Changing cultures in Europe C o u r s e M o d u l e

Creolising cultures:

a perspective Kristian Van Haesendonck Centre for Comparative Studies - University of Lisbon E-mail: [email protected]

November 11, 2011 Objectives • introduction in the concept of and the debate on creolisation, in the context of postcolonial theory • To shed light on the Caribbean background of the concept • In how far is the concept useful to describe the changing cultures in “Europe”?

2 Preparatory reading

• Benitez-Rojo, “Creolisation and Nation-building in the Hispanic Caribbean”

• Gyssels, “The world wide web and rhizomatic identity: Traité du tout-monde by Édouard Glissant”

• Schwieger Hiepko, “Europe and the Antilles. An Interview with Edouard Glissant” [version in French here]

• Van Haesendonck, “From Atavism to Creolisation” 3

Structure

1. and postcolonial theory 2. From Creole to Creolisation 3. Edouard Glissant and Benítez Rojo: rhizomatic identity and chaos 4. Creolising “Europe”?

[ THE LINKS IN THIS PRESENTATION WILL TAKE YOU TO SOME RELEVANT WEBSITES, IN CASE YOU WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE. SOME IMAGES INCLUDE LINKS ]

4 When ?

. Implication of time: refers to the period after colonialism

. Problem: Post-colonialism does not propose a new term .  What´s next: post-post-colonialism?

. Other terms with Post- as prefix:  Postmodernity, Postmodern, Postmodernism  Postnationalism,  Poststructuralism, …

5 When ?

We use the term ‘post-colonial’…to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupation throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back)

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Postcolonial theory: some key theorists

• Edward SAID • Homi BHABHA • Gayatri Chakravorti SPIVAK

7 8 Edward SAID (1935 - 2003)

9 Postcolonialism and context Postcolonialism

Aim: • to shift the dominant ways in which the relations between “western” and “non- western” people and their worlds are viewed since the 19th century • to debunk presuppositions and fixed views on (formerly) colonized countries • Responds to a paradigmatic change (end of Euro-centrism)

11 Knowledge / Power

Thirld-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate…We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing ‘old fashioned’ or ‘outdated’ (Chakrabarty) Creolisation in popular culture

• Food: “creole cuisine” • Music: Jazz • Religion: syncretism – Caribbean (incl. diaspora) • Santería (Cuba) • Voodoo (Haiti) – Candomblé (Brazil) – Mexico: Virgin of Guadalupe • Dance/performance: Capoeira (Brazil)

13 Cultural creolisation

• Term mostly used by anthropologists as an analogy taken from linguistics • refers to process of mixing when cultures enter in contact (Pratt: “contact zones”) • creolisation is (wrongly) defined as synonym of “cultural mixing” and hybridity • Changing cultures –like any change tout court -involves conflict as much as negotiation:

14 dialogue or clash?

• Creolization as “the encounter, the interference, the clash, the harmonies and disharmonies between cultures in the accomplished totality of the earth-world” (Glissant) • Creative interplay between the center and periphery (Hannerz)

15 Origins

• Era of discoveries and consolidation of colonialism: Cape Verde / Caribbean & South America / Indian Ocean / Africa • Uprooting and displacement of large numbers of people in colonial plantantion economies • both slaves, colonizers and slave-traders

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17 18 Anthropology

• Use the notion to study the complex dynamics of cross-cultural contact and mixing • Cultural creolisation: “the development of new traditions, aesthetics, and group identities out of combinations of formerly separate peoples and cultures” (Spitzer) • Hannerz: “cultural creoles” in global society

19 Creole & Creoles

• Etymology – Portuguese: crioulo < cria (“infant”) – Latin: creare – Spanish: criollo = Spaniard born in New world (e.g. Nueva España (Mexico) of foreign parents.

• Progressively, the criollos (creoles) identify and interact with their local environment, making them “different” from their (overseas) ancestors as they blend and adopt different habits and “local colour”

20 Linguistics

• Since 1950s : study of pidgins and creoles • Creolistics / creology as subfield of linguistics • Creole = new language as a result of contact between different languages • Here is an example of Haitian creole (or go further, if you would like to learn some créole!)

21 Creolisation vs Hybridity

• Hybridity – Biological term – Result is usually predictible • Creolisation – Linguistic term < créole – Ongoing process / change – Result is unpredictible – Involves both conflict and dialogue

22 Context: Changing cultures

• After WWII: Decolonization of European colonies (mainly in Africa)

• Era of Globalization – Hispanization of USA – Migrations to/within Europe (from ex-colonies) – Shift in economical superpowers

23 Édouard Glissant []

• Discours Antillais / Caribbean Discourse • Poétique de la relation / Poetics of relation

[VIDEO – source: France24]

Postcolonial theory: some key-figures

• Edward SAID • • Homi BHABHA • Gayatri Chakravorti SPIVAK

25 • Voyage à l'Isle de France (1773) J.H. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814)

26 Négritude [as counter-example of creolisation]

Protagonists of Négritude

• Literary, aesthetic, ideological movement founded by – Léopold Senghor (Sénégal) – Aimé Césaire (Martinique) – Léon Gontron Damas (Guyane Française) • Reaction to domination of the “white” colonizer and his racial politics of assimilation • Context: France, 1930-40s

Aimé Césaire (Martinique, 1913-2008)

Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) Discours sur le colonialisme (1950)

• Key text of anticolonial literature • Published in the age of decolonization and revolt in Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America • Other important anti-colonial texts: • Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) • Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized • W.E.B. DuBois, Color and Democracy (1945) and The World and Africa (1947) • … Negritude

• Term < Cahier d´un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a return to the native land] (1939), by Aimé Césaire – Alternative terms: mélanité (Melas: gr. black), africanité, éthiopité • Aim: to promote and express pride of the black race • The nègre (cf. negro) “acteur historique, un acteur culturel” (Césaire) instead of a passive object of domination

Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) Negritude is the sum of the cultural values of the black world; that is, a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe. It is…a certain `way of relating oneself to the world and to others´. Yes, it is essentially relations with others, an opening out to the world, contact and participation with others. Because of what it is, negritude is necessary in the world today: it is a humanism of the twentieth century (Senghor, 28) Eloge de la Créolité / In Praise of Creoleness

35 Eloge de la Créolité / In Praise of Creoleness

36 Antonio Benítez-Rojo [Cuba] La isla que se repite / The Repeating Island The Repeating Island

• Attempt to theorize the Caribbean from a poetic, ‘postmodern perspective’

• Chaos [theory] as a space where the pure sciences connect with the social sciences, art and cultural tradition

• Caribbean as meta-archipelago without boundaries / center

Fractal [Mandelbrot]

• « …the Caribbean as an important historico-economic sea and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each copy a different one… » (Benítez-Rojo) The Caribbean The Repeating Island

• meta-archipelago which connects the Americas ‘in a certain way’ (!) • Plantation as the ‘unifying’ factor in Caribbean culture • Problem: Plantation as essentializing metaphor ? • Performance and polyrhythm The Repeating Island

• The certainty about creolization is that it inevitably refers to the plantation” • ...to my way of thinking none of our cultural manifestations is creolized, but is, rather, in a state of creolization. I think that creolization does not transform literature or music or language into a synthesis or anything that could be taken in essentialist terms (...)For me, creolization is a term with which we attempt to explain the unstable states that Caribbean cultural artefacts [such as orishas, cf. santería], continuously transformed by a series of performers, present over time (C&T, 149) 43

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Overseas / outermost Europe EU outermost regions • Martinique, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Guyana, La Réunion, Mayotte (Départements d´Outre Mer of France) • Azores, Madeira, Canary Islands

EU overseas territories • Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten (autonomous countries of the Netherlands) • French Polynesia, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin, Futuna & Wallis (Overseas collectivities of France) • Falkland Islands, Bermuda, … • Greenland

* Most territories and regions are part of the European Union but not of the Schengen Area. Their habitants have European citizenship (incl. Greenlanders).

