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 A M ER IC A N C R EOL E S
The Francophone Caribbean
and the American South

francophone p ostcolonial st u dies

The annual publication of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies
New Series, Vol. 3

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 1 13/04/2012 11:09:47

 Francophone Postcolonial Studies
New Series, Vol. 3, 2012

The annual publication of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies

The Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (SFPS) is an international

association which exists in order to promote, facilitate and otherwise support the
work of all scholars and researchers working on colonial/postcolonial studies in the
French-speaking world. SFPS was created in 2002 with the aim of continuing and
developing the pioneering work of its predecessor organization, the Association for
the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French (ASCALF). SFPS does not
seek to impose a monolithic understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ and it consciously
aims to appeal to as diverse a range of members as possible, in order to engage in
wide-ranging debate on the nature and legacy of colonialism in and beyond the
French-speaking world. SFPS encourages work of a transcultural, transhistorical,
comparative and interdisciplinary nature. It implicitly seeks to decolonize the term
Francophone, emphasizing that it should refer to all cultures where French is spoken
(including, of course, France itself), and it encourages a critical reflection on the
nature of the cognate disciplines of French Studies, on the one hand, and Anglophone
Postcolonial Studies, on the other.
Our vision for this new publication with Liverpool University Press is that
each volume will constitute a sort of état present on a significant topic embracing
various expressions of Francophone Postcolonial Cultures (e.g., literature, film,
music, history), in relation to pertinent geographical areas (e.g., France/Belgium, the
Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, Polynesia) and different periods (slavery,
colonialism, the post-colonial era, etc.): above all, we are looking to publish research
that will help to set new research agendas across our field. The editorial board of
Francophone Postcolonial Studies invites proposals for edited volumes touching on
any of the areas listed above: proposals should be sent to Professor David Murphy:
[email protected]. Fur further details, visit: www.sfps.ac.uk.

General Editor: Nicki Hitchcott (University of Nottingham)

Editorial Board: Chris Bongie (Queen’s University, Canada)

Dominique Combe (Wadham College, Oxford, UK/Paris III, France)
Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool, UK)
Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (University of Warwick, UK)
Sam Haigh (University of Warwick, UK)
Alec Hargreaves (Florida State University, USA)
Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College, Oxford, UK)
Lieven d’Hulst (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Lydie Moudileno (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
David Murphy (University of Stirling, UK)
Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK)
Dominic Thomas (UCLA, USA)

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 2 13/04/2012 11:09:47

 A merican C reoles

The Francophone Caribbean

and the American South

Edited by
Martin Munro
and
Celia Britton

Liverpool Universit y Press

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 3 13/04/2012 11:09:48

American Creoles
American Creoles
First published 2012 by
Liverpool
First University
published Press
2012 by
4 Cambridge
Liverpool Street Press
University
Liverpool
4 Cambridge Street
L69 7ZU
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2012 Liverpool University Press and the Society for Francophone
Postcolonial
Copyright © Studies
2012 Liverpool University Press and the Society for Francophone
Postcolonial Studies
The right of Martin Munro and Celia Britton to be identified as the editors of this
bookright
The has been asserted
of Martin by them
Munro in accordance
and Celia Britton towith the Copyright,
be identified as theDesigns and
editors of this
Patents
book hasAct 1988.
been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system,
All orreserved.
rights transmitted, in any
No part of form or bymay
this book any be
means, electronic,
reproduced, mechanical,
stored in a retrieval
photocopying,
system, recording,inor
or transmitted, otherwise,
any without
form or by the prior
any means, written mechanical,
electronic, permission of the
publisher.
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British
British Library
Library CIP record is available data
Cataloguing-in-Publication
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBNPDF
Web 978-1-84631-753-8 cased
eISBN 978-1-84631-720-0
ISBN 978-1-84631-753-8 cased

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Printed
Typeset and bound byBook
by Carnegie CPI Production,
Group (UK) Lancaster
Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
 Contents
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1
Martin Munro and Celia Britton

