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.

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

Literature & Fiction

Benítez-Rojo, Antonio

History & Criticism

Duke Univ Pr

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.

Duke University Press Books

Pocas veces se concentra una gama temática tan extensa, tan diversa y de tanta profundidad en un mismo autor. Rarely does a writer display such a broad and diverse range, as well as such complexity.

Antologia Personal antonio benitez rojo (Spanish Edition)

World Literature

Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico

Re-creates Spain's history in the Caribbean by describing King Philip II of Spain's reign, the beginning of the African slave trade, the founding of St. Augustine, and Columbus's second expedition to the new world

Sea of Lentils

Genre Fiction

University of Massachusetts Press

Finalist for the 2016 PEN Center USA Award for Translation
 In 1809, at the age of eighteen, Henriette Faber enrolled herself in medical school in Paris—and since medicine was a profession prohibited to women, she changed her name to Henri in order to matriculate. She would spend the next fifteen years practicing medicine and living as a man.
Drafted to serve as a surgeon in Napoleon's army, Faber endured the horrors of the 1812 retreat across Russia. She later embarked to the Caribbean and set up a medical practice in a remote Cuban village, where she married Juana de León, an impoverished local. Three years into their marriage, de León turned Faber in to the authorities, demanding that the marriage be annulled. A sensational legal trial ensued, and Faber was stripped of her medical license, forced to dress as a woman, sentenced to prison, and ultimately sent into exile. She was last seen on a boat headed to New Orleans in 1827.
In this, his last published work, Antonio Benítez Rojo takes the outline provided by historical events and weaves a richly detailed backdrop for Faber, who becomes a vivid and complex figure grappling with the strictures of her time. Woman in Battle Dress is a sweeping, ambitious epic, in which Henriette Faber tells the story of her life, a compelling, entertaining, and ultimately triumphant tale.
Praise for Woman in Battle Dress
"Woman in Battle Dress by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, which has been beautifully translated from the Spanish by Jessica Ernst Powell, is the extraordinary account of an extraordinary person. Benítez-Rojo blows great gusts of fascinating fictional wind onto the all but forgotten embers of the actual Henriette Faber, and this blazing tale of her adventures as a military surgeon and a husband and about a hundred other fascinating things is both something we want and need to hear."—Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome
"A picaresque novel starring an adventurous heroine, who caroms from country to country around the expanding Napoleonic empire, hooking up with a dazzling array of men (and women) as she goes. A wild ride!"—Carmen Boullosa, author of Texas: The Great Theft
"As detailed as any work of history and as action filled as any swashbuckler, Woman in Battle Dress is not only Antonio Benítez Rojo's last and most ambitious book, but also his masterpiece. In this graceful English translation of Henriette Faber's autobiography—more than fiction, less than fact—American readers will have access to one of the most engaging novels to come out of Latin America in recent years."—Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Columbia University
Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1931–2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was widely regarded as the most significant Cuban author of his generation. His work has been translated into nine languages and collected in more than 50 anthologies. One of his most influential publications, La Isla que se Repite, was published in 1989 by Ediciones del Norte, and published in English as The Repeating Island by Duke University Press in 1997.
Jessica Powell has translated numerous Latin American authors, including works by César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Cardenal, Maria Moreno, Ana Lidia Vega Serova and Edmundo Paz Soldán. Her translation (with Suzanne Jill Levine) of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo's novel Where There's Love, There's Hate, was published by Melville House in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo's novel Woman in Battle Dress.

Woman in Battle Dress

United States

City Lights Publishers

Estatuas Sepultadas Y Otros Relatos (Spanish and English Edition)

Ediciones Del Norte

Propone un enfoque pluridisciplinario en que la historia, la economia, la etnografia, la sociologia, la antropologia cultural que dinamizan la completa cultura del Caribe...

La Isla Que Se Repite: El Caribe Y La Perspectiva Posmoderna

Contemporary

Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Magic Dog and Other Stories. Selection, edition and introduction by Frank Janney. First edition. Hanover, N.H., Ediciones del Norte, 1990. 12.5 x 20cm. (13), 261 pages. Original softcover. Very good condition. Winner of Pushcart and Casa de las Américas prizes, these stories lead the reader down the paths of magical realism, the absurd, and the fantastic, to take us before the dense grain of Caribbean reality. Benítez Rojo addresses the problem of colonial heritage, neo-colonialism, and dependency. [From jacket notes]

The Magic Dog: And Other Stories

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

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Books by Benítez-Rojo, Antonio

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

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

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

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

Antologia Personal antonio benitez rojo (Spanish Edition)

Sea of Lentils

Woman in Battle Dress

Estatuas Sepultadas Y Otros Relatos (Spanish and English Edition)

La Isla Que Se Repite: El Caribe Y La Perspectiva Posmoderna

The Magic Dog: And Other Stories

A View from the Mangrove