In this masterful collection of short stories, a celebrated Cuban writer continues his imaginative exploration of the genesis of the modern Caribbean world. Intent on recovering the interior history (la infra-historia) of this astonishingly diverse region, Antonio Benítez-Rojo ranges widely across time and geography. He also experiments with a variety of narrative techniques and prose styles, each intended to capture some unique aspect of the Caribbean's heterogeneous, polyrhythmic cultural heritage. Thus "The Broken Flute" centers on a tragic anthropological reflection; "Windward Passage" on the confessions of a guilty priest stationed in Hispaniola; "Summer Island" on events surrounding the colonization of St. Kitts; and "A View from the Mangrove" on the troubled days of a soldier during Cuba's War of Independence. The result is historical fiction of the first order, a vivid tapestry of characters and contexts. Whether describing the world through the eyes of a seventeenth-century African slave or an English slave trader, a French buccaneer or a Spanish official, an Aztec god's avatar or a Haitian grand blanc, Benítez-Rojo displays a rare gift for resurrecting the past in all its chaotic and compelling immediacy.

A View from the Mangrove (Faber Caribbean)

Literature & Fiction

Antonio Benítez Rojo

Genre Fiction

Faber and Faber

In this second edition of The Repeating Island, Antonio BenÃtez-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, BenÃtez-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. BenÃtez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbeanâthe area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politicsâthere emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. BenÃtez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, GuillÃ©n, Carpentier, GarcÃa MÃ¡rquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and RodrÃguez JuliÃ¡.

The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Post-Contemporary Interventions Series)

History & Criticism

Duke Univ Pr

Mediante ensayos críticos y diversas estrategias de investigación que incluyen, entre otras, las teorías de las matemáticas fractales y del Caos, el escritor define una de las culturas más complejas y elusivas de la posmodernidad: el Caribe.

La Isla Que Se Repite: El Caribe Y La Perspectiva Posmoderna (Spanish Edition)

Editorial Plaza Mayor

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Books by Antonio Benítez Rojo