The Repeating Island

Abstract

the repeating islandIn recent decades we have begun to see a clearer outline to the profile of a group of American nations whose colonial experiences and languages have been different, but which share certain undeniable features.I mean the countries usually called "Caribbean" or "of the Caribbean basin."This designation might serve a foreign purpose-the great powers' need to recodify the world's territory better to know, to dominate it-as well as a local one, self-referential, directed toward fixing the furtive image of collective Being.Whatever its motive, this urge to systematize the region's political, economic, social, and anthropological dynamics is a very recent thing.For it is certain that the Caribbean basin, although it includes the first American lands to be explored, conquered, and colonized by Europe, is still, especially in the discourse of the social sciences, one of the least known regions of the modern world.The main obstacles to any global study of the Caribbean's societies, insular or continental, are exactly those things that scholars usually adduce to define the area: its fragmentation; its instability; its reciprocal isolation; its uprootedness; its cultural heterogeneity; its lack of historiography and historical continuity; its contingency and impermanence; its syncretism, etc.This unexpected mix of obstacles and properties is not, of course, mere happenstance.What happens is that postindustrial society-to use a newfangled term-navigates the Caribbean with judgments and intentions that are like those of Columbus; that is, it lands scientists, investors, and technologists-the new (dis)coverers-who come to apply the dog-