Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film

By H. Adlai Murdoch

A study of how Caribbean immigrants to France and the UK from 1948–1998 and their descendants portray their metropolitan identities in literature and film.

Creolizing the Metropole is a comparative study of postwar West Indian migration to the former colonial capitals of Paris and London. It studies the effects of this population shift on national and cultural identity and traces the postcolonial Caribbean experience through analyses of the concepts of identity and diaspora. Through close readings of selected literary works and film, H. Adlai Murdoch explores the ways in which these immigrants and their descendants represented their metropolitan identities. Though British immigrants were colonial subjects and, later, residents of British Commonwealth nations, and the French arrivals from the overseas departments were citizens of France by law, both groups became subject to otherness and exclusion stemming from their ethnicities. Murdoch examines this phenomenon and the questions it raises about borders and boundaries, nationality and belonging.

“An outstanding contribution to scholarship. Theoretically grounded and meticulously researched, it examines the complexities inherent in constructing new diaspora identities that are at once ethnic, national, and fluid.” —Renée Larrier, Rutgers University

“In these expansive, fresh, adroit interpretations of Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Zadie Smith-White, and Andrea Levy, the author exposes the stark reality that race, and the prejudices attached to it, is a barrier to unequivocal assimilation. This study affirms that a diasporic duality persists as creolization slowly alters the metropole. Overall, an interesting read.” —Choice

“[This] book provides an extremely valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial studies and European literary and film studies in at least three ways: it theoretically refines the concept of creolization, it contributes to much-needed redefinitions of France and the United Kingdom as multicultural, and it foregrounds the aesthetic qualities of the works under study.” —Research in African Literatures

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780253001320

Book preview

Introduction

The Caribbean Diaspora and the Metropoles

This book seeks to come to terms with two related issues: the ramifications of the cultural and demographic phenomenon of Caribbean post-war migration that took thousands of West Indians to the former colonial capitals of Paris and London between 1948 and 1998, and the ways in which these new inhabitants and their descendants came to represent their simultaneously separate but parallel experiences in literature and film. Indeed, in what became a veritable flood of peoples and cultures, there are now more than half a million people in each of these cities claiming West Indian birth or background, and most recent national census figures estimate Caribbean communities to be virtually 1 percent of the population in both cases. What is of greater interest here is that many second- and third-generation immigrants to these capitals define themselves as West Indian (Guadeloupean, Martinican, Antiguan, Jamaican), irrespective of their metropolitan place of birth and whether or not they have even visited the Caribbean island from which they draw their ethnic and cultural affiliation. This work concentrates specifically on the situation of the Antillean citizens of the DOM (départements d’outre-mer), or French overseas departments, and examines the migratory ramifications and contradictions of presumptive integration into the national framework of the former colonial power. This experience is contrasted with that of the colonial Commonwealth citizens of an English-speaking Caribbean on the cusp of independence. The resulting hybrid modernities of contemporary Britishness, Frenchness, and Caribbeanness engendered in the metropoles by these migration-based demographic and cultural shifts are the core of this project. It is precisely these identitarian hybridities, I argue, that increasingly destabilize our current notions of nationality and belonging.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, I propose to analyze the ways in which these groups implicitly differentiate themselves from the larger immigrant cultures of their respective metropoles, from the nationalist patterns of their host country, and from the established identitarian framework of their countries and cultures of origin. This insistent difference has transformed the complex ethnocultural structures and stratifications of both London and Paris, making way for a new Caribbean diaspora whose amorphous geographical boundaries locate its subjects in an explicitly transnational and transformative space of change and renewal. In demographic and political terms, this project also traces the evolution of this hybrid migrant subjectivity in its resistance to varied attempts at post/colonial acts of legal exclusion. Pressing questions of ethnicity, immigration, integration, and citizenship have increasingly dominated political and cultural discourses in both of these capitals in the postwar era, such that the migrant phenomenon highlighted similarities as well as variations in both the concept and the practice of assimilating difference. As Adrian Favell puts it, their policies towards immigration and integration provide the perfect complement and contrast to each other. In these two nations with parallel colonial pasts, demographic conditions, and social problems very similar to one another, the British experience tends to focus on ‘race relations,’ ‘ethnic minorities,’ and ‘cultural toleration,’ concepts anathema to . . . the French post-revolutionary idiom with its emphasis on "republican citoyenneté and intégration" (94). The resulting all-inclusive, indeed, all-encompassing vision of francité, predicated as it is on a delegitimation of ethnic identity – with its key corollaries of race and religion – in favor of a national identity grounded in unicity, runs into trouble when it fetches up against the hybrid positionalities of the postwar arrivants from the former colonies and the DOM-TOMs, especially given the fact that the recognition of minority cultures, multiculturalism, and legislated race relations is seen as the illogical, incomprehensible praxis of the inhabitants of the island across the Channel.

