Rereading the Diminutive: Caribbean Chaos Theory in Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris

In the early 1990s, chaos theory captured the imagination of Caribbean writers by offering a new approach to interpreting scientific data. In its analysis of Edouard Glissant’s Poétique de la Relation alongside Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s introduction to The Repeating Island and essays by Wilson Harris, this essay proposes that Caribbean thinkers are drawn to chaos theory because it articulates how they already envision and describe the complexity of Caribbean cultures. For these three thinkers, chaos theory makes possible a radical rereading of the diminutives of Caribbean space and offers them a methodology for destabilizing the world’s (post)colonial orders.