Alejo Carpentier’s biographical self-fashioning, particularly his fabricated Cuban birth, is explored through his early journalism and correspondence with his mother. The chapter argues that Carpentier’s “performative self,” evident in his fashion writing under a female pseudonym, demonstrates a fluidity of identity and a deliberate crossing of borders. This performative aspect is further illuminated by his Oedipal relationship with his mother, as revealed in his letters, where he assumes the role of a husband-substitute after his father’s abandonment. The analysis challenges interpretations that attribute Carpentier’s self-invention to trauma, instead highlighting a consistent “chameleon-like sense of self” that permeated his work and public persona, ultimately contributing to his success and the construction of Latin American literary identity.

Haiti was a remarkably constant presence in Carpentier’s life and its imprint on his narrative fiction and essays has been profound, far-reaching, and indelible. Carpentier’s fascination with Haiti begins with his first novel, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933), culminates in The Kingdom of This World (1949) and resurfaces within the transatlantic context of the French Revolution in yet another major work, Explosion in the Cathedral (1962). While traces of Haiti appear in myriad formal and conceptual manifestations throughout Carpentier’s oeuvre, in this essay I suggest that the notion of the Plantationocene, forged by Donna Haraway and Donna Tsing, carries significant critical potential for refocusing Carpentier’s links with Haiti in a manner that is both transdisciplinary and cross-historical.

In 1920, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso accepted a lucrative contract to sing at ten opera performances in Cuba, most of them in Havana’s recently built theater across from the Parque Central. When Caruso arrived in the island, he found a tense political climate: sugar prices had plummeted in the international market, and unemployment and economic crises had led protesting workers to the streets. During his final performance of Verdi’s Aida, a bomb exploded in the theater, sending the audience and musicians into a panic. After the explosion, Caruso’s reaction became the subject of much literary speculation. This chapter explores the accounts of Caruso and the bomb given by Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mayra Montero, and contrasts them to Caruso’s own version of the events.

This study of the years of Carpentier’s revolutionary commitment in Havana focuses on his activities and travels around the world, his contacts with Latin American writers, lectures and essays written during that time. Fornet argues that while these years did not yield much literary outcome, they did matter for Carpentier’s commitment to collective projects, such as the directorship of the Editorial Nacional and other important official functions. Fornet points to references, in some of Carpentier’s essays, to other writers and to earlier chronicles, such as an early review of the Soviet author Vsevolov Ivanov’s “Armored Train” from 1926, where Carpentier had noted that a revolution requires a new order of ideas, and that it mattered to stay with the revolution. The chapter suggests that Carpentier’s decision to return to Cuba was consistent with what he had written earlier. Among other multiple activities during that time, Carpentier’s interest in popular music are discussed, as well as the premieres of two of his ballet scenarios.

For his 1920s ballet librettos, Alejo Carpentier drew inspiration from the groundbreaking spectacles that ensembles such as Les Ballets Russes produced in Europe during the avant-garde era, even though he had not witnessed those theatrical productions. Rather, he experienced them from afar – as a vicarious spectator – in the act of reading texts about them. Carpentier approached the ballet libretto as an eclectic and experimental literary genre in which to explore his wide-ranging intellectual interests: in various styles of avant-garde art, music and theatre (from Futurism to Jean Cocteau’s poetics of the commonplace), as well as in politics, Afro-Cuban culture and ethnography. Although he held no direct contact with the artists creating experimental ballets in Europe and elsewhere in Latin America, he saw them and himself as forming an international community – which illustrates the extent to which the transatlantic and hemispheric networks of the avant-garde operated as imagined communities.

This chapter explores underlying links between Carpentier’s life and works. It points out that because of his asthma, the boy did not receive a systematic education but read a lot. The phases of his longer apprenticeship can be divided in two, his years in Cuba, and then the years spent in Paris. While Carpentier distanced himself from socialist realism at the time, he committed himself to the defense of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. There is no doubt that as the youngest member of the Minorista generation of Cuban intellectuals, Carpentier worked consistently towards artistic, social, linguistic and political transformation.

This chapter charts Alejo Carpentier’s connection with Mexico, from his momentous first visit in 1926, when he traveled to Mexico City as editor of Carteles, to his later friendships with major Mexican intellectuals, and including his publishing choices in the early and late phases of his career, (EDIAPSA; Fondo de Cultura Económica; Siglo Veintiuno). It focuses particularly on Carpentier’s friendship with Diego Rivera and his circle, as well as on his depictions of Mexicans living in 1920s Havana. This chapter describes Carpentier as part of a transnational community of intellectuals bonding over shared ideas on avant-garde art and politics. It argues that Mexican literary, visual and musical culture and the Mexican Revolution impacted Carpentier’s life deeply and shaped his vision of Latin America.

This essay explores Alejo Carpentier’s engagement with Afro-Cuban culture in his literary works, analyzing how he incorporates African languages and cultural elements. It examines Carpentier’s perspective on African art and religion, revealing his interpretations and potential misunderstandings of Afro-Cuban traditions. The analysis includes discussions of his poems, essays and novels, focusing on his use of language, imagery and cultural references. Ultimately, the essay contextualizes Carpentier’s work within the broader discourse of Afro-Cuban identity and cultural representation.

Until quite recently, little was known about Alejo Carpentier’s private life and family background, apart from the facts that he chose to reveal, several of which later turned out to be false. This chapter explores a hidden level of Carpentier’s literary work, characterized by repeated and cryptic references to family traumas involving Alejo’s father, Georges Carpentier. Especially significant are the circumstances surrounding Georges’s choice to abandon his wife and son during a difficult period; events which the author never referred to publicly, but which we can now start to discern with the help of previously unpublished documents. The details of this trauma and the way the author turned it into a part of his fictional universe represent an important key if we wish to understand the emotional and psychological undercurrents fueling the author’s creative writing process.