These issues of migration, departmentalization, borders, belonging, and transnationalism within a larger context of postwar population shifts give rise to the following questions: How, if at all, are issues of identity and difference integrated into the national narratives undergirding French or British national culture? How are stereotypes of otherness and exoticism driven by these nations’ colonial encounters? To what extent is national identity inflected by visions of the foreigner, and who is a foreigner and what is it that marks one as such? What differential and discursive practices are at work when these immigrant subjects seek to represent themselves as an integral part of French or British national culture? How do such immigrant narratives expand or inflect the cosmopolitan pluralism of present-day postcolonial capitals? How do the burgeoning asymmetries of metropolitan hybridity impact and (re)orient the self-fashioning of these diasporas? How are the tensions that undergird the interaction and exchange between these groups and the larger social whole resolved, if indeed they are? Many of the most striking recent attempts to come to terms with new patterns and themes of difference, hybridity, national identity, self-definition, and self-representation in contemporary French and British literature and film have been produced by authors and directors hailing from formerly colonized French and British Caribbean territories. Such works reflect the trenchant pluralisms of London and Paris as increasingly multiethnic metropoles, articulating key strata of otherness that draw on the hybrid, transformative modernities produced by the phenomenon of postcolonial migration. This project thus reads the pluralities and intersections that continue to (re)shape the slippages of Britishness, Frenchness, and Caribbeanness engendered in the metropoles by these migration-based demographic shifts.

For what would become known as the Black British experience, the phenomenon of postwar migrant movement is in fact an integral part of a larger historical Caribbean migratory pattern rooted in slavery and its corollary of maroon communities. Indeed, migration became the accepted means of circumventing Caribbean social constraints, rather than a means of permanent escape; its allure had pervaded the region’s social classes at least since the 1840s. This demographic pattern was increasingly driven by spiraling population growth and unemployment, which had increased exponentially in size and scope after World War II, reaching 25 percent in Jamaica by the late 1940s. Similar socioeconomic forces, joining restricted social mobility to the inherited and uneven hierarchies of the plantation system, sent large numbers of West Indians to other metropolitan centers during the same period, with New York and London assuming pride of place. With the passage of the McCarran-Walker Act of 1952 restricting Caribbean immigration into the United States, the United Kingdom quickly became the destination of choice. With no restrictions on the arrival of West Indians from British colonies, since they were officially British subjects, large-scale West Indian migration is recognized as beginning with the docking of the MS Empire Windrush with its 492 West Indian passengers at Tilbury in 1948, a moment paradoxically made possible by the Nationality Act of 1948, which was in its turn largely catalyzed by Indian Independence in 1947. As Adrian Favell points out, this open-door policy may have heralded its own undoing: Britain’s peculiar relationship to the post-colonial Commonwealth ensured that, in this period, Britain maintained an open door relation to members of the Commonwealth who, as sovereign subjects, were effectively British citizens with rights of entry and abode. This expansive policy was confirmed in the 1948 Nationality Act (101). The arrival of the Windrush launched a demographic Caribbean movement that averaged 32,850 persons per annum between 1955 and 1962, and was halted only by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of that same year and the promulgation of a White Paper in 1965, limiting immigration into Britain to 8,500 people annually. Here, we should be in no doubt about those groups at whom such legislation was specifically aimed; the Act of 1962 was a direct consequence of, if not a response to, the Notting Hill riots of 1958, events seen as both reaction and resistance to increasingly overt racism and rejection on the part of resident Britons. Adrian Favell makes the link clear: the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act . . . put in place the first restrictions on immigration, cutting open immigration from the New Commonwealth, and thus clearly demarking and limiting future coloured immigrants from others of (white) origin (103). Nevertheless, in spite of such deliberate legislative obstacles, and with new standards and requirements for residency being imposed on migrants prior to any application for citizenship and a clear distinction now being drawn between a British citizen and a Commonwealth citizen, the British Home Office stated that the 15,301 British residents claiming to be born in the Caribbean in 1951 had mushroomed to 171,800 ten years later and to 304,000 in 1971. By 1981, reflecting a subsequent migration wave made up primarily of children and dependents of previous migrants, 275,000 of Britain’s West Indians claimed a birthplace outside the UK, while 244,000 of them claimed British birth. By ten years after that, it was confirmed that the total West Indian population in the UK had topped 500,000 and stood at about 0.9 percent of the population.

