'Sampling' of colonial texts in "Concierto barroco" by Alejo Carpentier

The present article reveals the existing filiation between the narrative production of Alejo Carpentier and his literary essays. Carpentier’s literary essay, a late genre in the chronology of his whole corpus, plays an exegetical role and illuminates techniques, narratological resources, and Scriptural traits which were the breeding ground of the authorial novel. From a structural perspective, Carpentier’s novel crystalizes in a model reconfigured from the chronicle of the Indies that allows a broadening of history and its re-reading from different viewpoints. Re-writing the past allows, according to the author, to intervene in history from an ethical and epistemic angle, which resolves itself in a reconfiguring of the sociopolitical imagery. With my research I will illustrate the theoretical development of this model, whose systematic value was highlighted by the author in the conference «The social role of the novelist», while I shall functionally follow the trail of its aesthetic realization in the novel "Concierto barroco.