SOURCE: "Black Character: Toward a Dialectical Presentation in Three South American Novels," in Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by William Luis, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 181-200.

In the following excerpt, Beane discusses the African characters in Isaacs's Maria.

Fiction in which Blacks and Mulattoes are main characters "deals not with eternal essences or ideal forms of life, but with life lived in particular conditions."¹ Black characters and black character—a way of being—in Hispanic-American fiction reflect traits drawn from a social reality. Any discussion of black characters in literature must bear in mind that literary creation results from a complex interplay between historical and socioeconomic factors and imagination. The latter is the source of "all sorts of images of non-Western peoples and worlds which have flourished in our culture . . . images derived not from observation, experience and perceptible reality but from a...