzed, refuses to subscribe to a fund necessary for a vital operation. Manallace nurses her until her death in 1915. One night, when Manallace and Castorley are working together again in a government department during World War I, Castorley, in a confident mood, had spoken of the dead woman in terms that Kipling, probably for censorship reasons, cannot quote. Whatever Castorley said – Angus Wilson suggests that Kipling hints at the woman’s paralysis as being due to syphilis contracted by whoring – it suffices for Manallace to dedicate the rest of his life to exacting vengeance.

With the death of Daniel Williams on 26 January 1716, aged seventy-two, his will, running to forty-four pages in print and some nine thousand words, became effective. Soon the pattern was established that his trustees each received a copy of the will. Their lawyers referred to it to ascertain Williams's intentions before confirming or denying Dr Williams's Trust's (DWT) ability to commit resources. These first trustees set up those charities that his will directed and found suitable premises for the library, which opened in 1730. In time Dr Williams's Library (DWL) became the leading repository for the books and archives of English religious nonconformity and DWT's main concern. Williams's own books, and the ‘large & usefull Library’ of his friend William Bates (1625–99), purchased by Williams, formed the centre of this collection.

To commemorate the centenary in 1816 DWT published Papers Relating to the late Daniel Williams, D.D. and the Trust Established by his Will. Almost seventy years later in 1885 Walter David Jeremy offered short biographies of all the trustees from DWT's beginning. In 1916 the trustees had planned to publish a history of the foundation and a catalogue of DWL's printed books, acquired since 1801. The outbreak of war in 1914 disrupted their plans and neither work appeared. Instead A Short Account of the Charity & Library Established under the Will of the Late Rev. Daniel Williams, D.D. was issued in 1917 to mark DWT's bicentenary. This Short Account was based on articles published in the journal, The Inquirer, written by the secretary and librarian, R. Travers Herford, and the sub-librarian, Stephen Kay Jones. The senior trustee, Philip H. Wicksteed (1844–1927), explained that additional details had been supplied by Francis H. Jones, DWT's secretary and librarian 1886–1914, and Stephen Kay Jones's father, whose knowledge of DWT was ‘exhaustive’. Although some published lectures by individual trustees and two by librarians have concentrated on the library, these have examined aspects of the work, rather than provided an overview. The tercentenary of Williams's death in 2016 called for a fuller history. Hence the present volume.

In 1603 James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of Elizabeth I and moved to London with his wife, Anna of Denmark, to become James I of England. Their English court is renowned for its masquing activity, with Anna and her ladies, in particular, enthusiastic participants in the spectacular masques designed and composed by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. Until now little has been known of the couple’s involvement in such performances during their reign in Scotland; scarcity of evidence of masquing at the Scottish court has contributed to a loose impression that James was indifferent and that Anna’s interest flowered only in England. But surviving evidence in clothing accounts, at least during the early years of their marriage, shows the King and Queen both engaging in maskerie on a number of occasions. This essay explores what this as yet little-known evidence can show us about the materials, activities, and occasions of royal maskerie in Scotland.

We are dependent on the records of expenditure on royal clothing for this evidence. In the early years of James’s reign, these are recorded in the Scottish Treasurer’s Accounts. But in 1590, perhaps following James’s marriage, it seems to have been decided that the King’s and Queen’s wardrobe should be funded directly out of the yearly subsidy granted to James by Elizabeth I throughout most of his reign. From that time onwards, most wardrobe payments disappear from the Treasurer’s Accounts. However, there survives a detailed account of materials supplied for clothing for James VI and Anna of Denmark at the Scottish court through the 1590s, made by the merchant and financier Robert Jousie, and funded largely from the subsidy paid by Queen Elizabeth. On at least four occasions in 1591 and 1592, fabrics for clothes were bought for maskerie. These entries will be discussed below. The records give a vivid picture of colours and fabrics but describe ensembles only as ‘maskerie clothes’ rather than giving any particular garment names. These costumes and the masques at the Scottish court in early 1590s are not well known. No maskerie costumes appear to have been bought after 1592, perhaps because of a lack of occasion, or the pregnancies of the Queen.

The twentieth century had brought challenges. Too much had depended on one officer, Francis Henry Jones, and, though competent, he had been stretched too far. In spite of this, Robert Travers Herford, with scholarly interests in historic Judaism, was appointed to both positions as secretary and librarian. Donations showed that DWL retained its status as the appropriate repository for items of nonconformist interest.

