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This chapter explores theoretical responses to and departures from the modern world system. The first part looks into Anibal Quijano's concept of “coloniality of power” and Enrique Dussel's “transmodernity” as responses to global designs from colonial histories and legacies in Latin America. The second part is devoted to Abdelkhebir Khatibi's “double critique” and “une pensée autre” (an other thinking) as a response from colonial histories and legacies in Maghreb. The chapter also studies Edouard Glissant's notion of “Créolization,” proposed to account for the colonial experience of the Caribbean in the horizon of modernity and as a new epistemological principle. These perspectives, from Spanish America, Maghreb, and the Caribbean, contribute today to rethinking, critically, the limits of the modern world system—the need to conceive it as a modern/colonial world system and to tell stories not only from inside the “modern” world but from its borders.

Anthropologists and cultural historians have related ‘creolization’ to processes of transformation produced by colonial rule, enslavement and plantation economies, while other scholars have seen creolization in terms of global cultural mixing or as theory which reaches beyond its Caribbean birthplace. The decolonial epistemological contributions of Caribbean intellectuals in conceptualizing creolization in political, economic, cultural and theoretical terms is foregrounded in this volume as relevant for a Europe in which the call for’ integration’ is allied with ‘the failure of multiculturalism’ discourse to continuously re-create Europe’s post/colonial other.

Stuart Hall engages with ‘Créolité and Creolization’ sets out the theoretical orientation that guides this volume in his challenge to us to seek out creolization’s applicability outside of the Caribbean as he takes up Glissant’s claim that ‘the whole world is becoming creolized’ and looks at its meanings and implications. Hall interrogates whether or not créolité can be applied to all processes of cultural mixing or if it is tied to the French Antilles and asks if it can be a genuine alternative to hegemonic post-colonial and post-imperial understandings. He also asks whether créolité and creolization refer to the same phenomenon and whether or not creolization should replace other terms such as hybridity, métissage and syncretism as he seeks out creolization’s general conceptual applicability.

Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak addresses the limitations in grasping the theoretical and policy implications of the proposal of creolization. Discussing reolity rather than kinship as a model for comparativist practice, Spivak suggests that we start with Dante’s understanding of popular Italian as varieties of Creole and his choice of an aristocratic (‘curial’) political Creole as ‘Italian’, because this will enable us to perceive the beginnings of European nationalisms as grounded on a creolized understanding of themselves while asserting kinship. In a second step, asserting literature’s capacity to inaugurate an ‘experience of the impossible’, Spivak discusses Glissant’s creolization as a project that gives us a way of thinking outside of the exigencies of activism and beyond the identitarian politics implicated in the European project.

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez focuses on conviviality and examines the ethical underpinning of the project of creolization for ‘living together’. Discussing creolization as an ethics of conviviality, she explores first, the epistemic implications of creolization within the Caribbean epistemological framework of ‘Antilleanity’, and second, contrasts this proposal with current debates in Europe focusing on cultural mixing. In particular, the focus lies on current political debates on integration in Germany and the United Kingdom. Third, she explores the potential of creolization in people’s everyday lives by engaging with ethnographic research conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Manchester on ‘Latinizing Manchester’, with Latin American and Spanish diasporic networks.

Shirley Anne Tate analyses the aesthetics of creolization. Introducing the cultural politics of beauty into Glissantian creolization she shows that aesthetics has the potential to take us beyond a simple mètissage to enable us to see how a nation understands itself. Discussing the example of the crowning of 20 year-old black ‘mixed race’ Rachel Christie on 20^th July 2009 as the first black Miss England, she explores, first what creole could mean in aesthetic terms; second, Rachel Christie as the embodiment of the English nation as creolized, and third, the poetics of relation in which the continuation of white racial hegemony emerges through the beauty pageant as a micro-strategy of aesthetic domination.

José Carlos Almeida and David Corkill interrogate the implications of the European colonial project in tracing new cartographies and phenomena. Departing from reolization as a concept which refers to the interaction between African slaves, European settlers, Asian indentured workers and indigenous peoples and cultural creolization, understood as the intermingling and mixing of two or several formerly discrete traditions or cultures, they discuss the limits of this concept in the understanding of the impact of Portuguese colonialism. Critically discussing Gilberto Freyre’s work on Lusotropicalism, they contrast creolization with the politics of miscegenation within imperial and fascist expansionist projects.

Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Emiko Saldivar explore the discourses of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) in Mexico in an attempt to understand the politics of public recognition of racism. They argue that the Mexican case can offer some interesting lessons on processes of mixture and diversity, encounter and dealing with difference in Europe and beyond, by reflecting on the notion of mestizaje, which like creolization, has emanated from the Americas. This is particularly relevant as there are some analysts in Europe claiming that the flux and mélange of cultures, accompanied by a politics of recognition, is a recipe against racism. The relationships between discourses and experiences of official mestizaje, nationalism and notions of ‘race’ in Mexico prompt us to examine the problem of recognition and disavowal of racism. By looking at the approaches to racist discourse and practices in Mexico they explore the limitations and opportunities of public racial recognition and associated debates about ‘political correctness’ and identity politics framed by mestizaje dynamics. Drawing on a controversy around the Mexican children’s character Memín Pinguín, and on a similar controversy in the UK concerning the golliwog doll, this chapter engages with the disjunctions between ‘race’, nation and political projects, be they mestizaje or creolization.

