scholarly journals Notes on the Caribbean Essay from an Archipelagic Perspective (Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez Rojo)

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florencia Bonfiglio
Keyword(s):  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Antonio Benitez Rojo

Creolization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Etherington
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Caribbean Basin ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Interdisciplinary Exchange

Creolization is a key concept in studies of cultural change in colonial conditions. Most typically, it refers to a mode of cultural transformation undertaken by people from different cultural groups who converge in a colonial territory to which they have not previously belonged. This was especially pronounced in the slave plantation economies of the Caribbean basin, where the indigenous peoples largely were wiped out or deported during colonization and the societies that replaced them were largely developed from the intermixture of transplanted Europeans and enslaved Africans. Creolization has been theorized in many different ways by scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Three common features can usually be discerned among the diversity of uses found for the term: (1) Creolization involves a “double adaptation” as those arriving into a colonial territory adapt to the new environment and to each other. This usually is driven by those who have no prospect of returning to their home culture and who suffer the effects of racial domination. (2) Creolization has a “nativizing” trajectory according to which the cultural practices formed through the process of mixing and adaptation become a group’s “home” culture. (3) Creolization is incessant: it never arrives finally at a stable cultural compound, but continually undergoes further inter-culturation and transformation. That a diversity of disciplines have found productive use for the concept has made for both rich interdisciplinary exchange and a complex and often contradictory array of different understandings. To navigate the terrain, it is helpful to distinguish between maximalist and particularist positions and between analytic, descriptive, and normative modes of usage. Maximalists tend to abstract from the exemplary creolizing processes found in the Caribbean basin to think about how cultural mixing operates across a world shaped by globalizing imperialism. Particularists tend to stress the uniqueness of the Caribbean (and a small number of other colonial plantation contexts) and local specificities of intermixture, cultural practice, and identification. This polarity often corresponds to modes of interpretation and analysis: particularists tend to use creolization in a descriptive capacity, and maximalists in an analytic capacity. Normative uses can go both ways, affirming either the specificity of Caribbean cultural mixing or the condition of global modernity writ large as being one of mixture and hybridity. In the literary sphere, the contest between particularist and maximalist positions was starkly evident in a heated debate over the term Créolité. This was sparked when a group of male Martinican writers placed Caribbean Creole identity at the center of a creative manifesto. Literary studies of creolization have tended to borrow heavily from creole linguistics (“creolistics”) and cultural theory. For some, literary creolization is simply the literary use of a creole language. This places emphasis almost entirely on linguistic criteria. Cultural theory, and especially the speculative work of Édouard Glissant, has given others a way of thinking inventively about creolization as a space of cross-cultural cultural emergence. A quite different approach can be extrapolated from the historical work of the poet Kamau Brathwaite on “creole society.” In it, creolization is conceived not as a single process but as a totality of concurrent and interacting processes. Understood this way, literary creolization can be studied as one form of creolization within an ensemble of creolizing processes, one that proceeds according to the technical, formal, and aesthetic demands specific to literary practice.

scholarly journals Cuba y el Caribe. Diáspora, raza e identidad cultural

2014 ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
José Gomariz
Keyword(s):  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
George Lamming ◽  
Fernando Ortiz ◽  
Identidad Cultural ◽  
Antonio Benitez Rojo

De la pluma del Almirante, las islas del Caribe comienzan a emerger en la imaginación europea dando comienzo al mito de la creación americana, así como de sus letras. En su singularidad, las islas se repiten en la plantación colonial, como sugiere Antonio Benítez Rojo; mientras que en el espacio postcolonial, son para George Lamming una familia de comunidades imaginadas. La transculturación de Fernando Ortiz, el discurso antillano de Édouard Glissant, el elogio de la créolité haitiana, son discursos de (com)unidad y pluralidad cultural que dan el perfil y la cifra de un Caribe, al decir de Iris Zavala, dialógico.

Between the plot and plantation: Parahuman ecologies in Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin M. Fehskens
Keyword(s):  
Young Girl ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Wilson Harris ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
External Forces

In this article I argue that Children of Paradise (2014), Fred D’Aguiar’s novelization of the final months of Jonestown, draws different spatializations of political oppression together and situates critique and resistance to that oppression in a parahuman ecology, a concept that develops out of a combination of vital materialist discourse and the writings of Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant. Jonestown is the name popularly given to the Peoples Temple, an American cult led by Jim Jones that ended in a horrific mass suicide event in the Guyanese rainforest in 1978. Unlike previous narratives and studies on the group, the Jonestown of Children of Paradise takes on the contours of the Caribbean plantation and plot in its obsessive and oppressive control over the lives and labours of its population and its narrative of liberation from and resistance to external forces. Critique and resistance to these power structures emerge at the intersection of politics and ecology to produce an ecologically-inflected parahuman community. This community is represented in particular by the unusually compassionate relationship that develops between Adam, a silverback gorilla caged at the centre of Jonestown’s commune space, and Trina, a young girl who lives in the commune with her mother. As Adam and Trina engage each other and their relationship with the rainforest more intensely, they create a potentially alternative mode of living for those wishing to escape the confines of the commune and, symbolically, the horrors of the plantation.