The Secretary/Librarian and Staff

Francis H. Jones explained in April 1913 that he found it ‘increasingly difficult’ to work the long hours as DWT secretary/librarian. Furthermore he was secretary to the Hibbert Trust, active with the Board of Guardians (which oversaw provision for the local poor until 1930), the Provincial Assembly, The Inquirer, and the Little Portland Street Unitarian congregation, leading the trustees to conclude that in future the two offices of secretary and librarian should be separated. Jones himself wished to resign as secretary, but continue as librarian, yet in June 1913 the trustees accepted his resignation from both positions, to take effect one year later, recording his ‘ability, zeal and loyalty’ over twenty-seven years. They gave £60 towards providing him with clerical assistance and secured from the Charity Commissioners the authority to pay a life pension of £200 to Jones on his retirement, yet only five years later he was dead. The trustees recalled his ‘devoted strength and constant industry’ and ‘courtesy to all who used the Library’.

Contrary to the earlier intention of separating the two posts, in February 1914 the Revd Robert Travers Herford (1860–1950), having pastored in Lancashire and London, was appointed the secretary and librarian at the salary of £310 a year, with ‘residence, light and heating’. Stephen Kay Jones became the sub-librarian, with his salary increased from £180 to £200 a year. Two years later, amid World War One, the younger Jones wished to volunteer for military service, but wondered how this might affect his position. DWT resolved to pay his salary during his absence, less the cost of providing a substitute. Herford himself was a scholar of Jewish rabbinical literature, having studied at Owens College, Manchester, at Manchester New College, London, and, as a Hibbert Scholar, at Leiden University.

S. XIV (bef. 1378), ?Oxford, Bury St Edmunds Abbey Sec. fol. at tamen

Structure: 124 leaves (i + 123), foliated by Henry Kirkestede, prior of Bury 1361–c. 1378. 325 . 225 (245 . 155–70) mm, retrimmed. Ruled with crayon in 2 cols of c. 60 lines. Collation: a singleton at each end, 1–1012, 112; catchwords framed in red. The quires are lettered in pencil at the beginning, ?[t - rent in the parchment], v–z, aa–ee. ff. i and 123 were almost certainly originally pastedowns. Binding: s. xix, half-binding of brown, polished calf with cream paper sides, over pasteboard; front joint cracked. At the head of f. iv is the mark of a brass chain-staple. The sewing appears to be original. On the front pastedown, in red, Distribuit libros Ellis Minns Bibliothecae: / Mutauit Cifras iMposuItque noVas (The capital letters form the date of 1904); four paper blanks at each end, the innermost pasted to ff. ir and 123v.

The coming of the twenty-first century presented several problems. How would DWT and DWL adapt? The trustees again chose to appoint from within the fold, entrusting DWT to a man of experience and knowledge, who understood nonconformity and Unitarianism, but who used DWL as an historian, rather than as a theologian. David Wykes had much to commend him.

Context

By the late twentieth century, DWT was no longer a Unitarian preserve, although Unitarians retained a majority. The trustees included Baptists, Quakers, and English former Congregationalists (drawn from those who had joined the United Reformed Church). With them were one Moravian, a Welsh Congregationalist, and a Roman Catholic. Having returned to Catholicism from Unitarianism while a trustee, Anthony Cross (1932–2019) encountered no explicit opposition on the trust, claiming to be a ‘dissenter of the Roman Catholic persuasion’. At the start of the new century, some believed that DWT might safely include those from beyond religious nonconformity.

One experienced trustee recognised that some of his fellows merely sustained the Unitarian majority, whereas he found the Congregationalist Geoffrey Nuttall a formidable and valuable presence until his retirement in 1998, after almost fifty years. On Nuttall's resignation, this trustee noted a loss of gravitas. Another saw DWT's difficulties as reflecting the general decline of nonconformity, evidenced in theological college closures and DWL's subsequent acceptance of books and manuscripts from these institutions. Such developments suggested that planned change should be welcomed.

Placing the librarian under the secretary of the trust had not worked well and, given financial pressures in the 1990s, led to the posts of secretary and librarian being combined. Prior to Wykes's appointment, he had been a trustee for ten years (a member of the library committee) and a DWL reader since 1976. He had resigned from DWT in order to apply for the position. Wykes's background was academic, having taught history at the University of Leicester, where his specialism was late seventeenth-century English dissent. Yet his was a Unitarian family, well known to several trustees. He therefore brought strengths to his post, being proven, loyal, and familiar with the traditions of both library and trust. Moreover, he knew many who shared his interests and might see the potential of DWL's theological, historical, and literary holdings.

The search for premises for DWL, although determined, was protracted. Having ruled out available City properties, before opting to build, the trustees found that they had been allotted insufficient funds to complete all necessary works. In response, the trustees and their friends proved generous. To understand that generosity fully, £1 in 1730 was equivalent in purchasing power to about £220 in 2020.

