May 2, 2023: Hemispheric Histories: Glissant and Creolization

[April 30thmarks the 75thanniversary of the formal founding of the Organization of American States(OAS). So this week I’ll offer some AmericanStudies contexts for that importantcommunity and a handful of other hemispheric histories, leading up to a weekendpost highlighting some of the many awesome scholars doing hemispheric studies!]

On the scholarwho most fully helps us start to grapple with hemispheric connections.

I don’t think it’s much of astretch to say that for most Americans, the Caribbean means, primarily orperhaps even solely, cruises and beach vacations and daiquiris with littleumbrellas in them and making sure not to drink the water and etc. There’s alsothat wholeunfortunateness about the Communist country with the (apparently) greatcigars that we can’t legally smoke and the bearded dictator and thenear-Nuclear War back in the day, but since Cuba has for most of a century notbeen an option for those cruises and beach vacations, I think it’s prettydistinct from the public consciousness of “the Caribbean” in any case. Yet thecomplex reality is that the Caribbean, or more exactly the many differentdistinct islands and nations it comprises, has been a hugely significantinfluence on American life (and vice versa) from literally the first 15th-centurymoments of European arrival (which took place on Hispaniola, present home toHaiti and the Dominican Republic, where Columbus first cameashore). There are, for example, the complex ways in which the Haitian Revolutionfollowed the American one, scared the hell out of Southern slaveowners, andcontributed to France selling the Louisiana Purchase to the US. Or there’severything that PuertoRico and Cuba meant to America’s imperialistic visions and wars at the endof the 19th century. Or our somewhat unofficial but very real andtroubling relationships with dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Trujilloin the mid-20th century. And the list goes on.

It stands to reason, then, thatone of the scholars and writers who can provide the most insight into ournational identity and experience—but whose voice and ideas, like the historicalmeanings of the Caribbean itself, are vastly underappreciated or even unknownin America (at least outside of the academy, and I would argue even inside itto a degree)—hails from the Caribbean island of Martinique. That writer is EdouardGlissant, a hugely unique and impressive literary and cultural scholar andcreative writer whose life very directly included links not only to hisCaribbean home but also to France (where for example he was asked by PresidentChirac in 2006 to serve as the inauguralpresident 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 CityUniversity of New York for decades). Glissant published eight novels, at leastas many books of poetry, and critical and theoretical works in a variety ofdisciplines, and also worked actively on behalf of counter-culture politicaland activist movements in both France and Martinique. He was short-listed forthe Nobel Prize (in the same year that St.Lucian Derek Walcott won it—guess that was the year for Caribbean writersto be nominated) and until the end of his life in 2011 producedmeaningful and compelling work in all his many genres.

But for an American audience, andmore specifically for our understanding of our own history and identity, Ithink Glissant can be boiled down to one crucial text: his 2008 essay “Creolizationin the Making of the Americas.” Finding this piece was one of the mostsignificant moments for me in the research for my second book,a clear and striking affirmation that my main idea is in conversation with someof those scholars who have thought and are thinking about what defines the NewWorld. But even if you never read my book—for shame!—you have to check outGlissant’s essay, which lays out succinctly and beautifully one of his mostcentral ongoing arguments: that from their very origins (at least in thepost-contact era), the Americas have been defined by cultural mixture, and evenmore importantly by the new and hybrid results of such mixtures. As Glissantputs it early in that essay, “When we speak about creolization, we do not onlymean metissage: crossbreeding, because creolization adds something new to thecomponents that participate in it.” And that’s the most crucial part of hisideas (and a big part of what I see as the stakes of defining our history andidentity in this way, as both he and I would): that such creolizations arefoundational and transformative for all who participate in them, makingAmericans, from the outset, unified across any cultural or ethnic or racialboundaries by this shared set of experiences.

It’s hard to overstate howradical such ideas were in the 1970s and 80s when Glissant was first beginningto fully articulate them. That was the era of identity politics and the rise ofmulticulturalism and ethnic studies departments, an era when celebratingdiversity—meaning recognizing and embracing many distinct identities andhistories and cultures—was becoming a national emphasis. Glissant didn’tdismiss such emphases or their political and cultural value, but he did argue,with force and conviction and precision and great power, that the diversity ofthe Americas has not only always been present but also has produced continualand crucial interconnections and new identities. Maybe not beach reading, butdamn important stuff. Next hemispheric history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Histories, contexts, and/or scholars you’d highlight?