2 IAN A. BETHELL BENNETT

endeavours to work around. We look at this issue as a way of speaking back
to, of debunking, some of those old representations of Caribbeanness that
isolate the stereotypical image from any socio-cultural context and focus
solely on its alterity. In many ways, modernity, or Caribbean modernity,
shown in the cover image, decentres the image of the Caribbean as alterior
other as re-presented by the 'West.'
 One may ask, though, why put together an issue on representations? It
has all been done before. Stuart Hall's 1997 publication, Representation:
Caribbean Representations and Signifying Practices, and Belinda Edmondson's
Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation are groundbreaking
works tiat make following in their shadows difficult. But, there are always
new works and new ways of looking at old themes. Well, this could all be true,
but so much of what is presented here is important to an ongoing debate
over the ability of the Caribbean and Caribbean Studies and Caribbean Studies
scholars within the region to extract the region from a history of representation
and silence or inferiority. While history has been one of the biggest burdens
to overcome in Caribbean Studies due in part to history's imperial gaze,
Caribbean writers and scholars are constantly working to rectify this imbalance
of power. Cecily Jones compares and contrasts two women's representations
of slavery, at the same time she works to show how the White woman's version
was, similar to Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main, taken as
historical fact while the Black woman's story was viewed more as testimony
and therefore subject to interpretation and the pitfalls of memory, hence
untrustworthy. This fact signals a power imbalance codified in the different
reading of the two texts. Similarly, representations are alive and well and
functioning in one of the regions most important industries, tourism. While
Hall and Edmondson have examined many aspects of what goes on in
Caribbean representations, the job that tourism marketing does to sell the
region is constantly on the move. The cover image along with Krista
Thompson's essay read with Kim Robinson Walcott's work on White West
Indians explodes the image of a region easily limited to one dimensional
presentations of silent, black subalterns, of a black population willing and
eager to please. These essays complicate the whole idea of the Caribbean as
a space of simplicitous frivolity and homogeneity.
 In putting together this group of essays the editors and staff at Sargasso
hope to engage in a discussion over the historical burden of the power of
representation and how, in the face of this, the Caribbean un-writes these
images and begins to re-write different presentations of Caribbean realities
and cultures. This issue is also significant because it is dedicated to the life
and work of Antonio Benitez Rojo, who passed away a year ago leaving his
legacy of a repeating island to live on after him. Thus, if this issue is about
anything, it is about highlighting this repeating meta-archipelago and how,
due to a similar history of encounters between Europe and the Americas,
geography, a shared history of colonisation and imperialism and-what would