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Caribbean Creolization

Critiques

While the Caribbean focus of these twin discourses was seen as a much-needed corrective to metropolitan visions of the Caribbean as a region mired in fragmentation and loss, an alternative view took a much more critical line, accusing the créolistes of having appropriated the issue of creolization and of imbuing it with restrictive, essentialist characteristics that valorized exclusivity over process. From this viewpoint, despite the specific historic context and catalyst of migration, colonialism, slavery, and indentured labor, the concept of creolization was applicable to many cultures and civilizations beyond the Caribbean basin.

By contrast, the creolization of Glissant's antillanité sought to subvert universalist notions of pure and impure, positing the world as subject to ceaseless cultural transformation, a joining of braiding and becoming: "Creolization as an idea is not primarily the glorification of the composite nature of a people: indeed, no people has been spared the crosscultural process.… To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of 'creolized' that is considered as halfway between two 'pure' extremes" (Glissant, p. 140).

EDOUARD GLISSANT

Edouard Glissant was born in 1928 in the commune of Sainte-Marie in Martinique. A poet, novelist, dramatist, and essayist, Glissant studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnology at the Musée de l'homme. In the 1950s he co-founded the Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l'indépendence, and went on to found the Institut martiniquais d'etudes in 1970. In 1982, he went to work as editor of the UNESCO Courier, was named Distinguished University Professor at Louisiana State University in 1988, and left there for a position at the City University of New York's Graduate Center in the mid-1990s. He began publishing in the mid-1950s, and his novels, plays, essays, and volumes of poetry have won many outstanding prizes. Perhaps the premier contemporary French West Indian cultural theorist, his influential concepts of antillanité (Caribbeanness) and poétique de la relation (cross-cultural poetics) promulgated in Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) seek to creatively anchor the Caribbean experience of fragmentation and disjuncture in a framework that gives voice to its central tenets of diversity and hybridity. The interpenetration of languages and cultures that lies at the core of this process of creolization posits contact and chaos, cultural relativity, and exchange and transformation as key tools in a polyvalent system of thought that redefines traditional notions of identity.

In their turn, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant managed to expand and buttress their own positions in a key interview published some years after their manifesto. Here, they stress the pluralities of creoleness: "our position is that there are several créolités" (Taylor, p. 142); valorize the role of pluralism: "créolité is all about understanding mosaic, multiple identities" (p. 153); and suggest that creolization is a process that encompasses more than a simple synthesis, more than métissage: "There's metis-sage in creolization, but creolization is chaos—shock, mixture, combination, alchemy" (p. 136). In these terms, creolization establishes its specific difference from hybridity, reflecting its beginnings in colonialism and slavery as well as the ceaseless redefinition and rebirth that are its primary constituent elements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balutansky, Kathleen M. and Marie-Agnès Sourieau, eds. Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998.

Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by James E. Maraniss. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992.

Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. "Créolité Bites." Transition 7, no. 2 (1998): 124–161. Interview.

——. Eloge de la créolite. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.

Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/ Colonial Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Brathwaite, Kamau. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.

Britton, Celia. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Burton, Richard D. E. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Chamoiseau, Patrick. Ecrire en pays dominé. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Raphaël Confiant. Lettres créoles: tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, 1635–1975. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.

Dash, J. Michael. Edouard Glissant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

——. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Lionnet, Françoise. "Créolité in the Indian Ocean: Two Models of Cultural Diversity." Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 101–112.

Murdoch, H. Adlai. Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001.

H. Adlai Murdoch

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Cosine to Cyano groupCaribbean Creolization - Caribbean Context, From Experience To Theory, Antecedents, Patrick Chamoiseau, Critiques, Edouard Glissant