transformed in the projection of a supersyncretic, chaotic, performative,
carnivalesque, polylinguistic, polyrhythmical, and subversive meta-
archipelago, a transmutation as teleological as it is epistemological, as anti-
as it is postcolonial, as pre- as it is postmodern. The points of departure
were no longer Darwin, Marx, and Freud but rather Adorno, Foucault, Barthes,
Derrida. Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari and, along with that earlier generation
of foundational Caribbean thinkers, a growing circle of other and younger
writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora. The "repeating island" depicts
the Caribbean that projects itself globally -even intergalactically- as well
as being anchored in atomized and infra-local attitudes and beliefs; the
migratory and diasporic Caribbean that functions as a key element in the
(re)constitution of metropolitan postmodernities; the Caribbean that spreads
subversively as both racial and cultural creolization and mestizaje through
polyrhythmic waves that insert themselves as much in everyday
subjectivities as they do in the round-table discussions and armored tanks
of political negotiations. This signifies a Caribbean redefined as "always
already" inscribed in modern and postmodern European history; a Caribbean
that "extends" not only from Bahia, Brazil to South Carolina, US, but also
includes Japanese salsa bands, the reinvented carnivals of Europe and North
America, the magical indigenism that rhizomatically unites the Americas,
Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, the rainbow of sounds -reggaet6n, rap, dub,
hip-hop, zouk, reggae, son, salsa, plena, beguine, bomba, calypso, kalinda ...
-that continues to transform the ways of hearing, seeing, and feeling
contemporary sensorial specificities and to redefine racial and ethnic
attitudes inside the old colonial centers.
 Like most other primary postmodernist texts, The Repeating Island, first
published as a book in 1989, is a product of the 1980s. The events that followed
-the fall of the Berlin Wall, the killings in Tiananmen Square, the breaking
apart of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War, the (re)birth of communist-
capitalist China, the hyper-globalization of Clintonesque economic policy
and politics, the proliferation of cybernetic technology and digitalized
communication, the European Union, the creativity of the post national
diasporas -including the Caribbean-inside metropolitan centers-everything
seemed to reinforce and confirm Benitez Rojo's reading of the Caribbean as
an expansive and multiplying network of ahistorical, improvised, chaotic,
polysemic, and nonapocalyptic sensibilities -ajouissance, although not without
dangers, menace, and privations, both intellectual and visceral, political and
cultural. Nothing precise has happened to negate or invalidate the extensive,
flexible, and elastic Caribbeanness of Benitez Rojo's depiction. However, we
no longer feel as comfortable inside it as we did ten or even five years ago.
Even before "September 11th," before the second Gulf War, before the bombs
in Madrid and London, the Bush '04 election, the military-nuclear developments
in North Korea and Iran, the current sense of closure and exclusion inside the
European Union, before the full emergence of this new age of apocalyptic