Explores creole discourse to re-conceptualize archive that is contemporaneous and centralizes the presence and imagery of the Caribbean figure.

Haitian Creole is a unique language, as are all creole languages. Mother tongue of almost six million people—without counting those who have immigrated—it has its own particular ways of expressing in words, of making sentences and forming a discourse. However, for more than two centuries it has been excluded from many circuits of communication. The limits imposed on it have kept it from developing a creativity, at the vocabulary level as well as that of organizing a discourse that (...) would assure a function of plural communication, both oral and written. The present challenge of this long-throttled language has posed an important number of problems in linguistics, teaching, culture and politics because of new communication systems and especially because of education. (shrink)

Les médias réunionnais constituent un terrain d'observation des langues en contact, français et créole, particulièrement heuristique. L'article cherche à montrer comment, au cours de leur récente histoire, ces médias ont été étroitement liés à un débat sociétal extrêmement polémique, parce que lié à des enjeux statutaires et politiques. Il évoque ensuite comment leur propre production discursive laisse peu à peu la place à une cohabitation plurilinguistique, surtout dans l'audiovisuel.A study of the Reunionese media allows a heuristic approach to the observation (...) of both Creole and French, the native and official languages. This article aims to show how, throughout their short history, Reunionese media have always been deliberately committed to controversial societal questions which have raised statutory and political issues. The second part of the article deals with a gradual evolution in the use made by Reunionese media, especially radio and TV, of French and Creole. Creole has benefited from wider usage in the media which has helped improve the situation of diglossia which had prevailed until now in Reunionese society. (shrink)

Martinican creolist Raphaël Confiant claims in an unabashed praise of Lafcadio Hearn that the nineteenth century writer “invented what today we might call ‘multiple identity’ or ‘creoleness’ [créolité].” Critic Chris Bongie notes that the word “creolization” appeared for the first time in the English language in Hearn’s 1890 novel Youma. In a letter written to his friend Henry Krehbel in 1883, Hearn himself announces this allegiance to all things creole as he signs “your creolized friend.” These comments identify the (...) nineteenth century thinker not only as a precursor of creoleness, but more importantly, and also surprisingly, as a forerunner of both creoleness and creolization, two related terms that are philosophically unlike in Martinican thought. (shrink)

Résumé Le but de cet article est de montrer que la manière dont à été posée la question de la scolarisation du créole trahit une sorte d’aveuglement sur ce que peut signifier le fait de parler créole - quelque chose comme l’oubli d’une de ses dimensions. Je dis qu’en réfléchissant à ce que pourrait être une institution (comme l’école ou autre chose) tirée de la vie créole étudiée dans sa manière de dire les choses, on pourrait porter remède à cet (...) oubli. (shrink)

This article discusses Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha’s theories on multiculturalism and diaspora as alternative epistemological references to confront racist revivals across Europe. Edward Said’ s defence of inclusive academic curricula is equally revisited as a parallel strategy to deconstruct Eurocentric ideas. These three thinkers also represent nationalism as an obsolete paradigm, inadequate to perceive a globalized world. The point of this article is to revisit established postcolonial thinkers and see how their discourses have been reinterpreted by committed artists/writers whose (...) works seem to share with the invoked thinkers the aim of challenging their audiences to think differently about race, cultural difference, invisibility of oppression and right of ‘belonging’. The invoked theoretical discourse is used as a platform to discuss four artistic interventions – a poem by Eunice de Souza, Raimi Gabdamosi’s performance in Cadiz, the collective installation Return to Hansala at MUSAC museum and a sculpture by Portuguese visual artist Ana Vieira. Two of the selected works address gender issues in articulation with domesticity and patriarchal genealogies while the other two pieces address race and marginalization without any particular gender inflection. The choice is deliberate. Feminist discussions cannot be isolated from other discourses that expose related forms of oppression and marginalization even if they are not primarily formed by feminist awareness. (shrink)

This article explores the politics and culture of Creole cosmopolitanism, which emerged in the French post-slavery colonies. It argues that Creole cosmopolitanism offers a framework to imagine oneself in the world. As a form of resistance to the French assimilative project, to absolutist ethnicisms and to abstract universalism, Creole cosmopolitanism imagines a world of trans-local solidarities, a way of being-in-the-world that acknowledges difference and diversity.

Sumit K. Mandal uncovers the hybridity and transregional connections underlying modern Asian identities. By considering Arabs in the Malay world under European rule, Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction was altered by nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control. Mandal traces the transformation of Arabs from familiar and multi-faceted creole personages of Malay courts into alienated figures defined by economic and political function. The racialisation constrained but did not eliminate the fluid character of Arabness. Creole Arabs (...) responded to the constraints by initiating transregional links with the Ottoman Empire and establishing modern social organisations, schools, and a press. Contentions emerged between organisations respectively based on Prophetic descent and egalitarianism, advancing empowering but conflicting representations of a modern Arab and Islamic identity. Mandal unsettles finite understandings of race and identity by demonstrating not only the incremental development of a modern identity, but the contested state of its birth. (shrink)