Creolizations

Lafcadio Hearn’s American Writings and the Creole Continuum 19

Mary Gallagher
Auguste Lussan’s La Famille créole: How Saint-Domingue Émigrés
Became Louisiana Creoles 40
Typhaine Leservot
Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans 56
Angel Adams Parham
Creolizing Barack Obama 77
Valérie Loichot
Richard Price or the Canadian from Petite-Anse: The Potential and
the Limitations of a Hybrid Anthropology 95
Christina Kullberg

Music

‘Fightin’ the Future’: Rhythm and Creolization in the

Circum-Caribbean 113
Martin Munro

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 5 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 vi American Creoles

Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz, and the Rejection of
Négritude 129
Jeremy F. Lane
The Sorcerer and the Quimboiseur: Poetic Intention in the Works of
Miles Davis and Édouard Glissant 147
Jean-Luc Tamby
Creolizing Jazz, Jazzing the Tout-monde: Jazz, Gwoka and the Poetics
of Relation 165
Jerome Camal

Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Condé

Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Édouard Glissant’s Reading of

Faulkner 183
Michael Wiedorn
Édouard Glissant and the Test of Faulkner’s Modernism 197
Hugues Azérad
The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner,
Glissant, and Condé 216
Celia Britton

An American Story 230

Yanick Lahens

Notes on Contributors 240

Index 244

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 6 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 Illustrations
Illustrations

Fig. 1. La Baraqu’ Obama, Sainte-Luce, Martinique. January 2010.

Photo courtesy of Anny Dominique Curtius. 83

Fig. 2. Rue Barack Obama, Le Diamant, Martinique. March 2010.

Photo by Valérie Loichot. 83

Fig. 3. Laurent Valère’s Memorial, Anse Cafard, with Diamond Rock

in the background. Le Diamant, Martinique. March 2010.
Photo by Valérie Loichot. 84

vii

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 7 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements

Many of the chapters in this volume were first presented at a conference

organized by the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and
Francophone Studies at Florida State University in February 2010. We thank
Alec Hargreaves for his generous support, Anthony Cond, David Murphy and
Charles Forsdick for their interest in and enthusiasm for this project, and
Teresa Bridgeman for her excellent translation work. We dedicate this volume
to the memory of Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), whose work has inspired a
great number of the essays in this book.

viii

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 8 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 Introduction
Introduction

Martin Munro and Celia Britton

There is a curious relationship between the birth of an academic field and its
death. In the manifestos and declaration of intent that mark the invention of
a field there is often a recognition of its limitations and an intimation of its
future demise. In some cases there is even a tacit challenge to bring about
and hasten that expiration, or at least quickly to render the field’s initial
manifestations and conceptual apparatus redundant. Such would seem to be
the case with Francophone Postcolonial Studies, a field of study that itself
came into being through the end of another, the Association for the Study of
African and Caribbean Literature in French. From the first issues of the new
society’s self-named journal, statements establishing the field and setting its
parameters existed alongside self-reflexive critiques that questioned already
the durability of many of its founding concepts (see, e.g., Assiba d’Almeida,
2003; Britton, 2003; Harrison, 2003).
This critical self-questioning has been an important and indeed salutary
element in the subsequent development of the field. Key works edited by
Charles Forsdick and David Murphy have primarily sought to prise open and
‘decolonize’ the terms ‘Francophone’ and ‘postcolonial’: through including
France in their investigations of the former term they emphasize the complex,
connected relationship between France and its former colonies; while by
stressing the importance of French-language works to the postcolonial field
more generally they seek to disrupt the almost exclusively anglophone focus
of that discipline (Forsdick and Murphy, 2009: 4–5). One of the consequences
of the rapid evolution of Francophone Postcolonial Studies and its distinc-
tively self-reflexive nature is that its two constituent terms – Francophone