However, such figures, as astonishing as they are, offer only a partial picture of the postwar migration phenomenon that would overtake, transform, and ultimately radicalize concepts of Britishness. By 1968, for example, there were 1,113,000 newly arrived nonwhites in the UK; of these, 77,966 had been admitted between 1962 and 1968, the latter figure representing a drastic reduction in arrivals, a downturn whose origins are perhaps best mirrored in the fearmongering speeches of the parliamentarian Enoch Powell, perhaps best remembered for his infamous Rivers of Blood speech of that same year. Drawing on racialized fears of ethnic and cultural difference, visualized in growing numbers of Commonwealth immigrants of color, Powell became the symbolic figurehead of a vocal anti-immigration movement that built on the fear of being swamped by the other, the unknown. Adrian Favell provides a telling description of the myriad tensions at work in this moment:

Powell was clearly speaking for a sizeable part of the population, when he called on a mythical discourse of dominantly English cultural unity and distinctiveness. This distinctiveness was embodied for him in the long historical tradition of constitution and sovereignty and spilt over into cultural exclusionism. Immigrants were thus pictured as invading hordes who, with their peculiar practices and origins and predilection for crime and moral turpitude, would never be able to assimilate. In the speech he speaks of the terrified white working-class family reduced to a racial minority in their own street; and predicts the bloody outcome that will ensue if measures are not taken to repatriate the new immigrants. (105)

Such themes are obviously grounded in a visceral fear of racial difference, one which was fine when kept at a distance, objectified, and rationalized as helping to make the empire great, but which now – as the empire re-turned to the center – was skirting spaces that were uncomfortably close to home. Seen from the latter perspective, this explicit conflation of race and nationness projected fears and anxieties that paralleled similar exclusionary themes – grounded in theorized conflations of belonging and temporality that appeared at first blush to be beyond stereotyped discourses of race and place – espoused in objective contexts even by such respected critics as Raymond Williams. This series of watershed events ultimately led to the racialization of immigration inaugurated by the Immigration Act and Rules of 1971 and 1973. These restrictions were but the precursor to the Nationality Act of 1981, which drastically reduced and redefined the criteria for British citizenship, insisting that henceforth either the subject or her/his parents had to be of British birth. From this point on, there would be no further right of permanent entry into Britain for former colonials. In a sense, however, for those hoping for the continuation of a United Kingdom that was visibly descended from the inhabitants of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, this would be too little, too late.

