Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans Fiction

Abstract

In recent years, critics have celebrated Caribbean theories of creoli­zation for their creative and protean approaches to identity. E.K. Brathwaite’s version of creolization and Wilson Harris’s “creative syncretism” (his term for cross-cultural exchanges) have been hailed as powerful critical tools in dismantling destructive binaries and harmful racial hierarchies within Caribbean literature.1 Similarly, Chris Bongie deploys Edouard Glissant’s understanding of creoliza­tion as a process of cross-cultural exchange to describe the limita­tions and possibilities of postcolonial theory. Bongie’s book, Islands and Exiles, is intended, he states, “quite simply to help further Glis­sant’s argument that ‘ours is a creolizing world’” (10). Indeed, H. Adlai Murdoch affirms the potential of Glissant’s theory in articulat­ing a relational identity vitally important to the Caribbean region (157–61). Even Peter Childs and Patrick Williams’s recent Introduc­tion to Post-Colonial Theory celebrates Caribbean creolization’s repre­sentation of a “positive, dynamic, processual becoming” (48). In all of these theories, creolization is situated in Caribbean history and racial identities but is, most fundamentally, as Bongie points out, a dynamic practice that can be extended to describe many situations of cross-cultural exchange.