'This creole culture, miraculously forged': the contradictions of créolité

Abstract

The French-speaking Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe have produced some of the earliest and most influential theorists of colonialism and its effects, whose work both anticipates and contributes to the current postcolonial moment. Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire and Edouard Glissant have become foundational reference points in the development of the varied and ever-expanding area that we now call ‘postcolonial theory’, and obligatory inclusions in its anthologies and introductory texts. Most recently the ‘creolite’ school, the focus of this chapter, has contributed a copious series of theoretical and fictional soundings of Caribbean identity (on this subject, see also Dash, Chapter 21). The confluence, on these small islands, of an unapologetically self-reflexive essayistic tradition and a vibrant and internationally recognized creative output is remarkable, and can be explained to a significant extent by factors endemic to the area as a whole. For the Caribbean was the site of a particularly brutal and traumatic form of colonialism, beginning with the genocide of the indigenous populations and sustained by the middle passage and the slave trade. Firstly, identity, a touchstone of postcolonial discourse generally, becomes a particularly obsessive theme in a society which has no continuous link to a pre-colonial era, and in which transportation has shattered any sense of a permanent or essential selfhood. Secondly, the inherently multilingual nature of the Caribbean makes it a ‘contact zone’ which nurtures the formulation and circulation of identitarian debate. A third, related factor, given the dominance of English in the postcolonial theoretical domain, is the geographical proximity of the United States, where the field of postcolonialism has flourished since the 1980s, and wheresuch prominent Antillean writers as Edouard Glissant and Maryse Conde have held university positions.