Postwar France, in its turn, begs these questions of borders, migration, and belonging given its insistence on maintaining the applicability of the myth of race-blind universalism that presumably mediates French citizenship. Despite the racial and economic hierarchies inscribed in the colonial encounter and the ethnic, geographical, and cultural differences separating the periphery from the metropole, the trajectory from the implicit egalitarianisms of the departmental statutes of 1946, through the formation of state-run agencies like ONI and BUMIDOM in the 1950s whose aim was to promote and facilitate migration, to the promulgation of the increasingly restrictive Pasqua laws of 1986 and 1993 and their revision and relaxation by the Guigou law of 1998 betrays a telling pattern of immigration restriction and narrowing of the criteria of nationness that mirrors the British experience. A look at the rapidly changing demographics of contemporary France shows that there are almost twice as many people of French West Indian descent or birth currently living on the French mainland than make up the entire population of either Guadeloupe or Martinique, with more than 80 percent of this population residing in Paris – now known in certain quarters as the third island. The presence of this multivalent Caribbean diaspora now constitutes over 1 percent of the total French population and is rapidly transforming the cultural and ethnographic makeup of the mainland through the ever-increasing penetration of West Indian–oriented literature, music, radio stations, and films into mainstream French culture. In addition, this sociocultural phenomenon is also made increasingly visible through the installation of Caribbean communities in specific metropolitan suburbs such as Seine Saint-Denis, Bobigny, and Aulnay-sous-Bois. As the very face of Frenchness undergoes rapid and exponential change, these pathbreaking ethnocultural and political phenomena help to generate an ever more complex national framework greater than the sum of its parts.

It would be useful here to restate the thesis that France is a nation shaped by a political fragmentation and ethnic and cultural pluralism it has continually sought to deny, from its origins in such epochal events as the conquest of Languedoc in the mid-thirteenth century, through the acquisition of the duchy of Brittany in the late Middle Ages, to the return of Alsace-Lorraine by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Historically, it has been a nation constructed from shifting, diverse fragments, partially and paradoxically made up of elements of its others. As a result, the paradoxes generated by recent intersections of immigration and ethnicity are evident even without the added complexities of a perceived otherness. While France enjoys a total immigrant population of about 5 million, out of a national total of 65 million, the term immigrant is not taken to refer to other Europeans like, say, the Portuguese, who presently constitute the predominant immigrant group in France. Rather, as Winifred Woodhull points out, it refers to the influx of non-Europeans, some of whom are not immigrants at all. These include people from France’s overseas departments in the Caribbean (Martinique and Guadeloupe), as well as from former French colonies such as Vietnam, Senegal, Cameroon, and the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) (32). Within such an overall framework of difference and displacement, one that selectively impacts specific groups of non/French non/immigrants, I would like to concentrate on the situation of the Antillean citizens of the DOM (départements d’outre-mer), or overseas departments, and the insistent, ineluctable hybridities that inform their paradoxical sociocultural inscription.

While postwar immigration into France was largely driven by massive labor shortages, as it was in most of the rest of Europe, the paradox of the DOMs is that their populations were not foreigners seeking entry but nationals moving from the periphery to the center of the nation-state. Specifically for the DOMs, however, the shape of such population movement into France was catalyzed by the creation of the state agency BUMIDOM. Between its inauguration in April 1963 and its dissolution eighteen years later, BUMIDOM funneled more than 160,000 workers from Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion onto the French mainland, many of whom sought to escape rising unemployment in their own territories. For example, a comparison between France and its Caribbean DOMs shows that in 1982, French unemployment stood at 8.4 percent, while in the Caribbean the rate stood at 12.8 percent. Further, the scale of such movement is shown by the fact that by 1970, over 150,000 French West Indians were residing in France, most having arrived within the space of a single decade. By the time BUMIDOM’s work came to an end in 1982, one person in four born in the West Indies was living in France; by 1990, the total number of people in France claiming West Indian descent had risen to a remarkable 400,000, of whom two-thirds were born on the Caribbean and one-third on the mainland. With this metropolitan Caribbean population now approaching the figure of three-quarters of a million, it is already more than 1 percent of the total French population, and its influence is transforming the landscape of French cultural identity in a myriad of ways.

Similarly, by the mid-1980s, census figures from other European and North American metropoles showed more than 455,000 residents of Caribbean birth in Canada and more than 250,000 Surinamese living in the Netherlands, the latter figure representing one-third of the entire population of Surinam, with 21 percent having been born on the Dutch mainland. Such demographic developments not only confirm the explosion in Caribbean migratory movement post-1945 and, indeed, even after the genesis of Caribbean independence in the 1960s, but draw our attention more particularly toward the second- and, now, third-generation progeny of these migrants, those who, born in these post/colonial European capitals, paradoxically identify themselves as West Indian whether or not they have ever visited the land of their grand/parents’ birth, and they continue to transform the cultural landscape of both Frenchness and Englishness even as they engage new patterns and parameters for designating the West Indian diaspora.

