416 p, Contents: 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 -- SOCIETY. 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 -- THE WRITER: Bartolome 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 soliman: Sugar, genitalia, writing. Derivations from the "Las Casas case" Nicoltis Guillen: sugar mill andpoetry. From Los ingenios to La zafra. From the libido to the superego. The Communist poet. The controversial poet. The subversive poet. The philosophical poet. Fernando Ortiz: the Caribbean and postmodernity ISO:The Contrapunteo as a postmodern text. Between voodoo and ideology. A danceable language. Knowledge in flight. Carpentier and Harris: explorers of El Dorado. The voyage there. The Path of Words. The trip to El Dorado. Concerning the three voyagers -- THE BOOK: Los panmanes) 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. 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. Nino Aviles) or history's libido. Nueva Venecia, an onion. Of palenques and cimarrones. The temptations of Fray Agustin -- THE PARADOX: Naming the Father, naming the Mother. The Father's ghost. The Mother's song. The unfinished matricide. Private reflections on Garcia Marquez's Erendira. The captive maiden. The pregnant woman. The Caribbean Persephone. The carnivalesque whore. Carnival. The system's deepest layer: Guillen's "Sensemaya" The intermediate layer: Walcott's Drums and Colours. The outer layer: Carpentier's Concierto barroco. Carnival at last
