Creolization on screen: Guy Deslauriers’s The Middle Passage as Afro-Diasporic Discourse [Le passage du milieu]

Abstract

ABSTRACT Le passage du milieu (France, 1999) or The Middle-Passage (US version, 2001) proposes in theoretical and conceptual cinematic language a visual and aural translation of the Creolization process on screen. Drawing on literary and theoretical imageries of the middle passage, Filmmaker Guy Deslauriers and his screenwriters replace plot-driven Western literary and visual constructions of la traite with an abstract and disorienting rumination on the slave trade to situate the film in a tradition of African diasporic discourses and to posit the ship as the first island and the original site of proto-creolization.