DWL's Need for a Site

The trustees authorised John Evans, Zachary Merrell, and Samuel Lessingham in December 1725 to enquire about a particular site for DWL. Evans felt that if the owner knew why it was wanted he might either refuse to sell or raise the price. Did that suggest a bias against DWT and dissent in general or merely reflect standard business practice? The trustees resolved, if it was freehold and large enough, to offer no more than £1,000, empowering Evans to make a down payment of £550. Although the library was not DWT's principal concern in these years, the Memoirs of … Daniel Williams state that Williams confidently expected

All enquiries were in vain until in 1727 a site in Cripplegate was identified. Founding libraries was not uncommon then. Thomas Tenison (1636–1715), Archbishop of Canterbury 1695–1715, had a ‘zeal for the foundation of libraries’. The library at St Martin in the Fields began life in 1684 during his rectorship. Sion College was among the privileged libraries specified in the Copyright Act of 1710 – with Oxford, Cambridge, the Scottish universities, and the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, later joined by the British Museum. In the 1700s Sion College housed the only public library in the City. These privileged libraries received a copy of every book registered at Stationers’ Hall. A library was founded at St Paul's Cathedral in 1707, once the vicar of Islington's collection had been purchased for £500.

However libraries for dissenters were rare. Lazarus Seaman (d.1675) had opened his own collection to dissenters, but on his death his five thousand volumes were sold.

In a recent study of medieval drama, Tison Pugh argues that the interplay between the Old and the New Testaments in the York Mystery Cycle “unleash[es] the queer potential of a theological production.” But The York Realist, a 2001 drama by the Welsh playwright and director Peter Gill, presents a more nuanced queering of the York Cycle. Among the cycles of English mystery plays, that from York (sometimes called the Corpus Christi Play) is the longest and may be the earliest. Forty-seven of what were once fifty individual plays, or pageants, survive and recount the whole of salvation history from the Fall of the Angels to Doomsday. The plays themselves were produced and performed annually by the city’s guilds for nearly two centuries on Corpus Christi Day. The earliest record of the York plays dates from 1376; the last performance until the twentieth century was in 1569, an attempt to revive them in 1580 having failed.

No one knows who wrote any of the individual York plays, though many seem to have been revised multiple times, some perhaps by a single author whom scholars have called the “York Realist.” The plays were written in the same long alliterative lines found in other literature from the north and west of England at the time. The eight plays attributed to the York Realist contain an overabundance of realistic detail and underscore the psychological motivations of characters, especially villains.

Besides an interest in the York Realist, recent scholarship has grounded the York Plays in the culture and history of medieval England’s second city. The centrality of the guilds and their conflicts with local civic and ecclesiastical authorities informs the dialogue and individual scenes in many of the plays. Similar plays from other cycles lack such sustained emphasis. As Clifford Davidson and Sheila White have shown, there is an ongoing concern within the York Plays with bullying, as individual characters, especially Christ, suffer at the hands of those who abuse their power. That abuse is often notable for its realistic cruelty. Such abuse may further reflect tensions between the guilds and local authorities when the York Cycle was produced. Furthermore, the York Plays are unique among the surviving English Corpus Christi cycles in their concern with homosocial male bonding to create a hypermasculine backdrop against which salvation history plays out.

Both Roger Thomas and Kenneth Twinn had been DWT secretary and librarian. Combining the offices in one person had brought successes and failures. DWT's openness to employing a librarian from beyond Unitarianism, but well versed in dissenting history, led to an experienced and talented man's appointment. With a Unitarian secretary overseeing the trust, clashes might have been expected. Would the secretary exercise a watching brief which the librarian would resent?

New Appointments

After Twinn the trustees knew that they must make two appointments, a librarian and a trust secretary. The appointments sub-committee recommended in March 1976 that the secretary, representing DWT, should have ‘overall responsibility’, while the librarian had ‘full responsibility’ for DWL. The librarian's duties included the administration of DWL, preparation of the Bulletin, reporting to library committee meetings, dealing with correspondence and manuscript accessions, publicity, printing and occasional articles, book selections, and, finally, readers’ problems. In 1976 the Unitarian minister James McClelland was appointed DWT secretary from January 1977 at £3,570 a year (£900 in lieu of accommodation) and John Creasey was appointed librarian at £2,500 with accommodation provided. Both were expected to attend DWT's general meetings.