45 Video: Wallis & Futuna: Forever

French? [source: Australia Network]

46 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgjoa1_la ncement-de-l-annee-des-outre-mer-discours- de-m-maximin_news

47 Daniel Maximin

(Poet, Guadeloupe. Commissioner of the French Year on Overseas Territories) “Where Europe is concerned, I think habits are hard to break, especially when one has conquered the world, governed the world, dominated the world. But I think that as long as there is nog change, not only in consciousness, but also in the imaginaire, the imaginary or deep mentality of European, nothing will happen.” (Glissant, interviewed by A.S.Hiepko)

49 Rhizomatic identity [Deleuze & Guattari]

rhizome Glissant and globalization

• Glissant fears the effects of globalization: – Homogeneization / standardisation – reinforcement of old hegemonies – the gap between North and South • Globalisation as opportunity: true creolisation of cultures is taking place in the « chaos-monde » or « tout-monde » • the Net changes our way of reading and studying literature and art – Back to orality? – « l'oralité, qui, elle aussi est une technique, est très comparable à ce qu'on voit dans l'Internet»

Learn more: The world wide web and rhizomatic identity: Traité du tout-monde by Édouard Glissant, by Kathleen Gyssels

51 orality / technology

« Electronic technologies are first and foremost techniques of written communication. But the fact is that orality, which is also a technique, is quite comparable to what we see on the Internet. Both show wild forms of accumulation, the excessiveness of an unexpected and unstoppable flow. What are the signs of oral culture? It is exactly this sense of relation, of the unexpected, the excessive, and the cumulative. That is why I think that a poetics of relation is akin to electronic technologies »

(interview with Glissant, Schwieger-Hiepko)

52 Europe´s “Tribalism”

• Atavism as persistent problem • the return of ethnocentrism based on foundational myths • Opposed to composite cultures, open to creolisation (cf. Caribbean) Europe´s “Tribalism”

• “Europeans squabble, they fight , they kill because of tribal affiliations”

• Race as marker of difference: "the cultural confusions of being black and British”; “a Europe I feel both of and not of” (Caryl Phillips [St. Kitts])

Cultural memory (Europe)

• Can we theorize about “creolization in Europe” without taking into account the (historical) links between overseas territories and EU? • Cultural memory: how to rethink cultural relations between Caribbean territories – EU without falling in the old binary traps?

55 Video: EU as postmodern empire?

56 Towards a “new” Europe?

• Debate on European identity and European literature should take into account what happens at the EU’s (ultra-)periphery. • Europe should question itself as cultural “borderland” (Balibar) • The (EU) Caribbean as synecdoche for Europe? Sources

• BENÍTEZ-ROJO, Antonio, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Durham: Duke UP, 1997

• CHRISMAN, Laura & Patrick WILLIAMS, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Essex: Longman, 1994

• COHEN, Robin & Paola TONINATO: The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures, London: Routledge, 2009

• GLISSANT, Edouard: Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, Trad. Michael Dash, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999

• GLISSANT, Edouard: Poetics of relation, trad. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997

• GYSSELS, Kathleen: “The world wide web and rhizomatic identity: Traité du tout-monde by Édouard Glissant”, in: Mots Pluriels, No 18. August 2001

58 • HANNERZ, Ulf (1987) ‘The world in creolization’, Africa, 57 (4), 546- 59

• LIONNET Françoise & Shu-mei SHIH (eds.) : The Creolization of theory, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011

• SCHWIEGER HIEPKO, Andrea: “Europe and the Antilles. An Interview with Edouard Glissant”, in: LIONNET & SHIH, 255-261 [original version in French here]

• VAN HAESENDONCK, Kristian. “From Atavism to Creolization `Europeanness´ in Contemporary Caribbean Discourse", in: D´haen, Theo & Iannis Goerlandt (ed.), Literature for Europe?, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009. 101-122

• YOUNG, Robert J.C., Postcolonialism: A very short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003

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LACE weekend Lisbon – January 27-29

Be there!

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