INTRODUCTION 3

become a unique process of creolisation the West Indian islands and mainland
offer a immensely rich cultural tapestry. Edouard Glissant's theory of
relatedness and Caribbean Discourse or Discourse Antillaise meets and
combines with Edward Kamau Brathwaite's theory of Caribbean Creolisation
and their submerged or submarine link that can be traced back to Africa and
up through the Sargasso Sea into the postcolonial cities like Miami and New
York that have become as much a part of the Caribbean as the colonial cities
London and Paris and, while destabalising the discourse of colonialism and
representation as constructed by the colonial centres simultaneously re-
inscribe the representations of Caribbean alterity, the historical burden from
under which the region strives to free itself.
 The essays and dedications here provide a new way of reading Caribbean
cultures. Similarly, Adams's paper deals with an often overlooked part of
Caribbean history, or a too often glossed-over section of the past, the
Amerindian presence, which she refers to as aboriginal in order to stress
their primal presence in the region. As Adams states, few people, except
Wilson Harris ever pay any real attention to the importance of the Indigenous
peoples in the Caribbean psyche. Of course, Peter Hulme's Colonial
Encounters blazes a trail through this, embarking on discourse analysis and
image deconstruction that work to uncover the representative project at
the base of so much of early Caribbean/colonial writing.
 This volume starts with Krista Thompson's work on postcard depictions
as a way of selling the region and moves through Peter Roberts' discussion
of nineteenth century representations of the Caribbean, Cecily Jones' work
on women writing in the region, comparing Mary Prince and Lady Maria
Nugent's diaries, up to Kim Robinson Walcott's work on White West Indian
writers and their place in the West Indies, and closes with a tribute to Cuban
writer and critic, Antonio Benitez Rojo who endowed us with many of the
words we use to read and write the Caribbean. Both Jones and Robinson
Walcott grapple with the theme of colour, which is certainly charged in the
Caribbean context, as the region's creoleness, that Benitez Rojo argues for,
is so often collapsed into a monolithic blackness. These two critics work to
illustrate how complex these racial realities are, and in Jones' essay
particularly how the intersection of race and gender, as well as class, are
paramount to any discussion on representations of Caribbean women, whom
the west has always hyper-exoticised. Jones, then, illustrates not only the
contrast of discourse and the gaze between a white woman and a black
woman, she furthers this by illustrating how Maria Nugent's position of power
compared to Mary Prince's assumed lack of power work to illuminate real
representative differences that Jones argues are based on race and class,
but this racial disjuncture is never a facile boundary. There is always discord
within the assumed homogeneity of shared gender, race and class. There
are few literary comparisons of two Caribbean texts that so clearly show the
disparities between these two female subject positions.