On H. J. McLachlan's resignation in December 1976, David Arthur was elected to the trust. After fifteen years, E. Anthony Wrigley also resigned and, in 1977, Revd Fred Ryde (1914–92) and Dr Barrington (Barrie) Raymond White (1934–2016) became trustees. A second library strongroom was created in late 1976 and early 1977 from the caretaker's workroom, necessitating electrical rewiring of the entire building. Fred and Rosemary Kett became caretakers in September 1977. On Gwendolen Woodward's death in March 1978, the trustees recalled her warm personality.

New College London's Library

NCL's offer to donate ‘a substantial part’ of its library had been welcomed in March 1975. The college, which closed in June 1977, had a library, which was the heir of several dissenting academies, broadly in the Congregational tradition. The college governors, through Geoffrey Nuttall who taught church history there, offered the basic collection to DWL, with manuscript archives and other works. Such an acquisition necessitated considerable reorganisation, although the gift was accompanied by an endowment of £10,000.

This work traces the history of Dr Williams's Trust from the early eighteenth century and concentrates, as it should, on the development of Dr Williams's Library from its genesis as merely one charity among others to its becoming the principal survivor of Daniel Williams's vision. As much as possible, I have attempted to adhere throughout to the chronology of the decisions and events described. An alternative thematic approach would have insufficiently reflected the unequal and uneven stresses placed at different times on the several causes supported by the trust. Nonetheless the trust's various objects have been separately discussed within each chapter.

The main argument here is that Dr Williams's Trust emerged from the situation of Presbyterians in late Stuart London, fearful of threatening Roman Catholicism and disappointed at the rejection of religious comprehension. The trustees’ task was to implement the terms of Daniel Williams's will and over the years to ensure that those causes that had been founded decades, or even centuries, before were upheld. This the trustees have performed faithfully, even when in doing so they and their co-religionists gained little direct benefit. Whether they might have done this better or differently readers may judge for themselves.

My thanks are due to successive trustees, not only for commissioning me to write this history and for affording the facilities to carry out the necessary research, but also for encouragement and patience as the project developed. In addition, I must thank the trust's director 1998–2021, Dr David Wykes, the conservator, Jane Giscombe, and other members of the library staff who have been working through lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic since the spring of 2020. The Jonathan Morgan fund has helped to make this publication possible. If, at times, in my text I appear critical of trust decisions and of the trust's approach, this criticism must be tempered by my respect for those who, over three centuries, have generously and selflessly committed time and energy to the operation of this unique trust, enabling its survival in the twenty-first century. My duty has been to quicken appreciation of the devotion and achievements of the past and thereby to stimulate what might be appropriate responses to the needs of today and of the future.

This study examines how a centuries-old European genre has been transformed by contemporary Afro-Latin American novelists to address key aspects of the diaspora in various Caribbean and Latin American countries. While attention to Afro-Hispanic and Brazilian literature has increased in recent decades, few critics have focused specifically on the Afro-Latin American bildungsroman written in both Spanish and Portuguese. Postcolonialism provides a useful theoretical framework for analyzing this literature, especially because it explores the movement of populations domestically and internationally. As noted by Bill Ashcroft and his coauthors in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice, “A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being.”

That crisis of identity has everything to do with the continuing movements of people. As Afro-Brazilian poet and novelist Conceição Evaristo stresses (in the first epigraph to this chapter) in her description of a Brazilian mother's search for her children who have gone to a distant city, “the ritual of coming and going” each time increases “the starting point” and, as we will see, works toward the final coming together of the family. Thus, this study of coming-of-age novels focuses on stories of young people searching for their families and, especially, a home. The second epigraph, from Pulitzer Prize–winning Dominican writer Junot Diaz, underscores how so many of these journeys calling young people “back home” pull them between nations with such different cultures that they experience difficulty understanding who they are. In addition to the movement of populations, another aspect of identity that Afro-Latin American writers examine relates to literary Blackness in different countries.

With the help of the expensive space-age medication “Rainbow Bright” and the tentacles of an anemone placed on her head, the main character of La mucama de Omicunlé, Acilde, rapidly transforms into a man. Her chest flattens out, her genitalia become male, and her jaw becomes sharp. This transformation takes place as Afro-Latin American prayers are said by the Cuban doctor Eric. While Acilde's alteration was long fated to help save the ocean, as a man he kills off the various avatars of himself. La mucama de Omicunlé and Sirena Selena, another coming-of-age novel that features an androgynous character who transforms him/herself, reflect a new era of twenty-first-century queer fiction that probes issues related to the Caribbean such as climate change and immigration.

