Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

WOMEN OF COLOUR: RECONTEXTUALISING ‘OTHERNESS’
WOMEN OF COLOUR:
RECONTEXTUALISING
‘OTHERNESS’
Ian Anthony Bethell*
Considering the othering agenda of 16 th and 19 th century travel
narratives and historical documents, this paper proposes to examine
how the images of Caribbean women are presented by these
“experts” on the Caribbean. It will explore works by Rosario Ferré
and Edwidge Danticat, comparing and contrasting their constructs
of women, particularly as they relate to the earlier constructed
stereotypes of alterity.
The Caribbean, an area ‘discovered’ by Spain in 1492 and, if accounts
are taken at face value, unknown before then, became a virgin turf, fresh
for travellers and chroniclers to cast it as they saw fit. What developed
from this period was an overwhelmingly negative and mostly reductive
and somehow surprisingly singular stereotype of Caribbean femininity.
Caribbean voices, if there were any, were for the most part exiled from
the discourse of representation or presentation. This left only the western
self-defined authorities to present their visions of truth.
Cuban writer and scholar, Antonio Benítez-Rojo argues that there is a
certain something that is Caribbean. He says that this certain kind of way
is a caribbeanness that is embodied in all aspects of Caribbean culture.
He also argues that there is a common rhythm that repeats itself across
the region. This paper will employ this repeating rhythm in the guise of
a monolithic image of Caribbean female alterity and attempt to illustrate
how this alterity may have arisen in the ‘Western’ imagination and remains
imbricated in many renderings of the West Indies and particularly in the
depiction of Antillian women. The repeating rhythm is here corrupted
from Benítez-Rojo’s original use of it and has been employed to signify
how the West created a unified rhythm of Caribbeanness. While the region
* Profesor Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras.
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •