Creolization, Hybridity and Archipelagic Thinking: Interrogating Inscriptions of Postcolonial Agency

Abstract The terms creolization and hybridity are neither parallel nor interchangeable. The former cannot be fully understood without taking into account its historical background and geographical context so that creolization is a phenomenon of exchange and transformation that is indispensable to understanding the New World experience. Hybridity, on the other hand, claims to provide a framework for avoiding the binaries of colonialist thinking, enabling agency particularly in postcolonial contexts involving subaltern subjects. Such a reading posits contact and chaos, cultural relativity, exchange and transformation as key tools in a polyvalent system of thought. The resulting nonbinary, archipelagic framework leads to the concept of archipelic rather than continental thought, transcending the universalist presumptions of the either/or and revising and rewriting traditional notions of boundary and location.