In the final chapter of this study, we examine how contemporary authors queer the Afro-Latin American bildungsroman. Sirena Selena by Mayra Santos-Febres and La mucama de Omicunlé by Rita Indiana feature androgynous protagonists, cross dressing, and gender reassignment. As in other chapters in this study, these novels address themes of Blackness, religion, and immigration, although in unique narrative styles. A brief overview of queer theory is necessary for the analysis of Sirena Selena and La mucama de Omicunlé. In addition to its history of being a slur meant to demean homosexuals, the term “queer” is also used to mean “odd” or “strange.” Queer theory developed a decade after the initial devastation of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. According to cultural historian Tasmin Spargo, “Queer theory is not a singular or systematic conceptual or methodological framework, but a collection of intellectual engagements with the relations between sex, gender and sexual desire.” A number of theorists influenced the development of queer theory, including French philosopher Michel Foucault, gender theorist and Cal-Berkeley professor Judith Butler, Teresa de Laurentis, and Eve Sedgwick, among others. Foucault, author of The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (1978), studied power systems in society and believed that sexuality was not based on biology but rather impacted by “historical, social and cultural” foundations. Moreover, Foucault shied away from strict definitions of “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” instead believing that there was a continuum of sexualities based on desire.

When Gracielita, a key character in Letters to My Mother, joins the hundreds of thousands of Cubans that cross the Florida Straits during the Mariel Boatlift she had no idea how her life would change. Her boyfriend had convinced her that life in Cuba no longer held promise after the revolution and going to the United States would offer more opportunities. Unfortunately for her, she does not find a better life and instead encounters racism, especially from Cubans who immigrated in earlier waves, and is unable to find work with her advanced degree from an Eastern Bloc country. In letters to loved ones back home, Gracielita describes how her life as an émigré evolves first in Miami and later in Washington, DC. With each correspondence, a group of women in Cuba eagerly looks forward to the descriptions of her life abroad. The Maids of Havana, written by Pedro Pérez Sarduy thirty years after the Mariel Boatlift, offers a reexamination of Mariel, again using the epistolary form.

The coming-of-age novels featured in this chapter on the Afro-Cuban bildungsroman are distinctive in the way they marry a unique narrative format with strong historical allusions. While bildungsromans typically address the journey of a child, the genre is generally not considered to be for children. Letters to My Mother (2006) by Teresa Cárdenas, however, was written as a young adult book that was also read by adults in Cuba and in translations around the world. Moreover, this book and The Maids of Havana (2010) by Pedro Pérez Sarduy are epistolary (correspondence-based) novels. According to Deborah Kaplan, in epistolary novels “stories emerge out of the discourse of identifiable correspondents, [and] are completed collectively in the mosaic of their communications.” Correspondence-based novels first appeared in eighteenth-century England and France, where they were associated primarily with female protagonists. Epistolary novels, though, have not been limited to Europe, and two examples of well-known twentieth-century epistolary novels in Africana letters are The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker and So Long a Letter (1989) by the Senegalese author Mariama Ba. While The Color Purple is an epistolary coming-of-age novel, So Long a Letter addresses common themes of African diasporic literature.

In one scene of City of God, Rocket and his friend Squirt magically travel back to the past to the origins of their favela. Instead of seeing building upon building, a haunted mansion glows in the moonlight. The Baron of Taquara sits upon a steed as slaves labor in the fields. When the terrified boys are discovered after seeing a runaway slave having his leg cut off, they manage to escape. The 1997 film City of God connects the horror of the past with the realities of the present and reflects how the legacy of slavery lives on today.

Whereas the preceding chapter focused on Afro-Cuban communities in Cuba and the United States, this chapter examines other areas of displacement— transnational communities in the Dominican Republic, the United States, and urban ghettos in Brazil. In City of God by Paulo Lins, the narrative style itself reflects the houses and apartment buildings of a favela, with sentences and paragraphs jumbled together. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is divided into multiple parts that reflect the life of a migrant family that moves backward and forward between the island and the mainland. In both, the environment plays an important role in a young boy's coming-of-age journey. In City of God Rocket cries when the natural surroundings that he associates with his childhood are destroyed. As a hybrid who grows up in two countries, Oscar feels out of place in both and at times does not want to go back to the home of his ancestors.

As in the other novels examined in this study, Blackness is a significant theme, but here narrators portray the impact of slavery and whitening projects in Dominican Republic and Brazil. While skin color largely determines socioeconomic status in this Lusophone South American country, being dark skinned on the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic can mean death, as it did for the more than fifteen thousand Haitians massacred during Trujillo's regime. Furthermore, the two boys do not fit into the places where they live because they do not have the type of masculinity possessed by their peers. In Rocket's Brazilian favela, masculinity is largely defined by criminality and the aptitude to be a gangster.