Caribbean Creolization

The arc of this experience explicitly acknowledges the antecedent influence of two other key Martinican writers and thinkers, Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant, and the literary movements with which their names are respectively linked: negritude and antillanité, or Caribbeanness. The créolistes, as the authors of the Eloge are called, address the importance of negritude to their thought formation: "To a totally racist world … Aimé Césaire restored mother Africa … Césaire's Negritude gave Creole society its African dimension" (Bernabé et al., p. 79). Indeed, they make specific reference to the irreplaceable role played here by Césaire himself. "It was Césaire's Negritude that opened to us the path for the actuality of … Caribbeanness … We are forever Césaire's sons" (p. 80).

At the same time, however, it must be recognized that the créolistes simultaneously acknowledge the limitations of the African model of cultural origin for the complex realities of the Caribbean basin. The basic paradox intrinsic to such an approach lay in the fact that adopting the negritude paradigm would simply amount to exchanging one unitary model of culture for another. Neither the European nor the African paradigm could contain the myriad ethnic influences and creative cultural exchange that had given rise to the Caribbean. To adequately account for the region's plural character, another model was necessary. For this, they would turn to the work of Edouard Glissant.

An accomplished novelist and poet as well as an important cultural theorist, Edouard Glissant had produced more than half a dozen creative works by the time he published his groundbreaking Caribbean Discourse in 1981. In this work, he also sought to take his vision of Caribbean reality beyond the epistemological boundaries of negritude. Realizing that a response that simply negated the tenets of a colonial discourse did nothing to expunge its essential properties, Glissant sought to specify the terms and conditions of a creole culture that would be inclusive of the wider English, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean as well as the French overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, one that would give rein to the region's constant creative flux and its insistent patterns of transformation and exchange. The core of this Caribbean vision, the one on which the créolistes would draw, he termed antillanité, or Caribbeanness.

Glissant locates the key axes of this concept between uprooting and transformation. Within these patterns of intersection and exchange, he demarcates the terms of Caribbean survival. "I feel that what makes this difference between a people that survives elsewhere … and a population that is transformed elsewhere into another people … and that thus enters the constantly shifting and variable process of creolization … is that the latter has not … collectively continued the methods of existence and survival, both material and spiritual, which it practiced before being uprooted" (Glissant, p. 15; emphasis original). This generative framework stresses principles of mixture and combination rather than confrontation and rupture; the infinite openness and fluidity of its practice expresses the diversity of the Caribbean collective identity in a way that allowed the architects of créolité scope to articulate structurally similar concerns. The productive multiplicity of the Caribbean, one that draws on its peoples and cultures to continually transform and reinvent themselves, is thus a core principle of both antillanité and créolité.