The Repeating Island Essay -- Literary Analysis, Benintez-Rojo

In The Repeating Island, Antonio Benintez-Rojo writes on postindustrial societies inaccurate views of the Caribbean as a common archipelago and calls on postindustrial societies to reexamine their view of the Caribbean. In this paper the following topics in The Repeating Island will be examined in validating Benitez- Rojo’s perspective that the Caribbean is a meta-archipleago with no boundaries or center: Columbus’s machine to the sugar-making machine, the apocalypse to chaos, rhythm to polyrhythm, and literature to carnival. The first way Benitez-Rojo draws attention to his perspective is through his analysis on how the Atlantic became known as the Atlantic because of the presence of European slave plantations, piracy, servitude, and monopoly over the trades in the Caribbean. He refers to Christopher Columbus presence in Hispaniola as the starting point of â€Å"the machine† (Benitez- Rojo 5) that brought a wealth of goods from Hispaniola to Spain, who then spread its profitable practice to Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico at the expense of native people (6). After the Cape San Vicente disaster, where the Spanish lost treasure from French pirates, in 1565 Columbus’s machine expanded its conquests of gold, silver, and diamonds thus creating the fleet. The fleet not only helped the Spanish become wealthy, it made the Caribbean a meta-archipelago because of its presence in the waters of the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific. Menendez de Aviles’s fleet proved successful in protecting gold and silver from pirate attacks through the use of Caribbean ports, forts, militia, and geography (8). In today’s Caribbean â€Å"the machine† is referred to as the plantation, which the Europeans controlled all aspects o... ...ted by it (23). Benitez-Rojo calls on a rereading of the Caribbean text and states once this is done, the result is the text showing the harmony of rhythms whose attempts to escape ‘in a certain kind of way’ (28). It is through carnaval the text can be seen in its most natural form, a meta-archipleago of everyday life. In The Repeating Island, Antonio Benintez-Rojo defends his perspective that the Caribbean is a meta-archipleago with no boundaries or center through his writing on Columbus’s machine to the sugar-making machine, the apocalypse to chaos, rhythm to polyrhythm, and literature to carnival. He debunks postindustrial society’s view of the Caribbean as a common archipelago by examining what makes the Caribbean, the Caribbean through its history and culture, which persuades the reader to reexamine the various writing on the Caribbean.