Caribbean Creolization

The origins of creolization for the Caribbean region arguably lie in the contested and interrelated processes of colonization, slavery, and migration that both brought the New World into being and gave it impetus and direction. Once the indigenous New World populations were decimated, the growth and development of plantation economies that arose in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century produced pathbreaking patterns of economic and cultural exchange between Europe, the New World of the Americas—including Central America, the Guianas, Mexico, and Brazil—and the African continent. Catalyzed by the slave trade, which forcibly removed untold numbers of peoples of diverse racial, cultural, and geographical origin from their African homelands and transplanted them onto vast island plantations, these already variegated groups subsequently came into contact with other transplanted peoples from Europe, South Asia, China, and the Middle East. As a result, the Caribbean region quickly became a key nodal point in what would become the creolization of these composite populations.

It was the product of these intersecting influences—the inauguration of a creole society in the Caribbean Sea—that became the subject of the text Eloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (1989). Written by Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, two Martinican novelists, in conjunction with Jean Bernabé, a Guadeloupean linguist, this manifesto can be seen in one sense as an attempt to come to terms with the paradox of French overseas departmentalization. The fact of these former colonies' incorporation into the French nation in 1946, and the conferral of French citizenship on their citizens, had done nothing to negate the ongoing material differences in history, geography, culture, and ethnicity that continued to separate these territories from the metropole, creating a double trajectory that made their citizens feel both French and West Indian. The "double consciousness" imposed by the duality of their legal and cultural status encouraged these thinkers to come to terms with the dilemma of belonging posed by departmentalization. Their solution was to seek out the origins of this pluralism, and to celebrate it.

Importantly, however, they were certainly not the first to do so. Some twenty years earlier, the Barbadian historian and poet Edward Brathwaite sought to establish patterns of creole interaction as a sort of sociological foundation for Caribbean societies. In his The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (1971), Brathwaite proposed that the principles of cultural distinction and unitary origin through which societies were typically analyzed and categorized be abandoned in the Caribbean case, recognizing instead the intrinsic ethnic and cultural pluralism of the islands. The cultural intersection, ethnic admixture, and linguistic cross-fertilization that lay at the core of the Caribbean experience would be made to contest the historical discontinuity and geographical and political fragmentation through which the region traditionally had been framed.