Rethinking the poetics of creolization: literary representations of cultural interactions in contemporary English-speaking Caribbean works

Résumé 0

Creolization is a founding concept in the understanding of contemporary Caribbean identities. It served to imagine a certain unity at a time when nationalist movements were emerging in a region where cultural diversity was sometimes a divisive factor. Cultural encounters in these countries had occurred in circumstances of extreme violence (slavery, colonization, indentured serviture) and under the constraint of colonial domination. This article analyzes unbalanced representations of creolization in contemporary Caribbean literature, viewed through the prism of cultural appropriation. It offers a fresh perspective on contemporary English-speaking Caribbean works by Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Olive Senior, Marlon James and Paule Marshall. Through an aesthetic and literary approach to creolization and cultural appropriation, it examines how literary works invite us to question forced exchanges between cultures in a colonial and postcolonial context and in Caribbean diasporas in England and North America. These literary works shed an aesthetic light on cultural interactions and emphasize the continuity in the contemporary context of cultural appropriation that occurred in the Caribbean’s colonial past.