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THE CREOLIZATION OF THEORY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................................1INTRODUCTION The Creolization of Theory Shu- mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet............................................................37ONE Symptomatically Black: A Creolization of the Political Barnor Hesse.....................................................................62TWO Postslavery and Postcolonial Representations: Comparative Approaches Anne Donadey.......................................................83THREE Crises of Money Pheng Cheah...........................................................................................................112FOUR Material Histories of Transcolonial Loss: Creolizing Psychoanalytic Theories of Melancholia? Liz Constable.............................142FIVE From Multicultural to Creole Subjects: David Henry Hwang's Collaborative Works with Philip Glass Ping-hui Liao.........................159SIX I Am Where I Think: Remapping the Order of Knowing Walter Mignolo.......................................................................193SEVEN Taiwan in Modernity/Coloniality: Orphan of Asia and the Colonial Difference Leo Ching.................................................207EIGHT Toward a Diasporic Citizen? From Internationalism to Cosmopolitics Étienne Balibar..............................................226NINE "The Forces of Creolization": Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe Fatima El-Tayeb..................................255A Europe and the Antilles: An Interview with Édouard Glissant Andrea Schwieger Hiepko Translated by Julin Everett.....................262B Creolization: Definition and Critique Dominique Chancé Translated by Julin Everett..................................................269REFERENCES....................................................................................................................................293CONTRIBUTORS..................................................................................................................................297

Chapter One

Barnor Hesse

A return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish. Édouard Glissant

This, then, is a symptom: a particular, "pathological," signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it. Slavoj Zizek

Creolization evokes the political, but only once we wrest its conceptual provenance from models based reductively on French Caribbean linguistic practices and interrogate the concept of the political itself. The familiar tropes of creolization—fusion, syncretism, transculturation—are also descriptors of the cross-cultural conditions historically emergent from the polities and societies established by Atlantic slavery across the Americas. Therefore understanding creolization as a way of conceptualizing practices other than language, though in important ways mediated by language, requires that we ask: what marks something as creolized? We can begin our answer by considering the historical formation of creole as a description, bearing the tropes of creolization as a process in three connected ways.

First, before its association with emergent languages, the term creole was used to refer to particular people. From the sixteenth century onward, initially in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French American colonies, creole, in its different versions, specified Europeans born in the colony as distinct from the metropole; Europeans whose European culture was compromised and curiously shaped by the cross-cultural environment of the colony. Underlying this was an informal distinction between pure Europeans and impure Europeans. Second, creole by the eighteenth century came to describe colonized people born in the colonies, partial descendants of slaves, whose African ancestry was mixed with European slave owners, and whose European culture and lighter pigmentation were born of colonial life. At the same time, the term also began to define the cultural and linguistic differences negotiated by the enslaved between black people born in the colony and those imported directly from Africa. It marked shifting and at times unreliable cultural distinctions between light-skinned creoles and dark-skinned creoles, as well as contested yet permeable Europeanized frontiers with the African cultural presence. Third, by the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, creole became heavily associated with particular language forms. Derived from historically combining European and African languages, culturally different vocabularies and syntactical structures, it emerged as a pragmatic means of communication between masters and slaves. Subsequently it became increasingly associated with the colonized populations and their descendants, often signifying a blurred distinction between Caribbean and European vocabularies, as well as sharp conflicts between African and European speech rhythms and comparative idioms of meaning (Glissant 1989; Dayan 1995; Chaudenson 2001; Enwezor et al. 2003).

What we can see in this historical schema of transculturation, in the movement from cultures to bodies to languages, is a logic of creolization that implicates each in the relations of European colonialities. It involves colonial imaginaries of autonomous, pure Europeanness seeking but failing to avoid contamination by representations from impure non-Europeanness, which in turn try to either assimilate Europeanness or to become extricated from it. There are also at work here antagonisms and accommodations between different claims to linguistic, cultural, and political representation that imbricate the dominant and the subordinate in the same transcultural relations. Conceptually we must also allow for mutual exchanges that influence and mediate the relation between colonizers and colonized, despite the historically European colonizing tendency to deny the dimension of cultural interdependency. Although the European colonial hegemony insisted on remaining dominant, and representative, while declaring the insignificance, marginalization, or nonexistence of a relation with the colonized other, this too is part of the logic of creolization. As is the colonized, non-European other's involvement in redefining and unsettling the dominating culture while articulating alternative cultural forms as a basis of its agency.

Each of these imbrications is as much the logic of creolization as the conventional separation of social forms (e.g., cultures, bodies, languages) into creolized and noncreolized identities. Particularly when read against the modern histories of the Americas, these still-legible colonial gestations remind us that creolization also describes the outcomes of intimate relations and discrepant fusions between formerly geographically disparate cultures;...