This chapter studies the history of translations of Alejo Carpentier’s novels into German. As Reisinger shows, novels by Carpentier were translated starting in the 1950s, but it took several translators and several changes of publishers to make Carpentier’s novels successful in German translation. In establishing Carpentier in the 1970s as one of the great Latin American writers, a crucial role was played by literary scout Michi Strausfeld and publishing house Suhrkamp. Relations between East and West Germany were relatively fluid, but Carpentier’s greatest success was in the West.

El recurso del método (Reasons of State), published in 1974 by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, has often been analyzed along with other dictatorship novels focusing on recurring themes, such as violence, rebellion, US imperialism or the dictator’s solitude. This essay introduces a “sensory approach” arguing that Carpentier revisits the traditional hierarchy of the five senses. Thematically, the novel emphasizes the “spectacular” and panoptical dimension of the dictator’s regime; however, this visual (and aural) domination is questioned by the Marxist opposition embodied in the character of the Student. From an intertextual perspective, Carpentier’s use of quotations from Descartes paradoxically undermines the Cartesian cogito, and the protagonist’s behavior ultimately evolves toward an anti-Cartesian and anti-ocularcentric stance, as epitomized by the figure of Mayorala Elmira. Reflecting on these two dimensions of the novel from a sensorial point of view contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Carpentier’s poetics.

Alejo Carpentier combines history and literature to compose his novel El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow). On the one hand, he uses historical facts to create a fictional story that reveals a human Christopher Columbus, far removed from stereotypes, myths and ideological designs. On the other hand, he draws on a vast wealth of literary works and authors from the Hispanic world to complement, through intertextualities and cultured references, the image he wishes to present of the Admiral. Relevant examples include quotations from Cervantes’ interlude Retablo de las maravillas (The Stage of Wonders) and Federico García Lorca’s poem “La casada infiel” (“The Unfaithful Wife”), as well as other more general texts such as Juan de Mandavila’s Libro de las maravillas del mundo (Book of the Wonders of the World) and various passages from the Bible. All of this is made possible, despite the anachronisms that appear in the text, thanks to the integration of the novel into the realm of freedoms of the postmodern historical novel.

This essay details how the author’s vocation as a writer and reader was awakened by the admiration he felt in his youth for Alejo Carpentier’s literature. That same admiration led to discovering Carpentier’s alienation from the Cuban regime, his role as a censor and a censored individual, and his tendency to adapt what he wrote to fit the ideological demands of the moment. Even though the political environment ended up conditioning readings of Carpentier, the author of this essay describes how he learned to strike a balance between admiration and criticism, acknowledging Carpentier’s complexity as a literary figure.

This chapter deals with the narrative treatment of time in Alejo Carpentier’s “Historia de lunas,” “Oficio de tinieblas,” “Viaje a la semilla,” “Semejante a la noche” and El acoso. These fictions were marked by an epochal climate in which a sense of civilizational crisis prevailed, as can be seen in the proposals of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee or Mircea Eliade, thinkers who left their mark on Carpentier’s historical thinking. The analyses of these narratives focus on the way in which their author deploys competing temporalities, a feature that shows how the historical dimension of his narrative was not limited to the recreation of past scenarios. Furthermore, in these works it is possible to trace a theory of historical becoming, a reflection on the teleology of its processes and the meaning of its occurrence.

Carpentier worked in radio broadcasting for more than twenty years, during the golden age of radio in the 1930s through the 1950s. He was a pioneer in thinking about the wireless reproduction of sound and music and worked collaboratively with many noted musicians and writers of his time. This chapter charts Carpentier’s poetics of sound as he formulated it in his articles on radio and radio scripts. It also studies two soundscapes that would appear in Carpentier’s posthumous memoir Recuento de moradas, and in his novel Concierto barroco. The chapter concludes by saying that the intermedial mingling, in his fiction of visual and soundscapes lent to Carpentier’s realist aesthetics a unique quality of verisimilitude.

Critics have tended to view magical realism as a global genre or as an organic expression of cultural difference. This chapter suggest that Latin American magical realism articulates in literary and aesthetic terms an essentialist self-conception that also underlies the hegemonic political project in mid-twentieth-century Latin America. I highlight the specificity of Latin American magical realism by reconstructing the lineage of the concept, from its role in interwar discussions of realism and the avant-garde to current incarnations of the genre. Through a discussion of Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), I argue that magical realism, insofar as it renders equivalent the epistemological and the ontological, turns political claims into a function of one’s cultural identity. In so doing, magical realism makes palpable the sort of self-conception projected by development populism in mid-twentieth-century Latin America, a modernization project that could only sustain itself if antagonistic political commitments were neutralized by appeals to a regional or national cultural identity.

The Latin-American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1928 in Buenos Aires caused a sensation, and in subsequent years the work was regularly performed across much of the continent. The work also found many imitators, but Latin-American composers understood the work differently from their peers elsewhere. Whereas in Europe and North America, The Rite’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers such as Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos drew direct parallels between Stravinsky’s paganism and indigenismo, the evocation of the continent’s pre-Columbian past and indigenous heritage. In a move characteristic of settler colonialism, what they found in Stravinsky’s work was not a European import but an Asiatic, pre-Christian legacy that could act as a foundation for an indigenous form of musical modernism beyond Eurocentric models. By contrast, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier associated Stravinsky’s Scythians with the descendants of the Yoruba, the largest group of enslaved Africans in Cuba. In this way, the chapter analyses transnational networks and entanglements between Russia, Europe and several Latin-American countries.

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.