Abstract
The title of this chapter is taken from Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s La isla que se repite (The repeating island, 1989), a study of Caribbean culture which is informed by Chaos theory.2 Benítez-Rojo’s term ‘soup of signs’ refers to the region’s ‘complex cultural spectrum’ (p. 269). From his postmodern perspective Caribbean space, ‘is saturated with messages — “language games”, as Lyotard [and, of course, Wittgenstein] would call them [… The] spectrum of Caribbean codes is so varied and dense that it holds the region suspended in a soup of signs’ (p. 2). The pages that follow explore how these slippery signs are being deployed in Cuba today to recharge an institutionalized discourse with new signification.
An earlier version of this essay is scheduled to appear in Latin American Perspectives in July 2000.
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Davies, C. (2000). Surviving (on) the ‘Soup of Signs’: Postmodernism, Politics and Culture in Cuba. In: Jones, A.B., Munck, R. (eds) Cultural Politics in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63055-4_5
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