Such demographic percentages have helped to inflect mainstream French society with zouk music, dreadlocks, and Caribbean condiments, foodstuffs, and restaurant cuisine, in areas ranging from Montparnasse to the Louvre pyramid. French Creole is now the common lingua franca in certain broadcasting media as well as in several Parisian suburbs whose character and population have become primarily French Caribbean, particularly such enclaves as Seine Saint-Denis, Val de Marne, Bobigny, and Aulnay-sous-Bois.

What is at issue here is a critically intersecting network of signification, one in which several strands of nationalism, history, culture, ethnicity, and discourse encounter and transform one another, giving rise to various inscriptions of identitarian Frenchness and Englishness that function within a doubled framework of discourse and representation. Further, characteristic definitions of Caribbean diasporic identity as one rooted in mixture and transformation both at home and abroad are directly linked to the colonial experience and to the patterns of postcolonial migration that ensued. As the diaspora moved to the metropolitan center, self-definition moved to the discursive fore in tandem with the increasing size, visibility, and presence of Caribbean migrant groups and their cultural corollaries of Creole, calypso, reggae, fiction, food, drama, and dress. It was this critical, creolized hybridity of the displaced Caribbean subject which, framed and mediated by the appropriation of the designation black, would come to designate the adaptability and continuity of Caribbeanness within a diasporic framework.

In demographic terms, these phenomena place new emphasis on the encounter between the majoritarian national framework and the minority subject obliged to negotiate with an imagined community in an ongoing state of flux. Further, they enact large shifts in the conceptualization of such fields as postcoloniality, identity, and diaspora, as the social and political paradoxes of the Caribbean experience enact their own patterns of transnationalism that traverse literatures and cultures and remap the functionality of its theory. These multiple identifications of diasporic groups located in a mainland European context juxtapose Caribbean pluralisms of history and ethnicity to engage new sites of signifying practice.

This encounter between Frenchness, Englishness and Caribbeanness and identity, nationalism, and diaspora displaces traditional concepts of ethnicity and dispossession and their categorical corollaries grounded in a neither/nor binary and replaces them with alternative positionalities of doubleness and difference. The resulting expansion and transformation of the imagined community exploits the innate but unacknowledged hybridities undergirding established and nascent notions of national consciousness to re-site the praxis and performance of identification in both metropole and periphery. Such a process critically conflates differential concepts of culture with the politics of ethnicity and historicity. R. Radhakrishnan notes that this reciprocal ‘identification’ can, on the one hand, historicize and situate the radical politics of ‘indeterminacy’ while, on the other, situating the politics of empowerment (62). Indeed, the idea of diaspora will be of overarching importance here, for the way in which we contest and come to terms with it will determine in its turn the discursive deconstruction of metropolitan and peripheral identity undertaken in this text.

If such an approach ultimately reveals the material reality of the multiple hybridities implicitly at work in our communal constructions of self and other, then the diasporic deconstructions of identity (157) that they produce must be seen as grounded in a fearful and critical asymmetry, a multiple rootedness attached to and derived from uneven axes of identitarian affiliation. By the same token, however, we should be careful not to conflate patterns of metropolitan and peripheral hybridity. As R. Radhakrishnan states, The postcolonial search for identity in the third world is beset primarily by the problem of location (162). In a certain sense, then, this problem of location can be seen as both enabling and disabling. Caribbean communities have historically been perennially peripatetic, informing and transforming one another beyond the locational boundaries either of the Caribbean Sea or, in migratory terms, of the dominant metropole. Transporting and implanting their culture with them as they moved, the diasporic (dis)continuities that distinguished this community displaced the implicit impositions of location through a praxis of cultural dialogism. On the other hand, the social structures specific to the metropolitan experience, particularly those pressing and prevalent notions of homogeneity and resemblance upon which European concepts of nationness and nationalism were constructed, would make location a potential barrier capable of inhibiting an already fragmented Caribbean subject group from adequately conceiving, representing, and performing those communal acts that inscribed Caribbean identitarian practices upon prescribed notions of Frenchness or Britishness. Crucially, this Caribbean cultural diaspora, in its encounter with the singularities undergirding metropolitan nationality, would draw on its own fissures and conflicts to enact new Anglo- and Franco-Caribbean communities from a disparate group of independent former colonial states and from a trio of overseas departments that arguably remained colonies in all but name.