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 1 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 2 American Creoles

and postcolonial – are put under a particular conceptual and semantic stress
that seems both to load them with meaning and deprive them of some of their
critical usefulness. In a sense, they appear at once to mean too much and too
little. Significantly in this regard, the second of Forsdick and Murphy’s edited
volumes jettisoned the term Francophone in favour of the more neutral
‘French-speaking’ – a move that acknowledges the ongoing difficulties of
dissociating the notion of the Francophone from colonial connotations. It
is similarly significant that a further edited work, Transnational French
Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-Monde, likewise excludes the term
Francophone and introduces a new term, transnational, which to some extent
shifts the emphasis away from exclusively colonial and postcolonial situations
and onto contacts and relations between, across and beyond nations no
matter their history. Thus, the more its founding concepts are brought to
light, the more they disappear, and the more the field develops, the more it
in a sense breaks up. Paradoxically, too, the demise of the field, or at least
some of its early incarnations, is a sign of its inherent health.
Our primary intention in this volume is to further this process of productive
reinvigoration through directing attention towards a neglected though
important dimension of ‘Francophone’ studies: the relations between the
French-speaking Caribbean, including Haiti, and the American South. This
shift in focus is prompted by several factors. First, a number of innovative
recent works have altered the map of French studies in ways that resituate
France into Atlanticist frameworks and asserted the importance of the
Americas to French cultural and economic history. Christopher L. Miller’s
landmark study, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the
Slave Trade (Miller, 2008), provides a timely reminder of the importance of
the oceanic circuits of capital and human bodies to hexagonal prosperity
and intellectual activity. Because slavery did not take place in France, it
has been relatively easy, not to say convenient, to forget it and to leave
its many and enduring consequences unacknowledged and misunderstood.
Miller’s work addresses this historical blind spot and in effect seeks to
bring the experiences of slavery, and the social, political and philosophical
conditions that allowed it to flourish, out of the shadows of memory and
time to which much French political and historiographical discourse has
cast them. Building an analytical model that is determined principally by
both geography and economics, he shifts his analyses around the three
points of the ‘French Atlantic triangle’ – metropolitan France, West Africa
and the Caribbean – and retraces the trajectory that shaped the lucrative
commerce between the three Atlantic sites. Miller’s particular geographical
focus reflects most obviously that of Paul Gilroy, though Miller works still
in a largely colonial context and does not incorporate the United States.

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 2 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 Introduction  3

Also, Miller’s Atlantic is not exclusively ‘black’, in that it is concerned as

much with Enlightenment-era ‘white’ literature and philosophy as with the
representations of slavery in the work of prominent Francophone Caribbean
authors such as Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Maryse Condé. A closer
point of reference – and a further significant influence in recasting the map of
French studies – is the work of Bill Marshall and his French Atlantic projects,
which do not confine themselves to a triangular shape, but consider more
broadly the relationship between France and the Americas. In prising open
a broader area of inquiry that emphasizes Franco-American relations in all
their diversity and complexity, Marshall redirects critical attention among
‘Francophone’ scholars to the Americas, inviting us to develop the many
fertile areas of investigation that he opens up (Marshall, 2005; 2009).
While Miller and Marshall have opened up this broadly American
dimension of Francophone studies, the field of Francophone Caribbean
studies has arguably remained more exclusively focused on the two-way
relations with Europe, at least in comparison with the rest of the Caribbean.
The aim of this volume is therefore to reorient Francophone Caribbean
studies and examine in detail the connections between the Francophone
Caribbean, including Haiti, and the American South, including Louisiana,
which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to
France and the Francophone world, being under French rule from 1682 to
1763 and from 1800 to 1803, and having received migrants from Acadia and
Saint-Domingue (Haiti) at important points in its history.
These are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse
nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. The basic configuration of
the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created,
was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Such are the
similarities that, when Édouard Glissant visited Mississippi and Louisiana,
he found himself explaining to Americans the ways in which their world
mirrored and echoed his own homeland of Martinique, how the families
that fled the French and Haitian revolutions brought a distinctive culture
that persists still in various forms: in cooking, in architecture and in music,
which are ‘principally the same in the culture of this whole area’ (Glissant,
1999: 29). The African trace, Glissant says, was kept alive and reconfigured
according to the ‘inspiration’ of particular places in this circum-Caribbean
world, a zone shaped by a common, interconnected history that ‘travels
with the seas’ (ibid.). The volume aims to examine these interconnections in
depth, and to develop our understanding of the cultural, social and historical
affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South.
An important consequence in redirecting the discipline in this way is that
it bypasses to a large extent the metropole and reduces greatly the anxiety

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 3 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 4 American Creoles

that runs through much of Francophone Postcolonial Studies over the fate
of metropolitan France and its apparent inability to come to terms with its
colonial past and postcolonial present. This anxiety has tended to deflect
attention away from the non-metropolitan, postcolonial world and created an
exaggerated sense of France’s importance to the postcolonial world, partic-
ularly the circum-Caribbean, which encompasses a great variety of territories
and states, ranging in historical and political terms from the US South
and Haiti, both of which became independent from Europe more than 200
years ago, to the French Overseas Departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe
and Guyane. In redirecting Francophone Caribbean studies in the way we
propose, we highlight a set of relations that do not require the mediation of
France. Taking the French out of Francophone studies liberates the discipline,
reduces the significance of France to the ‘Francophone world’, and shifts the
focus away from metropolitan political and social intransigence and onto
issues of history, language, politics and ‘culture’ in more or less tangible
forms: for example, literature, dance, music, theatre, architecture, cooking,
religion.
In other words, it focuses attention on the notion of ‘Creoleness’, that
elusive, slippery, contested concept that is a peculiarly American invention, a
term rooted in, born and indicative of contact between European and African
people and cultures in the Americas. Its contested nature is epitomized
in the debates it has provoked in the Francophone Caribbean in the past
twenty years. The Créolité movement was effectively launched in 1989 with
the publication of Éloge de la créolité, which later appeared in a bilingual
edition with the English title of In Praise of Creoleness. The principal figures
in this movement are the Martinicans Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and
Raphaël Confiant. Créolité centres on a belief in the importance of Creole
language and culture, and an interest in the processes of creolization. Like
Glissant, the Créolité group challenges the traditional, colonially inherited
mimetic impulses in French Caribbean culture. Whereas they cite Glissant
as an important influence, they have posed a very direct challenge to Aimé
Césaire and négritude. Because Césaire wrote only in French, they say, he
neglected the island’s ‘authentic’ language, and the rich oral tradition. In their
turn, however, the Creolists and their doctrine of Créolité have been criticized
for their apparent desire to fix Antillean identity in their new, essentialized
version of Creoleness. Critics say that, unlike Glissant, the Creolists have
underplayed the evolving, non-teleological elements of creolization, and
sought to ground identity once more in a new oneness. Perhaps the most
strident critic of the Creolists has been Maryse Condé. She argues that the
Martinican school of Créolité ‘is singular because it presumes to impose
law and order’, and in implying a notion of ‘authenticity’, which inevitably

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 4 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 Introduction  5

engenders exclusion, as ‘“authenticity” is based on the very normative

ideology that for so long consigned us to the world’s periphery’ (Condé,
1998: 106). Like Condé, this volume promotes an idea of Creole culture and
creolization as open-ended, non-prescriptive phenomena. Like Sidney Mintz
and Sally Price in Caribbean Contours, we insist that the terms remain some
of the most useful for conceiving the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and
historical unit, an overarching, polyvalent and malleable concept that does
not deny internal diversity and difference, but which indeed incorporates
these as constituent elements of Creole societies and cultures (Mintz and
Price, 1985: 6). The book’s chapters are organized into three sections (under
the headings Creolizations, Music, and Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant,
Condé) that group the essays thematically, though our objective is that the
sections and chapters be read not in isolation but comparatively, as particular
inquiries into topics that are fundamentally related.

