Creole to the world

By Dylan Kerrigan

Globalisation and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation, by Michaeline A. Crichlow, with Patricia Northover (Duke University Press, ISBN 978-0-8223-4441-4, 305 pp)

I have a bias: I think the Caribbean is the centre of the world. Not because it’s where I live and work, but because the rest of the world could learn much from us.

The pushback against this thinking, from persons both within the region and outside it, has always been that the Caribbean — and its ideas and people — are too numerically and financially insignificant for the Western powerhouses of the world to take lessons from. Perhaps this isn’t surprising — from a Caribbean point of view, it’s clear these Western powerhouses believe their own hype. The Euro-American culture industries churn out films and media that force the rest of the world to believe we all share some everyday connection to metropolitan lifestyles and tastes. These culture industries produce a massive number of books, scholars, and ideas, too. This quantity of textual production often stands in for actual quality, its sheer weight of material drowning out what are potentially valid — and perhaps better — ideas about globalisation and cultural change.

After reading Globalisation and the Post-Creole Imagination, I’ve come to think Michaeline Crichlow might share my bias. Her book puts a Caribbean-derived concept about cultural process, mixture, and change at the centre of her project, which is to better understand the development and multiple nature of modern subjecthood. That concept is creolisation theory. It has been around since the 1970s, and Crichlow believes it can be liberated from its analysis of Caribbean plantation history and discussion of the ways domination and resistance came together to produce new forms of culture in the Caribbean, to become a valid concept for talking about socio-economic inequalities globally.

To do this, Crichlow takes the reader on a journey through “theory” that begins in the Caribbean, stretches far beyond it, but also circles back. We move through sociology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and much else. We learn about the French thinker Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus” — a bubble of historically derived dispositions each person carries around, which shapes who they are. We are shown the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s “rhizomes” as a way to move beyond linear thinking. Our understanding of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic concept is extended to include the whole world of oppressed people within its sphere. There is much more “theory” throughout. Crichlow’s central reason for discussing so many theoretical constructs is to connect them all back to the process of creolisation. This is in order to let the reader see that all populations around the world who are confronted by power today and develop forms of resistance to it — where their own personhood is reshaped — are essentially involved in a modern process of creolisation, similar to what Caribbean populations went through during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Crichlow’s purpose, as I see it, is to subvert the traditional, local definition of creolisation and reinvigorate the concept as a more robust and empirical global tool — one that can clearly articulate and reveal the open-ended and fluid constants of cultural interaction taking place all around the world, as different peoples, groups, and ideas come together in the process of neo-liberal globalisation. In doing this, she builds on previous ideas about the reinvention of creolisation by other thinkers. These include the Jamaican sociologist Nigel Bolland, the British literary theorist Wendy Knepper, the Martiniquan writer Èdouard Glissant, and the late Trinidadian economist and philosopher Lloyd Best, who stressed in a 2001 lecture at York University in Canada that what the Caribbean had to sell to the world was our experience: “because globalisation is imposing our experience on everybody now . . .we have lived it for five hundred years and we need to write it down and distill it.” For Crichlow, this same self-awareness of resistance and creation in the Caribbean can be extended to understanding the wider world today.

Crichlow is a historical sociologist, as clearly seen in her prologue and first two chapters, where she connects the Caribbean plantation history of marginalised populations confronting power to vulnerable populations around the world, confronting the modern power inequalities produced by neo-liberal policies and pressures. The questions she answers here put Caribbean experience at the centre of understanding the global; for example: “how concretely does Caribbean creolisation, as a process of selective creations and cultural struggle, find expression in this postcolonial, neo-liberal economic era?”

Her third chapter is something of an in-between space, between the local and the global, where Crichlow poses interesting questions about “the politics of accommodation” as much more than a passive space of domination. Here her text stresses forms of accommodation as fruitful spaces where resistance can be understood as a “flight to modernity,” producing new subject forms that are more than simple binary positions providing opportunities for social mobility. As an example, she talks about persons involved in informal economic activity, and describes the emergence of diverse subsistence cultivators in late nineteenth-century Caribbean societies and their development into modern producers of export crops. She also enters the St Lucian flower marketplace and shows how hustlers previously deemed unrespectable developed to become accepted citizens.

