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

In The Repeating Island, Antonio Benintez-Rojo writes on postindustrial societies inaccurate considers 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- Rojos perspective that the Caribbean is a meta-archipleago with no boundaries or pith Columbuss simple machine to the sugar-making machine, the apocalypse to chaos, regular recurrence 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 cognize 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 the machine (Benitez- Rojo 5) that brought a wealth of goods from Hispaniola to Spain, who then sprea d 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 preoccupied treasure from French pirates, in 1565 Columbuss 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 Aviless fleet proved successful in protecting gold and silver from pirate attacks through the use of Caribbean ports, forts, militia, and geography (8). In todays Caribbean 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 unison of rhythms whose attempts to escape in a certain kind of way (28). It is through carnaval the te xt can be seen in its most natural form, a meta-archipleago of workaday 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 Columbuss machine to the sugar-making machine, the apocalypse to chaos, rhythm to polyrhythm, and literature to carnival. He debunks postindustrial societys 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 respective(a) writing on the Caribbean.