Creolizations
Many of our contributors comment on the semantic instability of the term
‘Creole’: it has had a complex history, from designating the original white
settlers of Louisiana to the potentially worldwide Glissantian dynamic of
creolization. There is also a connection to be made between this linguistic
indeterminacy and the hybridity and fluidity that are so prominent in its
referent – Creole culture itself. As a cultural identity, ‘Creole’ seems to be
definable only as a shifting set of differential terms which depend upon the
particular context: French- versus English-speaking, mixed-race versus either
black or white, culturally as opposed to biologically defined racial identity,
and so on. Thus, Angel Adams Parham, for instance, groups her Creole-
identifying interviewees according to the term that they define themselves
against. In a rather different sense, however, binary oppositions are also
deeply antipathetic to Creole culture. One of its most prominent features
is its three-tiered racial classification as opposed to the Anglo-American
binary black–white divide. Similarly, the characters of the play analysed by
Typhaine Leservot are shown as building an identity as American citizens of
Louisiana in opposition to both revolutionary Saint-Domingue and revolu-
tionary France.
The chapters in this volume that deal explicitly with definitions of Creole
culture and Creole identity discuss a wide range of types of text: journalism,
ethnography (amateur and professional), interviews, drama, novels, political
slogans, autobiography. This generic hybridity is indeed often in evidence
within the work of one particular figure. Mary Gallagher’s analysis of
Lafcadio Hearn’s writing on nineteenth-century Louisiana and Martinique

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 5 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 6 American Creoles

shows how it veers from journalism to a kind of proto-ethnography (in his

descriptions of popular culture, and his published collections of Creole
folk-tales, songs, etc.) to fiction: he also wrote two novels, one set in Louisiana
and one in the Caribbean. Gallagher shows how for Hearn Louisiana and
the French-speaking Caribbean form a ‘Creole continuum’ that disregards
national boundaries; and how even this continuum lacks clear boundaries, as
Hearn’s writing on black communities in Cincinnati reveals the similarities
between these communities and those that he defines as strictly Creole.
She stresses his long-standing fascination with Creole culture: not only his
intense intellectual investment in Creole issues but also – despite his always
positioning himself as an outsider – a strong emotional attraction and
aesthetic delight that, she suggests, result in his production of imaginative
literature as well as quasi-ethnographic journalism. It is above all the
phenomenon of racial mixtures that fascinates him: the aesthetics of skin
colour and the ‘depth of the inter-ethnic and inter-linguistic palimpsest that
distinguished post-plantation culture’ (29).
Staying with nineteenth-century Louisiana, Leservot’s analysis of Auguste
Lussan’s 1837 play La Famille créole has a very different emphasis. It is more
explicitly concerned with the mechanisms of a construction of collective
identity, and less in relation to racial differences (except in so far as these
are carefully excluded by the play) than in terms of an emerging national
American identity. Leservot notes the importance of theatre as a forum for
identity politics in the 1830s, when Louisiana was still regarded with some
suspicion by the rest of the United States. A major factor in this was the influx
of refugees fleeing the revolution in Saint-Domingue, of which Lussan’s ‘Creole
family’, the Clairvilles, are an example. The play is set in 1794, and opens with
the Clairvilles’ arrival in New Orleans, having abandoned their land and
their wealth in Saint-Domingue. Rather than staying in America, however,
they plan to settle in France, but get caught up in the French Revolution, are
nearly guillotined, and return to Louisiana, which now assumes the status
of a safe American haven for innocent victims of political persecution.
Leservot shows how the journey to France and back is an essential stage in
the play’s manoeuvring of the Clairvilles into a position where they identify
with America rather than France and are politically acceptable as American
citizens. The way in which the French Revolution is superimposed on the
Haitian one allows the latter to disappear: as victims, the Clairvilles can be
presented not as slave-owning colonial planters but as innocents wrongfully
accused of treason, neither revolutionaries nor royalists. Thus divested of
any inconvenient allegiances, they are ready to become American citizens.
Angel Adams Parham’s ‘Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans’ is an
ethnographic study of the continuing significance of the Saint-Domingue

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 6 13/04/2012 11:09:49

 Introduction  7

refugees in the present-day racial identifications of the Creoles of New Orleans.