From here onward the book moves out of the Caribbean to see creolisation at work around the world. The key chapter, for me, where the author’s thesis about the importance of reinvigorating the creolisation concept is most clearly discussed, is “An eBay Imaginary in an Unequal World: Creolisation on the Move”. Here Crichlow points to compelling instances of a new conception of creolisation. Examples of life in different places around the globe — under different expressions of the practices of government, neo-liberalism, and registers of race, gender, and class in different locales — provide weight for her claims about the utility and benefits of reworking creolisation theory.

In many ways, Crichlow’s post-creole imagination can be understood as an endeavour to connect the world’s economically oppressed populations. The post-creole imagination, while still acknowledging cultural differences between nations and populations, recasts globalisation as a form of neo-colonialism, and as such recognises that in the history of populations that were colonised — such as in the Caribbean — can be found the everyday techniques for confronting political and economic processes. Not only that: scholars, by revisiting creolisation theory, can also find the language best suited to describe and document resistance to powerlessness.

Seen as a whole, the book is structured according to continuities in and disruptions to the old and new discourses of creolisation which Crichlow interrogates. Each chapter stands on its own but can also be read within a wider narrative of reconsideration that frames the whole book. Aimed at fellow academics, the language in the text may not always be accessible to the non-specialist reader. That said, if you love theory, Crichlow’s text is impressive for the way it brings together the thought of so many scholars to provide a rich and sophisticated analysis of the process and ontology of creolisation. These various authors and theorists would fill the walls of any high cultural theory hall of fame.

Inevitably, as with any dense theoretical work — and this is my central criticism of the text — there is a tendency to introduce straw men. On occasion, faceless researchers who claim an extreme position, invisible agents who are driving the project of globalisation, and popular accounts that somehow stand in for verified statements of fact provide Crichlow’s discussion with convenient targets to knock down. There is also, in the author’s promise of fresh ideas, a tendency to paint old thoughts in new words. Echoes of Lloyd Best’s “Ethnicity as Automatic Solidarity”, Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, and Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony give the sense that even though the post-creole imagination feels new, we’ve been over this ground before, in other ways and at other times.

With over sixty pages of footnotes, Globalisation and the Post-Creole Imagination might function equally well as an online text with hyperlinks. Perhaps this is a deliberate style choice, meant to echo the rhizomatic thinking the author embraces. The constant back-and-forth between text and footnotes won’t be to every reader’s liking. Such intertextuality is highly effective on one level: it conveys the infinite intersections involved in the process of cultural change. But on another level, this referential abundance invites concerns of over-determination: with so many referents, meaning becomes slippery to hold on to.

At the end of the book, I was left somewhat torn. Crichlow has successfully placed Caribbean thought and cultural theory at the centre of a project to better understand oppression around the world. Caribbean ideas, she demonstrates, are as valid and important to cultural theory as those in any Euro-American text. In this sense, the book scores points for the theoretical brilliance of Caribbean scholarship. Yet while it may promote discussion in graduate classes around the world, I doubt this is a book most ordinary readers will find accessible, let alone finish.

This, for me, is often the greatest pity about post-colonial critique at its theoretical best. I am never sure if, for all its brilliant word play and culture-speak, such books do anything to change the real-life social relations laid down in the past, and the violence — actual and structural — that many persons around the world live with each day. Even when Globalisation and the Post-Creole Imagination successfully places Caribbean theory at the centre of understanding the modern world, it is reproducing a kind of ivory-tower segregation, and the very neo-colonial power relations it sets out to counteract. When I put the book down, I was left thinking that fleeing one plantation for another isn’t fleeing anything at all.

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The Caribbean Review of Books, January 2011

Dylan Kerrigan is an anthropologist, currently based at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. His recent research looks at the relationship between the accumulation of capital and the shifting construction of difference in nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban Trinidad.