Repeating Islands

Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (2009) by Michaeline A. Crichlow (with Patricia Northover) is described as a major intervention into discussions of Caribbean practices gathered under the rubric of “creolization.” The following is an excerpt from the Duke University Press description:

Examining sociocultural, political, and economic transformations in the Caribbean, Michaeline A. Crichlow argues that creolization— culture-creating processes usually associated with plantation societies and with subordinate populations remaking the cultural forms of dominant groups— must be liberated from and expanded beyond plantations, and even beyond the black Atlantic, to include productions of “culture” wherever vulnerable populations live in situations of modern power inequalities, from regimes of colonialism to those of neoliberalism. Crichlow theorizes a concept of creolization that speaks to how individuals from historically marginalized groups refashion self, time, and place in multiple ways, from creating art to traveling in search of homes. Grounding her theory in the material realities of Caribbean peoples in the plantation era and the present, Crichlow contends that creolization and Creole subjectivity are constantly in flux, morphing in response to the changing conditions of modernity and creatively expressing a politics of place.

Engaging with the thought of Michel Foucault, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Achille Mbembe, Henri Lefebvre, Margaret Archer, Saskia Sassen, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Crichlow argues for understanding creolization as a continual creative remaking of past and present moments to shape the future. She draws on sociology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies to illustrate how national histories are lived personally and how transnational experiences reshape individual lives and collective spaces.

Michaeline A. Crichlow, a historical sociologist, is associate professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development. Patricia Northover is a Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

For more information, see http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4441-4