At the time of this migration Louisiana, because of its distinctive colonial
history, was far more racially tolerant than the rest of America, and its large
mixed-race community – the free people of colour – included individuals of
considerable wealth and status; but all of this had been under threat since
the Louisiana purchase in 1803. The refugees from Saint-Domingue more
than doubled the numbers of the free people of colour in New Orleans and
so helped the community resist the pressures of the American binary racial
divide and retain its Creole culture. Parham’s interviews with descendants
of the refugees demonstrate their continuing awareness of the Caribbean
component of their ancestry, and their feelings of affinity with the Caribbean.
But she also distinguishes four ‘cultural scripts’ in which their self-identi-
fications as Creole are formed by differentiating between themselves and,
for the white subjects, either ‘Américains’ or the binary black–white divide,
and for coloured subjects, either in opposition to or as part of the wider
community of African Americans. This approach reveals the mobility of
the signifier ‘Creole’; it allows the complexity of racial and ethnic identities
in Louisiana to emerge; and it also emphasizes the extent to which racial
identification is not a biological given but a discursively constructed choice
of a particular cultural script.
Valérie Loichot’s analysis of representations of Barack Obama in France,
the USA and Martinique moves the discussion of ‘Creoleness’ out of Louisiana
but places an even more explicit emphasis on the cultural, as opposed to
biological, nature of racial identity. She does this by contrasting biological
‘métissage’ (with its etymological roots in plant-breeding) with ­‘creolization’;
in Glissant’s sense of unpredictable cultural contact and exchange,
‘métissage’ stabilizes and creolization destabilizes racial constructs. Most
French journalists describe Obama as a ‘métis’, while in Martinique he is
referred to as ‘créole’. Thus the French press essentializes Obama’s racial
identity; it does so, moreover, with a concept that is completely foreign to
American definitions of race: in the binary opposition of the ‘One-Drop
Rule’, the ‘métis’ corresponds only to the pejorative ‘half-caste’. Conversely,
the appellation ‘African American’ is not used by the French, because it
transgresses the republican principle that citizenship is independent of
ethnicity. These mismatches illustrate the ‘untranslatability of race’ between
different national cultural discourses. But, in any case, Obama is not African
American in the dominant sense of being a descendant of slaves. Since
neither ‘métis’ nor ‘African American’ can satisfactorily define him, Loichot
argues we must turn away from fixed biological or historical determinations
and look at the freer identifications made possible by creolization. During his
election campaign, the Martinicans enthusiastically adopted Obama as one

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 7 13/04/2012 11:09:50

 8 American Creoles

of themselves: Loichot cites a video of him dubbed into Creole in which he

is made to say ‘Moin cé un Matinikè’ [I am a Martinican]. Obama is a Creole
precisely because of his racial indeterminacy – ‘his complex cultural, familial
and racial diversity impossible to fix in one static definition’ (88). Moreover,
he is an agent of creolization through the chosen identifications of which he
is both subject and object.
Christina Kullberg’s chapter on Richard Price also focuses on Martinique,
and brings together two themes that we have encountered in previous
chapters: the hybridity of Creole culture and the ethnographic perspective.
But she is most centrally concerned with another characteristic of Price’s The
Convict and the Colonel, one which is curiously similar to Lafcadio Hearn’s
writing a century earlier. Unlike Hearn, Price is a professional anthropologist;
like him, however, Price’s writing is, some of the time, openly subjective
and emotionally involved with a Martinican culture that he is not only
observing but to which (unlike Hearn) he also claims to belong. If Price’s book
thus combines anthropology and autobiography, it does so of course with a
sophisticated reflexive awareness that is entirely lacking in Hearn’s naively
expressed attachments and prejudices. Indeed, Price is consciously partici-
pating in an ongoing debate within his discipline as to the validity of so-called
postmodern anthropology, whereas Gallagher attributes Hearn’s love of
Creole culture to his own personal history of mixed Greek–Irish descent and
childhood displacement. But they have in common, beyond the basic incorpo-
ration of affect into conventionally impersonal ethnographic description, a
strong nostalgia for Creole cultures that they both see as disappearing: what
Gallagher sees as Hearn’s ‘antiquarian’ perspective is not all that far removed
from Price’s critique of the trivialization and commodification of cultural
memory in a rapidly modernizing Martinique. Equally, Price’s book develops
in a far more deliberate fashion the generic diversity of Hearn’s mixture of
reportage, aesthetic appreciation and fiction; it combines anthropological
analysis with travel writing and imaginative reconstruction (of, for example,
the convict’s years in French Guyana, of which there is very little documen-
tation). One major difference between the two writers is that while Hearn
always maintains the role of observer of a foreign culture, Price adopts a
stance of emotional involvement with his Martinican subjects and writes as a
participant in, as much as an observer of, their community, alternating between
intimacy and distance to produce the ‘staging of a distance which is then
superseded’ (101). Kullberg argues that the ‘poetic’ qualities of Price’s anthro-
pological narrative work to inhibit a fixed view of the other, and ultimately
relates this lack of fixity to the nature of Creole culture itself. That is, she
concludes that the reason for the hybridity of his discourse is not so much
a move in a scholarly debate on the status of anthropological knowledge