In concentrating on the ways in which Caribbean diaspora identity is articulated in the texts and films studied here, the implicit imbrication of literature with the social materialities of racial discrimination is of critical importance. Wendy Walters writes that the articulation of diaspora identity in writing is more than a literary performance, it is, in fact, a political act (ix). In carving out an expressive space that would mediate the process of diaspora identification, then, the resultant staging of cultural identity becomes an act of communal agency, building on or even appropriating diaspora’s primary condition of exile to move beyond the traditional identitarian boundaries that are the product of the nation-state to sites of individual and group resistance. But rather than establishing conditions of opposition between home and diaspora, these writers seek to inscribe identity within a conjoined framework where writing is both performance and politics. Such an approach draws on the importance of seeing literary narratives as crucial ongoing sites where diaspora claims are made, unmade, contested, and reinforced (xi), as Walters cogently puts it, turning the transformations imposed by location into critical patterns of discursive displacement.

Location, then, and its primary corollary of movement inflect the literary, cultural, and performative articulations of diasporic identity and the patterns in and through which they inscribe themselves. Here, location implies movement and travel, the migratory displacement that would have eventuated in diaspora. But if, as James Clifford claims, ethnography – in its anthropological guise as the study of cultures – has privileged relations of dwelling over relations of travel (Traveling Cultures 99), then it is the transformative potential arising out of a culture’s external relations and displacements (100) that undergirds these exercises in literary and filmic form, unsettling the traditional fixities used to ground diaspora relocation. For this study, the fact that the transformative tensions of travel are embedded in and imbricated with literary expression frames a conjunction critical to the terms of diasporic expression. Clifford explains that when it becomes important to assert the existence of a dispersed people, the language of diaspora comes into play. . . . All communities . . . maintain structured travel circuits, linking members ‘at home’ and ‘away’ (Diasporas 309). For the French and British Caribbean diaspora, history and politics converge in new expressions of diaspora identity, grounded in movement and transformation.

The intersection of ethnicity with nationalism, particularly with regard to minority communities within the metropolitan space, go through a number of distinct and recognizable phases. But ethnicity remains constant, as R. Radhakrishnan points out:

During the initial phase, immigrants suppress ethnicity in the name of pragmatism and conformism. To be successful in the New World, they must actively assimilate and, therefore, hide their distinct ethnicity. This phase . . . gives way to a . . . period that refuses to subsume political, civil, and moral revolutions under mere strategies of economic betterment. In the call for total revolution that follows, immigrants reassert ethnicity in all its autonomy. The third phase seeks the hyphenated integration of ethnic identity with national identity under conditions that do not privilege the national at the expense of the ethnic. (Ethnicity 121)

In the ascendancy accorded to ethnicity as Radhakrisnan inscribes it here, while it might temporarily cede ground to assimilation and economic advancement – often the principal driver of migration – it never quite disappears. In seeking to integrate patterns of ethnic identitarianism with national ones, the challenge for such groups will be to recognize and come to terms with the arc of transformation that has accompanied their dis-location and to develop an articulative context that will give expression to this new positionality. In such an acknowledgment of difference, an implicit duality of identification or belonging in no way negates the claims made by the ethnic axis. Radhakrishnan notes that diaspora has created rich possibilities of understanding different histories. And these histories have taught us that identities, selves, traditions and natures do change with travel . . . and that we can achieve such changes in identity intentionally . . . alongside the phenomenon of relationality and the politics of representation (126–27). From this critical inscription of pluralities, new possibilities for dis-placed metropolitan identities are engendered and valorized.

