Abstract
Together with Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s views on Creolization, and Edouard Glissant’s concept of Antillanité, Antonio Benítez Rojo’s vision of a chaotic meta-archipelago is the third major postcolonial analysis to adopt the perspective of the longue durée through which to approach the Caribbean region and its complex identities. This theory was fully developed in La isla que se repite, published in Spanish in 1989, and in English as The Repeating Island in 1992. I will start by disentangling the different theoretical frames within which this text has been read in Latin American and Caribbean literary and cultural studies, namely postmodernism, chaos theory, and a set of striking terms including supersyncretism, polyrythm, and free-play of performance. Benítez Rojo derived these concepts from one notion, the Plantation, capitalized in the text and viewed as the primary scenario of violence in the Caribbean. One metaphor, in particular, the “feed-back machine to conjure violence,” becomes emblematic of Caribbean cultures.
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Notes
If historians like Jacques Heers doubt the fact that Columbus was a Jew (see Jacques Heers, Christophe Colomb, Hachette, Paris, 1991), his Jewish background is nevertheless an element frequently exploited in the Latin American New Historical Novel such as
Carlos Fuente’s El Naranjo/The Orange Tree (1993). Benítez-Rojo makes a reference to Don Cristobal’s “long, thin and curved” nose (nariz afilada, larga y corva) when he first appears in Chapter IV of El mar de las lentejas / The Sea of Lentils.
The statue in Cardenas is from the Spanish artist José Piquer y Duarte and the one in the City Museum of Havana is from the Italian J. Cucchiari; both are from 1862. See Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, Monumento conmemorativo y espacio público en Iberoamérica, Cuadernos Arte Cátedra, Madrid 2004, pp.402–412.
In 1975, Benítez-Rojo wrote an article, entitled ¿Existe una novelistica antillana de lengua inglesa? (“Is There an Anglophone Caribbean Novel?”) in Revista Casa de las Américas, num 91, 1975, pp.185–192, where he reviewed Brathwaite’s work. The year 1975 was indeed a year of collaboration between Casa de las Americas and the University of the West Indies, the magazines of which, the Revista Casa de las Américas and the Caribbean Quarterly, were at the time respectively directed by Roberto Fernández Retamar and Rex Nettleford. Both men have been involved in a vision of the extended Caribbean, and in the 1992 commemorations (for or against the 1992 anniversary, as we will see in the next section of this book in Chapter 5 on Columbus in the Hispanic Caribbean, and Chapter 6 in the English Caribbean). For an extensive analysis on the relationship between Cuba and Jamaica at the time, see Luz Rodríguez Carranza and Nadia Lie, “A comparative analysis of Caribbean literary magazines, 1960–1980,” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Vol 3, Cross-Cultural Studies, 1997, pp.119–158.
Among many, we can name Carlos Fuentes’s Cristobal Nonato (Fuentes, 1987) and El Naranjo (Fuentes, 1993),
Abel Posse’s Los perros del paraiso (Posse, 1987),
Augusto Roa Bastos’s Vigilia del Almirante (Roa Bastos, 1992).
For example, the adaptation of the novel into a play, by Daniel-Henri Pageaux, directed by Jean Louis Bihoreau, at the Théâtre Atelier du Luxembourg, Paris, June–July 1992, see Daniel Henri Pageaux, “En marge du cinquième centenaire de la découverte de l’Amérique: De la Harpe et l’Ombre à Saint Christophe Colomb? ou les aventures et métamorphoses d’un découvreur passé au théâtre” in Christophe Colomb et la Découverte de l’Amérique: Mythe et Histoire, ed. Jacques Houriez, Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 1994, pp.63–71.
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© 2014 Fabienne Viala
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Viala, F. (2014). Anamnesis, Chaos, and Columbus: Antonio Benítez Rojo and the Caribbean Feedback-Machine . In: The Post-Columbus Syndrome. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439895_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439895_5
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