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 8 13/04/2012 11:09:50

 Introduction  9

as it is a recognition and replication of the heterogeneous nature of Creole

culture itself and the difficulty of capturing its elusive reality: ‘a ­representation
of Creole society which can itself be described as creolizing’ (105).

Music
This notion of a creolized and continually creolizing cultural sphere across
the circum-Caribbean is developed and expanded in four chapters – by
Martin Munro, Jeremy Lane, Jean-Luc Tamby and Jerome Camal – that focus
on the particular contributions of music and musicians. Music appears as
a distinctively fluid and effective conduit for the kinds of non-hierarchical
exchanges that creolization thrives on. Munro’s essay deals specifically with
rhythm and starts from the idea that European colonists in the plantation
world created anti-rhythmic societies that lacked the basic rhythmic sociali-
zation (a common, functional understanding of time, culture and work) that
has been a fundamental element in bonding communities from the beginning
of human history. As Munro argues, however, among the enslaved people
more organic and benign rhythms persisted and helped them survive the
plantation and its anti-rhythmic foundations. A crucial aspect of Munro’s
thesis is that rhythm was not the property of one group, and that it became
one of the most effective means of transgressing social and racial divides
and in creating the unique social order and culture of the circum-Caribbean.
The chapter examines some of the ways in which rhythm has functioned
and continues to serve as a particularly malleable and persistent social and
cultural element both in the Caribbean and in the American South. The
initial focus is on James Brown’s rhythmic innovations in the 1960s, and
Brown’s interpretation of his rhythms not as echoes of a recoverable racial
past but as pre-echoes of the future, and of sounds and ways of thinking
yet to be realized. The chapter discusses Brown’s rhythms in relation to
other instances in Haiti, Martinique and Trinidad where rhythm has been a
prominent factor in moments of social and personal transformation. Rhythm,
Munro argues, has been a primary force in creating these creolized societies,
and remains a dynamic element of the circum-Caribbean world.
Jeremy Lane writes on Frantz Fanon, a figure not normally associated
with creolization or with circum-Caribbean cultural relations. As Lane
shows, however, Fanon’s interest in one prominent manifestation of creolized
American culture – jazz music – formed an important, if neglected, part of
the Martinican’s critique of Romantic interpretations of black cultures in the
Americas. Arguing that Fanon’s biographer David Macey misunderstands
and underestimates the significance of Fanon’s allusions to jazz, Lane calls
into question Macey’s assumptions about ethnic or national identity and the

