Preface: Islands of Créolité?

Abstract

When Eloge de la creolite appeared in 1989, there was an understandable enough elation in francophone Caribbean studies.1 It was something of an intellectual event. And rightly so. Striking a note of defiant provocation, the authors—Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant—sought to reckon in a sympathetic yet critical way with the profound inheritance of Negritude, its almost overwhelming authority as a cultural-intellectual frame of engagement and identity embodied in the towering (if not unambiguous) presence of Aime Cesaire, then of course still very much alive. Crossing out without negating la presence africaine with the poetics of antillanite, the authors were concerned to forestall—even subvert—the drive toward an external identification with a mythological Africa as the consoling counterpoint to an external identification with a mythological Europe. “Nous sommes fondamentalement frappes d’exteriorite,” they asserted with exuberant disaffection, we are fundamentally stricken with exteriority. It is against this orientation that they formulated their idea of creolite, “une vision interieure,” as they called it, the interior vision of a hybrid world made up of disseminated and recomposed fragments.2