Queer creolization in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco

Abstract

This chapter argues that Chamoiseau’s sidestepping of the logic of biological kinship and genealogical lineage works to subvert the repeated invocation of Martinique’s ties to the “motherland,” France, thus enabling the diasporic and dialogic subjectivities of creolité. The novel offers a history of diasporic community formation on Martinique which questions and finally resists the demand for filiation, just as it does without the trope of motherhood. This reading of Chamoiseau’s novel also allows for a reconsideration of debates over creolization and Édouard Glissant’s notion of relationality, both of which have received renewed and increased attention, including in the anglosphere, in recent years. In order to make creolization useful for a queer postcolonial and diasporic critique, I argue that creolization must also be understood as a displacement from normative, national kinship, and that this then feeds back into recent debates on creolization as a global process, not one restricted to the Caribbean.