On the scholar who most fully helps us start to grapple with the connections.
I don’t think it’s much of a
stretch to say that for most Americans, the Caribbean means, primarily or
perhaps even solely, cruises and beach vacations and daiquiris with little
umbrellas in them and making sure not to drink the water and etc. There’s also
that whole
unfortunateness about the Communist country with the (apparently) great
cigars that we can’t legally smoke and the bearded dictator and the
near-Nuclear War back in the day, but since Cuba isn’t an option for those
cruises and beach vacations, I think it’s pretty distinct from the public
consciousness of “the Caribbean” in any case. Yet the complex reality is that
the Caribbean, or more exactly the many different distinct islands and nations
it comprises, has been a hugely significant influence on American life (and
vice versa) from literally the first 15th-century moments of
European arrival (which took place on Hispaniola, present home to Haiti and the
Dominican Republic, where
Columbus first came ashore). There are, for example, the complex ways in
which the Haitian
Revolution followed the American one, scared the hell out of Southern
slaveowners, and contributed to France selling the Louisiana Purchase to the
US. Or there’s everything that Puerto Rico and Cuba
meant to America’s imperialistic visions and wars at the end of the 19th
century. Or our somewhat unofficial but very real and troubling relationships
with dictators like the Dominican
Republic’s Trujillo in the mid-20th century. And the list goes on.
It stands to reason, then, that
one of the scholars and writers who can provide the most insight into our
national identity and experience—but whose voice and ideas, like the historical
meanings of the Caribbean itself, are vastly underappreciated or even unknown
in America (at least outside of the academy, and I would argue even inside it
to a degree)—hails from the Caribbean island of Martinique. That writer is Edouard
Glissant, a hugely unique and impressive literary and cultural scholar and creative
writer whose life very directly included links not only to his Caribbean home
but also to France (where for example he was asked by President Chirac in 2006
to serve as the inaugural
president of a cultural centre focused on the history of the slave trade)
and to America (where for example he served as a visiting professor at the City
University of New York for decades). Glissant published eight novels, at least
as many books of poetry, and critical and theoretical works in a variety of
disciplines, and also worked actively on behalf of counter-culture political
and activist movements in both France and Martinique. He was short-listed for
the Nobel Prize (in the same year that St.
Lucian Derek Walcott won it—guess that was the year for Caribbean writers
to be nominated) and until the end of his life in 2011 produced
meaningful and compelling work in all his many genres.
But for an American audience, and
more specifically for our understanding of our own history and identity, I
think Glissant can be boiled down to one crucial text: his recent essay “Creolization
in the Making of the Americas.” Finding this piece was one of the most
significant moments for me in the research for my second book,
a clear and striking affirmation that my main idea is in conversation with some
of those scholars who have thought and are thinking about what defines the New
World. But even if you never read my book—for shame!—you have to check out
Glissant’s essay, which lays out succinctly and beautifully one of his most
central ongoing arguments: that from their very origins (at least in the post-contact era), the Americas have been defined by cultural mixture, and even
more importantly by the new and hybrid results of such mixtures. As Glissant
puts it early in that essay, “When we speak about creolization, we do not only
mean metissage: crossbreeding, because creolization adds something new to the components
that participate in it.” And that’s the most crucial part of his ideas (and a
big part of what I see as the stakes of defining our history and identity in
this way, as both he and I would): that such creolizations are foundational and
transformative for all who participate in them, making Americans, from the
outset, unified across any cultural or ethnic or racial boundaries by this
shared set of experiences.
It’s hard to overstate how
radical such ideas were in the 1970s and 80s when Glissant was first beginning
to fully articulate them. That was the era of identity politics and the rise of
multiculturalism and ethnic studies departments, an era when celebrating
diversity—meaning recognizing and embracing many distinct identities and
histories and cultures—was becoming a national emphasis. Glissant didn’t
dismiss such emphases or their political and cultural value, but he did argue,
with force and conviction and precision and great power, that the diversity of
the Americas has not only always been present but also has produced continual
and crucial interconnections and new identities. Maybe not beach reading, but
damn important stuff.
Next connection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other connections you’d share?
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