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 9 13/04/2012 11:09:50

 10 American Creoles

particular cultural forms appropriate to that identity. He similarly questions

Françoise Vergès’s critique of what she sees as Fanon’s ‘disavowal’ of the
‘reality’ of his Creole identity, in favour of a reinvention of his ‘filiation’ and
‘symbolic ancestry in Algeria’ (Vergès, 1997: 579). As Lane sees it, Macey’s and
Vergès’s critiques are underpinned by fundamentally Romantic ideas about
the organic relationships between ethnic identity, bounded geographical
location and their associated forms of cultural and linguistic expression.
Ironically, as Lane shows, Fanon’s scattered allusions to jazz show him
attempting precisely to question and re-formulate each of those Romantic
assumptions, chiefly through the Martinican’s critique of Léopold Sedar
Senghor’s conception of négritude. In his early essays and poems, Senghor
had presented jazz as an important expression of négritude, that is to say
of an essentialized nègre identity, rooted in the unchanging rhythms of an
organic rural community, of which West Africa was the archetype and the
American South its faithful reproduction in the New World. As Lane shows,
Fanon’s allusions to jazz form an integral part of the Martinican’s critique
of Senghor’s négritude and, as such, involve Fanon seeking to uncouple
jazz’s potential cultural and political significance from any organic links the
music might be assumed to possess either to essential racial identity or to its
putative geographical place of origin in the American South.
Jean-Luc Tamby carries out a music-based comparison of two figures that
are rarely discussed together: Édouard Glissant and Miles Davis. Davis is
not conventionally associated with the South – indeed, he seems to illustrate
Fanon’s critique of the essentialist association of jazz and the South – but
Tamby’s comparison of his and Glissant’s aesthetics makes many telling
connections between the two that implicitly expand the boundaries of
the circum-Caribbean into the Northern states to which many African
Americans migrated from the South during the twentieth century. Basing his
analysis on a statement made by Glissant that his writing style is virtually the
same as Davis’s jazz style, Tamby asserts that the literature of the Caribbean
and jazz music in the United States belong to areas of cultural activity which
have comparable histories, despite their dissimilarities. Tamby’s comparative
approach to the two artists leads to reflections on their common ‘strategies
of resistance’ and their individual formal concerns. Style and rhythm are
Tamby’s primary areas of interest – means of bridging historical differences
between Caribbean literature and African American music. As Tamby
argues, Glissant’s concepts of langage and the (African) trace bring together
different cultural phenomena within a single community and connect groups
with a common history of slavery and colonialism but which are separated
by either geography or linguistic differences. Glissant similarly conceives of
an aesthetic community that joins several artistic disciplines, and, as Tamby

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 10 13/04/2012 11:09:50

 Introduction  11

says, style in this case has a primarily collective value. Careful analyses of the
rhythmic qualities of Glissant’s and Davis’s work lead Tamby to conclude that
the power of the artists’ rhythms cannot be reduced to their shared history,
and that through rhythm they manage to escape the confines of history and
attain a style that transcends their place in time, reaching perhaps a kind of
ultimate destination of creolization, a space that incorporates all of history
yet is freed from it.
Jerome Camal’s essay similarly employs Glissantian concepts to frame
its analyses of circum-Caribbean musical forms. Camal reflects on musico-
logical debates concerning the usefulness of the concept of creolization
in globalization studies as a means of emphasizing the fluid and unstable
nature of culture, and in postcolonial studies as a marker of the putative
creative ingenuity of ‘subaltern and deterritorialized peoples’ (Khan, 2007:
237). Noting that a number of anthropologists have argued that the historical
process of creolization in the Caribbean has been fundamentally different
from contemporary processes of globalization, and that creolization not be
divorced from its original historical and geographic contexts, Camal sets out
to test the usefulness of creolization through a study of American saxophonist
David Murray’s collaboration with Guadeloupean musicians. Drawing on
written, ethnographic and musical sources, Camal compares musicological
understandings of Glissant’s créolisation with the meaning of creolization for
the musicians involved in the Creole Project in Guadeloupe. Camal shows
that ‘creolization’ – and its related terms ‘Creole’ and ‘Créolité’ – continue to
hold specific and disputed meanings in Guadeloupean society, which render
difficult their wider application as concepts capable of describing global
processes of cultural exchange or identity formations.

Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Condé

Glissant also figures centrally in three chapters in this volume which are
concerned with his work on William Faulkner; in other words, the connections
between the American South and the French-speaking Caribbean are also
embodied in the relationship between two of their greatest writers. Glissant’s
admiration for Faulkner is evident throughout his career, culminating in
the book Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), which he wrote while he was himself
living in the American South, teaching at Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge. This book, whose title immediately proclaims the importance
of Faulkner’s affiliation with the South, is the subject of the chapters by
Michael Wiedorn, Hugues Azérad and Celia Britton. Azerad emphasizes
the impact that Faulkner, Mississippi had on existing critical assessments
of Faulkner, both in its original form and in the English translation that

Munro Britton, SFPS 3, 2012.indd 11 13/04/2012 11:09:50

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