In this second edition of The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments to the Second Edition
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: the repeating island
- From Columbus’s machine to the sugar-making machine
- From the apocalypse to chaos
- From rhythm to polyrhythm
- From literature to carnival
- PART 1 SOCIETY
- 1 From the plantation to the Plantation
- Hispaniola: the first plantations
- The emergence of creole culture
- Contraband, repression, and consequences
- The island creole and the mainland creole
- The Plantation and the Africanization of culture
- The Plantation: Sociocultural regularities
- PART 2 THE WRITER
- 2 Bartolomé de Las Casas: between fiction and the inferno
- Las Casas: Historian or fabulist?
- Las Casas and slavery
- The plague of ants and the uncanny
- The piedra solimán: Sugar, genitalia, writing
- Derivations from the “Las Casas case”
- 3 Nicolás Guillén: sugar mill and poetry
- From Los ingenios to La zafra
- From the libido to the superego
- The Communist poet
- The controversial poet
- The subversive poet
- The philosophical poet
- 4 Fernando Ortiz: the Caribbean and postmodernity
- The Contrapunteo as a postmodern text
- Between voodoo and ideology
- A danceable language
- Knowledge in flight
- 5 Carpentier and Harris: explorers of El Dorado
- The voyage there
- The Path of Words
- The trip to El Dorado
- Concerning the three voyagers
- PART 3 THE BOOK
- 6 Los pañamanes, or the memory of the skin
- The puzzle’s next-to-last piece
- Displacement toward myth
- The “other” Caribbean city
- Violence, folklore, and the Caribbean novel
- 7 Viaje a la semilla, or the text as spectacle
- A canon called the crab
- We open the door to the enchanted house
- We close the door to the enchanted house
- All quiet on the western front
- Noise
- Directions for reading the black hole
- 8 Niño Avilés, or history’s libido
- Nueva Venecia, an onion
- Of palenques and cimarrones
- The temptations of Fray Agustín
- PART 4 THE PARADOX
- 9 Naming the Father, naming the Mother
- The Father’s ghost
- The Mother’s song
- The unfinished matricide
- 10 Private reflections on García Márquez’s Eréndira
- The captive maiden
- The pregnant woman
- The Caribbean Persephone
- The carnivalesque whore
- 11 Carnival
- The system’s deepest layer: Guillén’s “Sensemayá”
- The intermediate layer: Walcott’s Drums and Colours
- The outer layer: Carpentier’s Concierto barroco
- Carnival at last
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
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