Introduction






mages, sounds, realities, echo and repeat across time and space, much
 like the image that Cuban author and critic Benitez Rojo conjures up of
 the repeating island, meta-archipelago that bifurcates across the region,
spilling over into Miami, New York, New Orleans. So too is the persistent
image of Caribbean felicity and exoticism that is often presented in popular
works about the region. "The image never asks us to think of her as a living
human in a social being in a social environment. It is constructed for a certain
kind of western viewer who already knows from many other representations
what a '[Caribbean] woman' ought to look like" (90). These words from Robert
Young's A Very BriefIntroduction to Postcolonialism, (2003) locate the problems
and the pitfalls in representations. It is illustrative of the fact, as Gayatri
Spivak declares at the end of her article, that the 'subaltern cannot speak,'
particularly in the case that s/he is being spoken for through the guise of a
representative figure. According to Young this is precisely the problem, the
representation is already established. As Homi Bhabha points out in The
Location of Culture (1994), it is important for us to think about how otherness
is represented. Bhabha's work in this context is similar to Edward Said's
study in Orientalism and also to Spivak's thesis that the subaltern cannot
speak because official discourse effectively silences her. Similarly for Bhabha,
the problem is that the representation is already established. Escaping from
its demarcated space is almost impossible. One of the burdens of colonial
history is that it continues to repeat itself in the present day. The image on
the cover works with this vision of 'otherness' and, similar to the woman in
Young's formulation, shows us what a Caribbean woman ought to look like,
except there is a difference here. The woman on the cover then challenges
the typical image of poverty and alterity, of non-descript object of the gaze
through the whiteness of her sneakers. It is a type of Caribbean modernity
clashing with the unforgiving history of alterity and representation. Perhaps,
the challenge in this photo is the almost but not quite that Homi Bhabha
refers to in mimicry. It is this kind of representation that this issue of Sargasso