This chapter argues that Chamoiseau’s sidestepping of the logic of biological kinship and genealogical lineage works to subvert the repeated invocation of Martinique’s ties to the “motherland,” France, thus enabling the diasporic and dialogic subjectivities of creolité. The novel offers a history of diasporic community formation on Martinique which questions and finally resists the demand for filiation, just as it does without the trope of motherhood. This reading of Chamoiseau’s novel also allows for a reconsideration of debates over creolization and Édouard Glissant’s notion of relationality, both of which have received renewed and increased attention, including in the anglosphere, in recent years. In order to make creolization useful for a queer postcolonial and diasporic critique, I argue that creolization must also be understood as a displacement from normative, national kinship, and that this then feeds back into recent debates on creolization as a global process, not one restricted to the Caribbean.

This chapter surveys the ways in which the Haitian Revolution was made a taboo subject in the U.S. South, as slave owners feared a similar conflagration; concurrently, however, appearances of the conflict in Southern letters is surveyed, leading to a comparison of the guarded nature of such presentations with subsequent settings of the conflict by Caribbean writers. Nineteenth-century works by Victor Séjour, Charles Gayarré, Sherwood Bonner, George Washington Cable, and Grace King are noted, followed by extended readings of texts by twentieth-century writers such as Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and William Faulkner, who are placed in company with Caribbean writers - Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant - who dramatized the conflict. The chapter concludes with a reading of Madison Smartt Bell’s All Soul’s Rising. All these sections are supported by a discussion of relevant histories and critical analysis by figures such as J. Michael Dash, Sybille Fischer, Franz Fanon, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot; special attention goes to vodoun, the interplay of colonial powers in the basin, varying portrayals of leaders such as Macandal, Toussaint, and LeClerc, and the contrasting roles of enslaved characters, who mount the “revolution from below.”

This chapter addresses the question of whether Africans in South Carolina were scattered in such a way as to make it difficult to perpetuate African cultural practices, or whether they lived in linguistically and culturally coherent clusters. The Hare captives’ experience suggests that the latter was the case in most instances. In addition to using probate records to reconstruct plantation communities, it uses a slave sales record from the firm of Austin and Laurens to demonstrate that most of the Hare captive purchasers had the ability to connect with others from Upper Guinea. Workhouse advertisements in the Charles Town newspapers demonstrate that Mande peoples in South Carolina had both the desire and ability to socialize with each other. The prevalence of Mande charm-making, secret societies, and the strength and significance of Islam all suggest that Mande languages and cultural practices endured into the early nineteenth century, all of which undermines the notion that newly-arrived Africans ‘creolized’ at a fast rate.

This chapter begins with C.L.R. James’ quip on considering the passage of his ideas to South Africa, that “revolution moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.” From a reading of James’ Black Jacobins the paper shifts to a diagnosis of four dialectical moments in anti-apartheid Durban, South Africa. The ‘moment of the disqualified’ exemplifies best what James (citing Hegel) calls “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labour of the negative.” Emerging from this detour through the rough and tumble of revolutionary Durban, through the making and unmaking of coalitional Black politics, the paper connects the critique of the essential Black political subject with the work of reimagining revolution against racial capitalism. The key argument is that a postcolonial politics to come must circuit through the insights of the Black radical tradition, while stretching the spectre of Black Power into new, and newly creolized futures.

This essay examines the persuasive fit between the biographical evidence of Claude McKay’s life, his characterization of Bita Plant as a maroon figure returning to “the point of entanglement” (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 26), and the continuum of masculine subjectivity in McKay’s work, from Jake/ Ray to Banjo/Ray to Bita. The author posits the idea of Bita as McKay’s maroon self returned in drag on two bases: one, that the life of a vagabond troubadour, and the habit of literary self-portrait had so become second nature to McKay, that he was unable to inhabit a less ambiguous, less tricksterish persona; two, that McKay’s unresolved issues with his mother and father play out as impersonation or ventriloquism, reconciliation, exorcism, and homage in the figure of Bita. The essay argues also that McKay’s lifelong and haunting need to return to the country of his birth played out in this literary disguise in which, if we also see Bita as Jamaica developing a decolonized subjectivity, her move is from (feminized) colonial territory to an authoritative republic of the self.

This chapter delineates the multilayered Indo-Caribbean experience of the region’s nationalism as it sought to balance pride in the realization of independence from Britain on the subcontinent in 1947 with a recognition of the need to forge permanent affective links within the Caribbean basin. Examining Khan’s The Jumbie Bird in the context of the influential creolization theories of Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant, the author argues that Khan’s book advocates for a version of creolized Caribbean nationalism inflected by its characters’ South Asian lineage. By highlighting the novel’s explicit repudiation of the “back-to-India” movement and its valorization of a syncretic Indo-Caribbean aesthetic practice, the chapter reveals that Khan’s political aesthetic is quite in keeping, on a structural level, with the more celebrated, more Afro-centric theories of creolization in concert with which it arose.

This chapter introduces French Louisiana cultural and musical landscape. It contextualizes Creole and Cajun identities throughout Louisiana history up to the present and gives a brief description of current musical categories. This chapter also explains the subject of the book, the approach that was adopted, and situates them within the existent literature on music. It also explores the concept of creolization and explains why it will not be used as an analytical tool but rather, as a vernacular category. Finally, the chapter presents the research methodology, including the ethnographic techniques involved and the importance of introspection.