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

Duke University Press, Durham, 1992. First edition. Blue hard cover with gilt titles on front and spine. Boards are clean and bright. Contents tight and clean. Stain on front e/p (where a label has been). No other markings or inscriptions. 303pp. No DW.
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.