Créolité
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Créolité is a literary movement first developed in the 1980s by Martinican writers Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. The trio published Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) in 1989 as a response to the perceived inadequacies of the négritude movement. Créolité, or "creoleness", is a neologism which attempts to describe the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Antilles, and more specifically of the French Caribbean.
History
Créolité can perhaps best be described in contrast with the movement that preceded it, la négritude, a literary movement spearheaded by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas in the 1930s. The Négritude writers sought to define themselves in terms of their cultural, racial, and historical ties to the African continent as a rejection of French colonial political hegemony and of French cultural, intellectual, racial, and moral domination. Césaire and his contemporaries considered the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora as a source of power and self-worth for those oppressed by physical and psychological violence of the colonial project.
Later writers such as Martinican Edouard Glissant came to reject the monolithic view of "blackness" portrayed in the négritude movement. In the early 1980s, Glissant advanced the concept of Antillanité ("Caribbeanness") which claimed that Caribbean identity could not be described solely in terms of African descent. Caribbean identity came not only from the heritage of ex-slaves, but was equally influenced by indigenous Caribbeans, European colonialists, East Indian and Chinese coolies (indentured servants). Glissant and adherents to the subsequent créolité movement (called créolistes) stress the unique historical and cultural roots of the Caribbean region while still rejecting French dominance in the French Caribbean.
The authors of Eloge de la créolité describe créolité as "an annihilation of fake universality, of monolinguism, and of purity." (La créolité est une annihilation de la fausse universalité, du monolinguisme et de la pureté). In particular, the créolité movement seeks to overturn the dominance of French as the language of culture and literature in the French Caribbean. Instead it valorizes the use of Antillean Creole in literary, cultural, and academic contexts. Indeed, many of the créolistes publish their novels in both Creole and French.
Bibliography
Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant (1993).Éloge de la créolité Paris: Gallimard. p. 28.
Ormerod, Beverley (1998), "The Martinican concept of "creoleness": A multiracial redefinition of culture", Mots Pluriels, vol. 7.
Créolité is a literary movement first developed in the 1980s by Martinican writers Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. The trio published Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) in 1989 as a response to the perceived inadequacies of the négritude movement. Créolité, or "creoleness", is a neologism which attempts to describe the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the Antilles, and more specifically of the French Caribbean.
History
Créolité can perhaps best be described in contrast with the movement that preceded it, la négritude, a literary movement spearheaded by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas in the 1930s. The Négritude writers sought to define themselves in terms of their cultural, racial, and historical ties to the African continent as a rejection of French colonial political hegemony and of French cultural, intellectual, racial, and moral domination. Césaire and his contemporaries considered the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora as a source of power and self-worth for those oppressed by physical and psychological violence of the colonial project.
Later writers such as Martinican Edouard Glissant came to reject the monolithic view of "blackness" portrayed in the négritude movement. In the early 1980s, Glissant advanced the concept of Antillanité ("Caribbeanness") which claimed that Caribbean identity could not be described solely in terms of African descent. Caribbean identity came not only from the heritage of ex-slaves, but was equally influenced by indigenous Caribbeans, European colonialists, East Indian and Chinese coolies (indentured servants). Glissant and adherents to the subsequent créolité movement (called créolistes) stress the unique historical and cultural roots of the Caribbean region while still rejecting French dominance in the French Caribbean.
The authors of Eloge de la créolité describe créolité as "an annihilation of fake universality, of monolinguism, and of purity." (La créolité est une annihilation de la fausse universalité, du monolinguisme et de la pureté). In particular, the créolité movement seeks to overturn the dominance of French as the language of culture and literature in the French Caribbean. Instead it valorizes the use of Antillean Creole in literary, cultural, and academic contexts. Indeed, many of the créolistes publish their novels in both Creole and French.
In the 1930s, black and coloured intellectuals from the French Caribbean colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane sought for the first time to define their cultural identity in terms of their historical and racial affiliations with Africa, rather than their political and educational ties with France. During centuries of colonial rule, class barriers had effectively separated darker-skinned from lighter-skinned West Indians; the school system had reinforced European aesthetic norms, and had demanded the repudiation of Creole, the language associated with black slaves, in favour of French. The Negritude movement, inaugurated with L.-G. Damas' Pigments (1937) and Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land, 1939), rejected this cultural predominance of France and emphasized the writers' membership of the African diaspora. To the Martinican Césaire is attributed the neologistic term, Négritude, which stressed the vital importance to the poet's ideology of his adherence to the black race. He and Damas brandished the terms "Negro", "Africa", "instinct" and even "savage" in their verse, delineating a new Caribbean cultural profile in truculent defiance of the prejudices of their likely public. For their message was addressed not only to French readers, but (and perhaps primarily) to the Francophile coloured and black bourgeoisie in the West Indies which had acquiesced in Europe's dismissal of Africa as a site of racial and cultural inferiority.... More
Ananci_7 wrote:
Very interesting, O. From what I gather this is virtually identical to the arguments advanced by novelist Earl Lovelace, Carnival masman Peter Minshall and especially by economist and social/political thinker Lloyd Best in the English-speaking Caribbean.
