The Fractal Caribbean

This talk explores the efforts of contemporary Hispanic Caribbean writers to represent a reality that thinkers such as Édouard Glissant have often described as significantly chaotic or fractal. How does the idea of the fractal Caribbean offer writers such as Pedro Cabiya Rita Indiana, Soleida Ríos, and others, a new way to understand rationality or selfhood? How might it help build a new, non-binary model of knowledge and social relations?

A reception and book signing will follow the program.

Bio: Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres is the author of some twenty books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, including the novels Sirena Selena, which was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, Our Lady of the Night, Any Wednesday I’m Yours, and, most recently, La amante de Gardel. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the recipient of the Juan Rulfo Short Story Prize and Puerto Rico’s National Literature Prize. Currently, Santos-Febres is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she directs the creative writing workshop and the Festival of the Word. In July, she worked as a writer-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency Program in Italy.

Sponsored by the Latino and Hispanic Faculty Association and the Dresher Center for the Humanities.