Studies on Jean Rhys have been fragmentary concentrating on one or two aspects of Rhys’s thematic concern with the alienation of the white creole without laying emphasis on Rhys’s exploration of the Creole’s identity. There has been no attempt to examine if the creole has to struggle harder and more than whites and blacks to come to terms with her personal identity until now. The answer is affirmative because the creole is a composite human being. Indeed, (...) the white creole is the ‘fruit’ of a mixed union. Born into miscegenation, hybridity and creolization, the creole is physically, linguistically, socially and religiously a diverse human being. Within the scope of this paper, the term identity is used in a broad sense. The creole’s personal identity refers to the different identities the Creole can have at different times and in different circumstances. Correspondingly, she must negotiate the white and black elements of her identity. The Creole must deal with the complexity of her identity through a web of tangled relationships with both whites and blacks. Read from this light, the personal identity of the creole is not “either/ or,” but reluctantly “both/ and.” In various ways, the creole is an ‘Everyman.’ The Creole undergoes an awareness, and is eventually, redefined through the image of the ‘other.’ Indeed, her jump toward her black friend Tia reflects Rhys’s basic concern for a Caribbean society in which assimilation and personal identity must blend in a single humane goal, that is, to co-exist beyond the lines of race, gender, class and sex in order to avoid annihilation. (shrink)

This article examines the study of natural history on the imperial periphery in late colonial Spanish America. It considers the problems that afflicted peripheral naturalists—lack of books, instruments, scholarly companionship, and skilled technicians. It discusses how these deprivations impacted upon their self-confidence and credibility as men of science and it examines the strategies adopted by peripheral naturalists to boost their scientific credibility. The article argues that Spanish American savants, deprived of the most up-to-date books and sophisticated instruments, emphasised instead their (...) sustained experience of local nature and their familiarity with indigenous knowledge. It details how some creole naturalists, such as the Mexican José Antonio Alzate, questioned the applicability of European classificatory systems to American fauna and flora, and it analyses the complex relationship between natural science and creole patriotism. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to draw as many possible consequences from this fact : in the Mascareignes islands, the use of the word « Creole » is regulated by criteria that limit its application to subgroups of the Creole world. The use of this word is not “cognitive”, it does not refer to the inhabitant of the islands, the “native” : it marks that from which one must separate oneself within the Creole language itself, possibly through (...) the evocation of back-languages, of customs, beliefs and attitudes inherited from somewhere else. A crucial defining feature of Creole life thus appears to consist in a distance between forms of experience that coexist but that strive to be as separated and watertight as possible. Sensitivities are deeply trained in measuring this distance, which leads hybridization to be conceived as subtractions to the norms inherited from colonial times. Distance and hybridization are the main terms through which I have attempted to describe the Creole world in the Mascareignes ; but I tried to do so “from a distance”, in the spirit with which Derek Walcott described fragments of epics in the Caribbean. (shrink)

This article illuminates why Nicolás Palacios’s 1904 monograph, Raza chilena:Libro escrito por un Chileno i para los Chilenos [Chilean Race: A Book Written by a Chilean for Chileans], is central to the creation of a myth of Chilean racial homogeneity at the turn of the twentieth century. Placing Palacios in the context of Latin American eugenic discourse, it demonstrates how he selected a specific racial origin story in order to accommodate his belief in racial hierarchy while also depicting race mixing (...) in a positive light. Specifically, the article highlights how the myth of Chilean racial homogeneity elided the difference between the term “mestizo,” which was applied to people of mixed racial heritage, and “white.” I contend that Palacios sought to differentiate Chileans from other Latin Americans by emphasizing their racial distinctiveness. The article therefore highlights that Latin American eugenics was concerned with the creation of national narratives that historicized particular racial mixtures in order to reify and affirm national differences. As such, it connects to literature regarding the history of eugenics, race, nation, and the creation of whiteness. (shrink)

RESUMEN El martiniqués Édouard Glissant ha sido uno de esos autores cuya obra poética, filosófica y literaria ha hecho una trashumancia en los espacios académicos y de los grupos militantes que se autoidentifican como decoloniales. Siendo objeto de relectura critica decoloniales, la categoria de creolización de Glissant se posiciona -al decir de algunos- como un auténtico ejemplo del pensamiento decolonial radical; como un arquetipo de una epistemologia no europea desde el Caribe. A contracorriente con estas ideas, deseo mostrar en qué (...) sentido la categoria de creolización de Glissant, entendida como un fenómeno del pasado y un horizonte del futuro, como un caos que promete un futuro y que es irremediablemente creol, antes de ser una categoria de negación y ruptura total con la filosofia modernidad, ofrece una comprensión renovada de dos categorias del pensamiento moderno: el cosmopolitismo y cosmopolitización. En efecto, el pensamiento de Édouard Glissant dialoga con la modernidad europea y no parece tener como intención una ruptura epistémica definitiva. ABSTRACT Martinican Édouard Glissant has been one of those authors whose poetic and literary work has made a transhumance in academic spaces and militant groups that identify themselves as decolonial. Being the object of a critical rereading of decolonials, the category of creolization is positioned - according to some - as a true example of decolonial thought, as an archetype of a non-European epistemology from the Caribbean. Against these ideas, there is a wish to show, in this paper, in what sense Glissant's category of creolization, understood as a phenomenon of the past and a horizon of the future in the whole world, as a chaos that promises a future and that is irremediably creol, offers a renewed understanding of two categories of modern thought: cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitization. Indeed, Glissant's thought dialogues with European modernity, and it does not seem to intend a definitive or partial epistemic break. (shrink)