Creolization as Method

“What took place in the Caribbean,” writes Édouard Glissant, “which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation as nearly as possible.”1 For Glissant, the word creolization condenses the history of the Caribbean. This is a history characterized by trans-border connections, culture flows, and the transregional movement of people and capital.2 As the first region to be colonized by Europe in the sixteenth century and the last one to be—incompletely—decolonized in the twentieth, the Caribbean has been shaped by the worldwide demand and supply of colonial labor. It was the destination of nearly half of all the enslaved Africans trafficked into the New World between 1492 and the end of the nineteenth century; of significant numbers of indentured and contracted European laborers during much of the same period; as well as of indentured Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian workers after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century.3 Subsequently, the first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a circuit of intra-regional migration of a labor force to the larger Caribbean islands where US-led corporations operated. After World War II, when labor from the non-independent territories of the Caribbean was recruited to rebuild the postwar economies of western Europe and the United States, the region turned into a source of transcontinental emigration.4 On account of this history, the Caribbean has been theorized in terms of transculturation, creolization, and hybridity; concepts such as “remittance societies,” “circular migration,” or “diaspora,” widely used in transnational studies, have also been coined in relation to the Caribbean.5 More than these other terms, however, the concept of creolization has come to condense both the sedimentation and ramifications of this history.