The resulting framework for cultural praxis itself perforce valorizes newness, a phenomenon perhaps to be expected, as O. Nigel Bolland explains: The idea that the synthesis of new cultural practices emerges from the struggle between conflicting social forces is certainly not new (113). As both migrant and host communities are transformed in the wake of the metamorphoses of arrival, it is the ways in which these new metropolitan minorities – formerly numerical majorities in their countries of origin, countries that were creolized in the case of the Caribbean – shape a space of identitarian articulation and performance for themselves that, as Bolland puts it, offer[s] new insights on the central problem of the creole-society thesis, namely, how the dominated people in a society can shape their own culture and make their own history (115). Here we have issue with the protean character of creolization, in that it is the displacement of the creolized population that raises the question of how, and to what extent, creolization takes place among those now dominated in the new migratory social environment. A key point here is the shift from majority to minority status; in an important way, the patterns of social adjustment engendered by this metamorphosis set in train other, related forces that actively draw on the hierarchical tensions between self and other, dominator and dominated. According to Bolland, those people whose status in society is that of ‘dominée’ are neither passive nor docile but, on the contrary, their actions frequently subvert the goals and structures of the dominators (115). So if the actions of the oppressed minority in a social context of domination tend toward the critical transformation of the cultural economy to force it to adapt to them, then this is arguably the endgame of the arc of metamorphosis bridging assimilation and ethnic assertion so ably articulated by Radhakrishnan. Within the thematic parameters set by these transformative intersections of culture and identity, the politics of representation determines the shape and substance taken by the text itself.

In broader terms, these arcs and parabolas of demographic movement also disturb those set, traditional patterns of nationality and belonging that are inscribed in the oppositional binaries of home and diaspora. In this paradigm, coming to terms with the discursive dissemination of Black Britain, for example, implies undoing the privileged status of the ethnic representation of a traditionally white British gaze, along with its more proprietary corollaries of naming and exclusion. Such a process of undoing ultimately calls for a postnational concept of citizenship, such that both poles of this oppositional axis are placed imbricated in new patterns of belonging, ones that seek to replace those insularities of exclusion that tended to produce fixed definitions of national identity. As these readings will show, the migrant-based articulations of home and identity essayed through text, film, and television lurk between difference and duality, articulating shifting visions of national identity as varying versions of migrant and metropolitan doubleness, discursively inscribed in multiple sites and through a variety of constructs. These plurilocal constructions of migrant-driven nationality, inscribed by screenwriters and novelists alike, aim at claiming a larger articulative space for identity, in which form follows function such that identity’s multiple stagings and contexts are discursively embodied in encounters whose formal revisions of voice, point of view, and character trace new performative boundaries for diaspora-driven subjectivity.

In chapter 1, I discuss the context and framework for defining the Caribbean people as a diaspora, both within and beyond the region. Chapter 2 examines the construction of an ethnically grounded Caribbean subjectivity among migrants in the twin metropoles of London and Paris. Chapter 3 reads two temporally, thematically, and stylistically different representations of this migrant experience in London, while chapter 4 reads two counterparts to this experience from a Parisian perspective. In chapter 5 I analyze two films: the first centers on an away cricket match played by a Caribbean team from Brixton against one from a London suburb, while the second examines the scale and scope of the Caribbean network in Paris as they are called on to help solve a kidnapping. Overall, I hope to show that the process of displacement and mutual transformation created by the presence of the ethnocultural other on metropolitan terrain gives rise to new themes of exile and identity, transformation and continuity whose creativity both extends and illuminates migration’s subversion of fixed metropolitan modernities. The diasporic perspective that already frames the Caribbean experience subverts central principles of national unity in favor of transnational and transcultural inscription of identity, relocating British, French, and Caribbean metropolitan communities whose interactions transform the present to expand the boundaries of the future.

In time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That amnesia is the true history of the New World. That is our inheritance. . . . The slave converted himself. . . . as he adapted his master’s religion, he also adapted his language, and it is here that what we can look at as our poetic tradition begins. Now began the new naming of things.