The transpacific tempest: Relational sovereignty and spiritual sociogenesis

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-398
Author(s):  
Jeong Eun Annabel We
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
The South ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Military Mobilization ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

This article examines the intersection of The Tempest adaptations and militarization across the Caribbean and Pacific. Through an analysis of the South Korean writer Ch’oe In-Hun’s 1973 novel The Typhoon, it argues that past speculative visions for a decolonial future continue to offer a critical imaginary of decolonization in the Pacific and of reunification of Korea. Building on the works of Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant, the article theorizes relational sovereignty and spiritual sociogenesis in the context of militarization of islands. It considers the transpacific region alongside the Caribbean through a comparative analysis of The Typhoon and the Martinican thinker Aimé Césaire’s 1969 play Une Tempête. This is an archipelagic perspective that decenters the logic that justifies militarization of the islands for the securitization of the continents. The article analyzes how decolonial knowledge emerges through the affective, spiritual, and environmental transformations and alters the course of military mobilization of the colonized on islands both real and fictional.

scholarly journals Toward a Sexual Difference Theory of Creolization

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Max Hantel
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
Theoretical Domain ◽  
The World ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Philosophical Importance

In lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph from the essay:Throughout his work, Édouard Glissant rigorously describes the process of creolization in the Caribbean and beyond. His later work in particular considers creolization through the planetary terms of Relation, “exploded like a network inscribed within the sufficient totality of the world.” As his philosophical importance rightfully grows, many note the dual risk of overgeneralization and abstraction haunting continued expansion of his geographical and theoretical domain. In light of that danger, this essay examines how questions of the ontological nature of embodiment as raised by feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray ground, both implicitly and explicitly, processes of creolization. Narrowly speaking, such a reading of Glissant suggests the possibility of a richer understanding of creolization as a historically lived process and its emancipatory promise in the present. More generally, the linking of Glissant and Irigaray begins a larger project bringing together theorists of decolonization and sexual difference at the intersection of struggles against phallocentrism and racialization, perhaps nuancing some decolonial critiques of the value of Irigaray’s (and her interlocutor’s) thought. Thus, the investigation begins with a concrete question of historical interpretation that stages the embodiment of cultural contact

scholarly journals El espíritu de Namsetoura y colonialidad de la naturaleza en Kamau Brathwaite // The Spirit of Namsetoura and Coloniality of Nature in Kamau Brathwaite

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-112
Author(s):  
Nora Vergara
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Spatial Awareness ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Caribbean Island ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
El Sistema ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Do So

Resumen      Las concepciones y prácticas culturales de la naturaleza que se observan en la representación del entorno geográfico y social del Caribe en la obra poética de Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados, 1930-) configuran un modelo local de naturaleza que responde a la pretensión de imponer un modelo único de modernidad promovido por la globalización contemporánea. En sus poemas, el lugar se configura mediante la oralidad de herencia africana que caracteriza las lenguas caribeñas, que depende de una fuerte conciencia espacial y le permite plasmar la presencia de las huellas culturales africanas en el territorio. En este artículo, proponemos ahondar en la importancia que la perspectiva ecológica cobra en su obra a la hora de construir la diferencia, destacando la manera en la que esa perspectiva medioambiental pone de manifiesto el valor político y epistemológico de Barbados, entendido como unas prácticas y relaciones implicadas en la producción de un complejo entramado global-local que opera en el sistema mundializado de poder. Para ello, abordaremos la perspectiva ecológica en la construcción de la isla caribeña que realiza en la segunda etapa de su obra desde los presupuestos planteados por el  programa decolonial del grupo de Modernidad/Colonialidad, apoyándonos en las nociones de diferencia colonial y colonialidad de la naturaleza. Abstract      Kamau Brathwaite’s (Barbados, 1930-) depiction of the Caribbean geographical and social environment encompasses conceptions and cultural practices of nature that shape a local model of nature as a way to respond to the imposition by contemporary globalization of a single model of modernity. In his poems, place is reconfigured through the African-derived orality that characterizes Caribbean languages, which is dependent upon a spatial awareness, allowing him to capture the presence of the African cultural traces in the region. This article addresses the relevance the ecological perspective has in constructing difference in his work and the ways in which the environmental perspective highlights the political and epistemological value of Barbados, which is conceived as a set of practices and relations involved in the production of a complex global/local pattern operating in the world system of power. In order to do so, we will explore the ecological perspective in his depiction of the Caribbean island in the second stage of his work within the framework of the decolonial project promoted by the Modernity/Coloniality group of scholars, relying on the notions of colonial difference and coloniality of nature.

scholarly journals Césaire, Glissant e Chamoiseau: identidade antilhana e tradição literária / Césaire, Glissant and Chamoiseau: Antillean Identity and Literary Tradition

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Danielle Grace
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Patrick Chamoiseau ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Caribbean Islands ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

Resumo: O presente artigo procura discutir algumas questões que envolvem a literatura antilhana de língua francesa. A partir de três autores, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant e Patrick Chamoiseau, pretende-se seguir os indícios de uma tradição literária que se constrói ao mesmo tempo em que se deseja definir os contornos de uma identidade propriamente antilhana. Nessa esteira, examinam-se alguns conceitos que atravessam a história literária das ilhas caribenhas, tal como a negritude, a crioulização e a crioulidade, que se apresentam como ideias-chave para pensar não somente a produção criativa e poética, mas também o arcabouço teórico que acompanha a prática literária desses autores.Palavras-chave: literatura antilhana; negritude; crioulização; crioulidade.Abstract: This article seeks to discuss some issues involving French-speaking Antillean literature. Through three authors, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, we intend to follow the indications of a literary tradition that is built at the same time that we want to define the contours of a properly Antillean identity. In this context, we examine some concepts that cross the literary history of the Caribbean islands, such as négritude, créolisation and créolité, which are presented as key ideas to think not only about creative and poetic production, but also the theoretical framework accompanying the literary practice of these authors..Keywords: Antillean literature; négritude; créolisation; créolité.

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