African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
350 p., In this second edition of "The Repeating Island," Antonio Benitez-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, Benitez-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. Benitez-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. Benitez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillen, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodriguez Julia.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
419 p, Explores the commonalities between literatures of the French Caribbean, French Guyana, and Belize, tracing aspects of the content and narrative structures of various Caribbean works back to African and European folklore and traditions, which were passed on to, and influenced in their turn, by the cultures of the Americas. Includes an index of works cited and a selective bibliography.;
The author introduces the reader to the work and importance of Haitian writer Dany Laferrire, whose acclaimed work 'Comment faire l'amour avec un Ngre sans se fatiguer' put him on an international stage
A critical look at the works of fiction of Haitian expatriate author Dany Laferrire, specifically his willingness to mix himself up into his characters without any strict adherence to factual truth of situations