I can’t help but wonder if both groups developed such thoughts independently or if one had an influence on the other.
I just wonder if both the Bestian school and the Creolite school of thought fed off of each other, developed independently or if one possibly influenced the other. I know Lloyd travelled and taught widely in his younger days and would have interacted with numerous thinkers both English and non-English speaking. He also drew extensively from just about everyone. His essay "Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom" which was written in 1967, I think outlines a lot of what seems to be advocated here in this concept of creolite
Otorongo wrote:
The Discourse of Coolitude
Diasporic Indians have adapted several discursive strategies in their efforts to thematize their experience of indenture and coolietization. They have employed neo-Hindu and neo-Islamic discourses, Christian discourses, Afro-Caribbean discourses of Negritude and créolité, and the Indian diasporic discourses of Indianité and Indienocéanisme. Coolitude builds on many of these discourses, particularly those of negritude, créolité and Indianité. The basic concept and the larger discourse around it were worked out in two earlier books, Cale d'Etoiles-Coolitude (1992) and Chair Corail, Fragments Coolies (1999). The latter was written after a very lively meeting in 1997 with Aimé Césaire, the founder of Negritude. However, in Coolitude, Torabully is very clear regarding his differences with Césaire and also with the founders of the créolité movement.
Both negritude and créolité are too centered for Torabully. So also is Indianité. Although centered in different places, they all share a “fixist attitude”* (p. 146). Negritude is too centered in Africa, Créolité in the French Caribbean, and Indianité in India. Thus at the end of their meeting when Cesaire says to Torabully, “you will do for India what I did for Africa” (p. 147), the latter recognized his difference with the former. Torabully's discomfort came from the fact that Cesaire was making India an “Ultimate Referent” (p. 147) for him. Similarly, in relation to Indianité, Torabully writes that “coolitude does redefine the concept of Indianité when it is a fixist set of Indian values” (p. 150).
Coolitude, though sharing the theme of cultural recovery with Negritude and Indianité, and of cultural mixing or métissage with créolité, differs from all three in its greater degree of de-centeredness and hence openness to other cultures and identities. Coolitude models itself on the semiotic structure of language and other sign systems rather than the logical systems of philosophical reason. The latter lead to a closed system as opposed to a de-centered structure, “being a construction with the idea of a totality, a centre” (p. 155). Coolitude “implies an approach in which the notion of a guiding culture, of a centre, of a logos becomes defunct” (p. 155). In other words, coolitude is a discourse that takes the theme of the postcolonial recovery of centered cultures from Negritude and Indianité along with theme of métissage from créolité and reinscribes them in a structural (semiotic) framework rather than a logical, national, ethnic or geographical one. The breaks with geography and nation are signalled by “making the crossing central” (p. 15). The ships and the ocean remind us that “the centre, the land of ‘origins' is not the ultimate referent” (p. 159).
"Coolitude" is both an intellectual interpretation, and a poetic and artistic immersion into the world of the vanished coolie. This collection of previously unpublished texts, poems and sketches capture the essence of the Indian plantation experience and deconstruct traditional depictions of the status of the coolie in the British Empire.
The concept of coolitude encompasses the experiences of the first generation workers together with those of their descendants spread across the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands today. Indeed the symbolic value of the word lies in the scope it gives us for considering both the specificities of the coolie experience and its use as a comparative tool.
The book embraces coolitude in its various incarnations: the shared experience of the voyaging migrants, the walk from village to port town and the weeks spent on the ship. All those Indians, irrespective of whether they went to Fiji, South Africa, the West Indies or the Indian Ocean islands, underwent an exile from homeland. "Coolitude" emphasizes their shared history.
Marina Carter completed her DPhil in history at Oxford University and subsequently held a research fellowship at Royal Holloway and Bedford College, University of London, followed by a Research Fellowship funded by the American McArthur Foundation. She has worked and studied for many years in Mauritius, where she has founded a pioneering NGO called the Centre for Research on Indian Ocean Societies (CRIOS). Widely published, she was recently appointed an honorary research fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh
Khal Torabully the descendant of a Lascar community who left India two hundred years ago, lives and works in France where he is not only a doctor of linguistics, but an acclaimed poet and filmmaker. He has numerous publications and awards to his credit, including the Prix Missives 1998 for his L'ombre rouge des gazelles, and the prize for best filmmaker at the Zanzibar International Film Festival of 1998.
" The concept of "Coolitude" of course parallels that of 'Negritude', pioneered by Clive James and other African and Caribbean intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s. It could have an equally profound cultural impact. [This book] is therefore politically as well as intellectually ambitious.
I believe that without a negritude movement almost fifty years earlier, a creolite movement would not be a possible reality. The negritude movement of the 1930's by Cesaire, Dumas, Senghor and others was an identity necessity in oppressive colonial times, metaphorical of planting of seeds. Fifty years later those seeds have bloom, bearing the fruits of creolite.
Creolite attempts at a new identity, and perhaps a total detachment from negritude is rather devoid of an urgent identity / crisis necessity, and the giants which made it possible. Creolite is a new age cultural folklore in my view, which prhaps all societies go through.
'
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