Michaeline A. Crichlow, an historical sociologist, is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development and a co-editor of Informalization: Process and Structure. Patricia Northover is a Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE POST-CREOLE IMAGINATION

Notes on Fleeing the PlantationBy MICHAELINE A. CRICHLOW PATRICIA NORTHOVER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4441-4

Contents

Preface........................................................................................................................................ixPrologue Globalization and Creole Identities THE SHAPING OF POWER IN POST-PLANTATION SPACES..................................................1One Locating the Global in Creolization SHIPS SAILING THROUGH MODERN SPACE...................................................................15Two Creole Time on the Move...................................................................................................................41Three Decentering the "Dialectics of Resistance" in the Context of a Globalizing Modern AFRO-CREOLES UNDER COLONIAL RULE.....................73Four Power and Its Subjects in Postcolonial Performance.......................................................................................107Five "Gens Anglaises" DIASPORIC MOVEMENTS REMIXING THE WORLD WITH POST-CREOLE IMAGINATIONS...................................................135Six An eBay Imaginary in an Unequal World CREOLIZATION ON THE MOVE...........................................................................171Epilogue Rethinking Creolization through Multiple Prsences MASKS, MASQUERADES, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN SUBJECTS............................201Notes..........................................................................................................................................221Index..........................................................................................................................................285

Chapter One

LOCATING THE GLOBAL IN CREOLIZATION

Ships Sailing through Modern Space

From childhood, therefore, Creoleness made me aware of the complex labyrinth of the family of human kind into which I was born in the twentieth century. The formation of the Atlantic as a zone of the world economy is not a question of geographical determinism. Indeed, even to think of the adaptation of the social and economic arrangements of the world economy to the physical and cultural environments of the Atlantic risks obscuring the complex historical processes through which specific aspects of those environments and not others were selected and developed.

A fragile reality (the experience of Caribbeanness, woven together from one side of the Caribbean to the other) negatively twisted together in its urgency (Caribbeanness as a dream, forever denied, often deferred, yet a strange stubborn presence in our responses). This reality is there in essence: dense (inscribed in fact) but threatened (not inscribed in consciousness). This dream is vital, but not obvious.

CREOLIZATION, SO APTLY described by Balutansky and Sourieau as "that syncretic process of transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities," has figured significantly in the Caribbean's complex histories of globalization, nationalization and regionalization. It has done so not only as process but, perhaps more importantly, as a problematic and politics that arguably has been implicated in shaping pasts, presents, and possible futures. Indeed, as several scholars have highlighted, practices for conceptualizing and strategizing development or spaces of hope in the region have tended to deploy various models of what may be called "Creole-isms" for articulating a cultural politics of Creole nationalistic and/or regionalistic, modernization projects.

As Hintzen has recently argued, the Creole ideas of interdependency and literal mixture have been deployed in the forging of Caribbean spaces to support specific erasures of cleavages or a papering over plural-cultural, racial, and ethnic cracks for effecting the unstable paradox of "plural wholes" as represented by modern yet Creole nation-states. Lloyd Best takes this critical stance further in his argument that these tactics of cultural adaptation or strategies of creolization that have been creatively expressed by diasporic populations to negotiate the structural effects of a hegemonic plantation cultural politics have nonetheless left the region in an unviable state. Given these experiences in the region, for Best the essential problem of development was therefore not one of a cultural transition to the "modern" (albeit nuanced by Creole cultures, as emphasized by Arthur Lewis in the Theory of Economic Growth); it was rather the radically deconstructive one of cultural transformation for "fleeing the plantation" and its racialized cultural and ethnic heritages of e/race/ing place, that is, the elision and (partial) loss of particularity and of presences.

However, while an understanding of the different kinds of cultural politics at work in the search for "catching up," "sustainable development," or "forging ahead" in the modern world system is important, the fundamental task of providing a more adequate theoretical and methodological framework for grasping the nature of the sociocultural change processes at work in modern times is still left as unfinished business. In taking up this challenge we wish to shift the terms of thinking about modernity by arguing that the condition of "being-modern-in-the-world" is best grasped not through ideas of time per se but rather through expressions of place and, relatedly, space. For though creolization studies have tended to focus on sociocultural practices-the outcome of distinct power relations-they have done so without a sufficient exploration of the connections linking the circuits of place, space, and "chains of power," which are conducting, producing, and disrupting such outcomes. Absent therefore from these accounts is a sufficient interrogation of the nature of the relationship between states and societies, or rather, between state spaces and subject places in the modern, and especially post-plantation era. This, we argue, would provide a window through which we can espy more fully practices invested with post-Creole imaginations and the cultural and ethnic or racialized struggles associated with creolization in the context of modern spaces, the apparent site of globalization processes. The post-Creole imagination as evoked in and routed through these processes is a central character in our stories of creolization here and speaks to stirred desires for making newness, that is, hopes for arriving in another future not present, and achieving a different space and place. It may be related to Derrida's idea that a structure of practical activity entails a messianicity, elucidated by Hoy as a concept that "drops the teleological story of progress, but retains the eschatological aspect whereby a breakthrough event can erupt at any moment" (our emphasis).

Creolization/creolization studies (henceforth creolization) as elaborated in this text are thus also centrally concerned with sociocultural practices, including subject productions. But we address them through a method that, first, seeks to link these practices with their emergent conditions of existence, or liminal wombs of present space, and second, offers to treat the two as relationally constituted and transformed...