Writer, critic, and Latin American Studies professor, Antonio Benítez-Rojo proposes that a first reading of the Caribbean will present: its fragmentation; instability; reciprocal isolation; uprootedness; cultural heterogeneity; lack of historiography and historical continuity; contingency and impermanence; and syncretism (1).
However, he says that the time has come for postindustrial society to start rereading the Caribbean, that is, to do the kind of reading in which every text begins to reveal its own textuality (2).
Key Concepts
chaos: within the (dis)order that swarms around what we already know of as Nature, it is possible to observe dynamic states or regularities that repeat themselves globally. (2); It includes all phenomena that depend on the passage of time; Chaos looks toward everything that repeats, reproduces, grows, decays, unfolds, flows, spins, vibrates, seethes (3); [reading the Caribbean from the theory of chaos looks to find] processes, dynamics, and rhythms that show themselves within the marginal, the regional, the incoherent, the heterogeneous … the unpredictable that coexists with us in our everyday world. (3)
repetition: [within] the discourse of Chaos… every repetition is a practice that necessarily entails a difference; however, amid this irreversible change, Nature can produce a [complex, highly organized and intense] figure (3).
meta-archipelago: a meta-archipelago has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center. Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance (4); the Caribbean is an important historical-economic sea and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each copy a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor (9)
machine: whose flux, whose noise, whose presence covers the map of world history’s contingencies, through the great changes in economic discourse to the vast collisions of races and cultures that humankind has seen (5); every machine is a conjunction of machines coupled together, and each one of these interrupts the flow of the previous one; it will be said rightly that one can picture any machine alternatively in terms of flow and interruption (6).
From Columbus machine to the sugar-making machine
Consistent machinic repetitions: the encomienda of Indians and the slaveholding plantation, the servitude of the coolie and the discrimination toward the criollo, between commercial monopoly and piracy, between the runaway slave settlement and the governor’s palace (5).
Columbus rudimental machine was a bricolage: Indians and their handicrafts, nuggets of gold and samples of other minerals, native species of plants and animals, and some words like tabaco canoa, hamaca, etc. Columbus’s machine was quickly remodeled and, carried on Indians’ backs over the sierras, set into motion in a half dozen new places. (6)
By around 1565, Columbus’s small and rudimentary machine had evolved into the Grandest Machine on Earth. In the first century of Spanish colonization this machine yielded more than one-third of all the gold produced in the whole world during those years; These fabulous deliveries of precious metals were the result of various innovations, for example: guaranteeing the availability of the necessary cheap manpower in the mines through a system known as the mita; using wind energy and marine currents to speed up the flow of oceanic transportation; implanting a costly system of security and control from the River Plate estuary to the Guadalquivir. But, above all, established the system called La flota the fleet. (7)
It was a machine made up of a naval machine, a military machine, a bureaucratic machine, a commercial machine, an extractive machine, a political machine, a legal machine, a religious machine, that is, an entire huge assemblage of machines which there is no point in continuing to name. The only thing that matters here is that it was a Caribbean machine; a machine installed in the Caribbean Sea and coupled to the Atlantic and the Pacific. (7)
Questions
Describe the fleet machine as examined by Benítez Rojo? (8)
What did the plantation machine produce? (8,9)
What do you understand Benitez Rojo means by the “Caribbean machine”? (18)
Free-write reflection
supersyncretism: it rose out of the collision of European, African, and Asian components within the Plantation, this syncretism flows along working with ethnological machines that are quite distant in space and remote in time (12)
Option One
Reread Benitez-Rojo’s description of la virgen de la caridad del cobre (12-16). How does this illuminate the supersyncretism, the density, and the workings of the various machines (Columbus machine, Plantation machine, Caribbean machine) operative in the Caribbean?
Option Two
How can la virgen de la caridad del cobre help us to understand the figure of Maria Concepcion in Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight”?