Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity (review)

At a time when hybridity and related notions loom large in discussions of the post-colonial and the postmodern, the editors of this anthology present the specificity of the Caribbean by offering original essays that address the regionally-generated term, creolization.

Following in the footsteps of Caribbean thinkers such as C.L.R. James, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Edouard Glissant, contributors double as writers of poetry, plays, and fiction. Not surprisingly, their language tends away from the careful and sometimes overdetermined, “theoretical correctness” characteristic of much post-structural discourse and toward first-person narrative in the form of anecdotes from childhood, discussions of family origins, and readings of Caribbean texts ranging from children’s rhymes to fiction. In their “reflections on current notions of creolization in Caribbean literature and culture,” to cite the editors (vii), they steer clear of globalizing theory and provide neither a synthesis of identarian discourse nor a portable definition of creolization. As Maryse Condé points out, “The differences between such theories as miscegenation, mestizaje, creolization, créolité are due to the ethnic and sociopolitical configurations of the colonized American world in which they were born and, consequently, to the languages in which they are articulated,” even if they all “aim to negate and subvert the dangerous notion of racial and cultural ‘purity’” (106). Rather, because the authors originate from the range of regions, cities, islands, and languages that make up the Caribbean, their perspectives combine to “represent our current moment in the dialectical process of coexistence and interaction among the regions of the Caribbean” (9).