INTRODUCTION 5

 It is the aim of this issue to dispel some of the representations, stereotypical
or atypical, of the region constructed with an eye to objectify the Caribbean
into exotic dreamscape. It is hoped that this issue will spark discussion, which
will evoke changes and also lead to more challenges to stereotypical cultural
representations. With these facts in mind, it is easy to re-read the region as a
repeating island, not to collapse any country's specificity into an unreal or
imagined sameness of the stereotype. But rather to illustrate yet another level
to Benitez Rojo's interpretation of Fernando Ortiz's contrapunteo, an
interpretation that shows how similar representations of the West Indies repeat
themselves across the region like the violence of sugarcane farming did in the
nineteenth century. Benitez Rojo has provided the field of Caribbean cultural
studies with an invaluable tool, the ability to articulate in a concise term the
shared nature, the creole culture of Caribbean societies.
 What the essays here belie is that there is more to Caribbean realities
than just the representation/image of happy exotic people content with their
position in life and happy to serve the visitors to their blue water-, white sand-
, bright sun-destination. It is a geographic space that goes beyond any one-
dimensional rendering of western representation. There are omissions on the
basis of the theoretical considerations that brought the issue together. But
themes that did not fit in here are left for later issues that will deal with them.
 The very image used on the cover demonstrates the varied representations
of the Caribbean, but it also speaks volumes of minute ways in which it can
be re-read to unpick the same representations it is an agent in perpetuating.
The woman on the cover, for example, may represent the symbol of the West
Indian/Caribbean beast of burden Zora Neale Hurston decries in Tell My Horse,
but she also offers a minimal, yet powerful discordant note to simply being
a poor, black, hard-working woman. This issue hopes to spark discussion,
upset established discourses and to, in some ways, question what we accept
as the view of ourselves as they see us, which is imbricated in the colonial
gaze.


 Ian A. Bethell Bennett
 Issue Editor