(Book Five of the Learning to Apply Series, is a consolida...)
Book Five of the Learning to Apply Series, is a consolidated version of two former manuals, titled Fieldworks (Duncan, 2010) and Applying Research (Duncan, 2010), used in 10th and llth grades at West College High School. This reform, at the suggestion of Director Cynthia Delgado, is consistent with the fact that the undergraduate paper that West's students prepare is developed precisely over these two academic years as a single project. During level ten-eleven, students consolidate their capacity for self-education -learning how to learn, learning how to comprehend the subjects studied, and learning how to apply the knowledge acquired when faced with today's challenging and changing reality, thereby achieving the final aim of the Series.
(Experience the struggle of African warriors defending the...)
Experience the struggle of African warriors defending their village. Travel on the slave boat with African enslaved women. Feel the tension mounting in Yanga's heart as he leads his Afro Mexican troops in confrontation with the Spanish colonial army. Live a vivid moment of the Afro-Colombian' struggle for freedom. Sit on the corridor and listen to a conversation between cuban heroes Jose Marti and Mariana Grajales. Visit a Jamaican Maroon battle field. Be part of Palmares's Brazilian warriors. Witness the resistance of Afro German women during the Nazi rule. Share young Martin Luther King's dilemma as he walks with his mother on the wrong side of town. Imagine yourself sitting in the bus, watching Rosa Parks as she refuses to move behind the line...
Quince Duncan was a Costa Rica's first Afro-Caribbean writer in the Spanish language. His works typically concern the Afro-caribbean population living on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast, particularly around the city of Puerto Limón.
Background
Quince Duncan was born on December 5, 1940, in San Jose, Costa Rica. His parents - who were of Jamaican, Panamanian, and Barbadian heritage - raised Duncan in Limon, an eastern region of Costa Rica. Duncan developed talents as both a scholar and a writer, both of which he pursues today. He has become a man-ofletters in a new-formed tradition; it is Duncan's ability to entwine various traditions that has made his creative work so rich. Duncan is a creature of many worlds, and by bringing all of the traditions of those worlds together in his fiction he has enriched each.
Education
Duncan trained both as a teacher and as a cleric: he received a teaching licentiate in Latin American Studies from the Universidad Nacional Heredia.
Before beginning his career as a writer, Duncan for a time was an Anglican priest in rural areas of his homeland. But by 1970, at the age of thirty, Duncan had begun to publish his writing; he first put out a collection of short stories titled Una cancion en la madrugada ("A Song in the Early Morning," 1970). In it, Duncan crafts small tales of his own people - Costa Ricans of Jamaican descent. Though the collection is affectionate, it doesn't gloss over the difficulties of the Jamaican-Costa Rican experience. After a 1971 novel that was prematurely published, Duncan produced Los cuatro espejos ("The Four Mirrors," 1973).
Duncan's most heralded work is the 1979 novel, Final de calle ("Dead End"). In it, Duncan moved away from the West Indian Costa Rican protagonists with which he had peopled his fictional universe; indeed, he composed the novel in order to break from the pigeonhole - " Black Costa Rican author"- into which he had been poked. With new acclaim in pocket, Duncan returned to his chosen issues of West Indian identity in Costa Rica, notably with his mature novel Kimbo (1990).
Though Duncan writes as a Costa Rican and a Christian, in his writing these traditions are thoroughly blended with his upholding of his own samamfo. He writes in Spanish peppered with West Indian terms, or in English shot through with other languages. Perhaps because of his ability to speak to so many audiences, he has become one of the most important figures in Caribbean letters. In 1996, Duncan produced Un senor de chocolate: treinta relatos de la vida de Quince ("A Chocolate Man: Thirty Stories from the Life of Quince," 1996), a collection of stories drawing more directly on his own history. Duncan is still writing, continuing to produce what will surely be remembered as some of the most important literature of the Caribbean, and of the twentieth century.
Quince Duncan is best known for his novels' exploration of the position of blacks in Costa Rica. Duncan's novels investigate the double heritage of his own people, weaving together the complex and contradictory beliefs of West Indian Costa Ricans. His novels have won great acclaim, and his selected short stories have been printed in English as The Best Short Stories of Quince Duncan (1995).
According to Lisa E. Davis, writing in Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean (1984), "Duncan has become the spokesman for an entire segment of the population whose history and culture are generally unknown both within the nation and to outsiders."
Connections
Quince has three sons from his first marriage, Andrés, Jaime and Pablo to whom he dedicated his book Los Cuentos del Hermano Arana. He also has two daughters from his second marriage, Shara and Denise.
Quince Duncan: Writing Afro-Costa Rican and Caribbean Identity
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 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.