DEREK WALCOTT, The Muse of History

ONE

Caribbean Diasporic Identity

Between Home and Away

DETERMINING THE DIASPORA

Any attempt to come to grips with the limits, implications, and resonances that the term diaspora embodies in the Caribbean context must begin by confronting the imbrication of this term with the varied inscriptions of identity that frame the concept of Caribbeanness. Ineluctably bound up with the complex patterns of regional history, identity here functions, in Paul Gilroy’s words, as a junction or hinge concept that can help to maintain the connective tissue that articulates political and cultural concerns (British Cultural Studies 225). This conjunction forces us to confront the doubleness – or perhaps the dilemma – that the term diaspora signifies in the political history and culture of the region, problematizing the many paradoxes inherent in the term itself. In a certain sense, following the arrival of Columbus and the profit-seekers who quickly followed in his wake, the Caribbean region as a whole had been made an ethnic and cultural tabula rasa by about 1600, due to the disappearance of the indigenous population through the pernicious combination of overwork and disease once exposed to the Spanish conquest. As a result, almost the entire present-day population of the Caribbean arrived there from elsewhere; they arrived for reasons as varied as voluntary migration, contract or indentured labor, and slavery, but the primary derivation of the Caribbean’s principal population groups is ultimately extra-regional. As Stuart Hall puts it in Cultural Identity and Diaspora, None of the people who now occupy the islands – black, brown, white, African, European, American, Spanish, French, East Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, Jew, Dutch – originally ‘belonged’ there. It is the space where the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated. The New World is the third term – the primal scene – where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West (234). Yet it is also indisputable that the cultural processes that Hall describes resulted in the creation of a home and an identity for the Caribbean people, one which they have made and made their own by affirming and living out the complexities of encounter, invention, and transformation. As Hall continues, Cultural identity . . . is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. . . . Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation (225). There is a plethora of evidence, much of it historical and cultural as well as anecdotal, to suggest that Caribbean people view themselves as originating in and belonging to culturally distinct national entities. At issue, then, is the extent to which the resonances of cultural identity converge with diaspora to map the boundaries of contemporary Caribbean identity.

Critically bound up with the doubleness of diasporic culture for the Caribbean are the related issues of migration and return. While certainly not peculiar to the Caribbean experience, both play a role in determining the extent to which, and the ways in which, the Caribbean may be defined as a diasporic community. On the one hand, the right – or, for that matter, the dream – of return grounds most concepts of the diasporic experience and is itself intimately bound up both with structures of meaning that are derived from and attached to problems of place or location and with those patterns of ethnic and geocultural dispersal, immigration, or exile that are read as having given rise to the concept of diaspora in the first place. Furthermore, such patterns are traditionally grounded in an act or event of recognizable trauma somewhere in the past, and they presuppose a somewhat uniform sense of co-ethnicity and exile among the dispersed as well as what Braziel and Mannur term clearly demarcated parameters of geography, national identity, and belonging (1). Along these lines, Robin Cohen also identifies a number of critical criteria grounding the mass displacements that traditionally compel diasporas into migration or flight. These include dispersal from an original homeland; the framing and idealization of this homeland in collective memory or myth; a hope or expectation of return; a strong, ethnically grounded group identity; a problematic inscription in the host country or community; and a sense of transnational solidarity with co-ethnic groups in other countries.¹ However, as a result of the many and varied movements of peoples that have characterized the twentieth century, the shape and tenor of diaspora itself have undergone numerous metamorphoses, leading Braziel and Mannur to caution . . . against the uncritical, unreflexive application of the term ‘diaspora’ to any and all contexts of global displacement and movement (3). But at least two key questions from the preceding structural schemas apply to the Caribbean case: first, how many of these criteria can be seen to apply directly to the Caribbean condition? And second, if the category of diaspora is itself linked to concepts of nation and national identity, how important are the national and geographic fragmentation and dispersal of the Caribbean peoples in the characterization of its various communities as a diaspora?

It is clear, then, that any inscription of the Caribbean as a diasporic community involves the implicit recognition of an imperial, external presence within the region, which in its turn mediates the very Caribbeanness of the term Caribbean itself. The processes of displacement and disjuncture implicit in the term diaspora are perhaps brought more clearly into focus through Gilroy’s gloss on its several resonances, where he points out that it disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness (Against Race 123). At the very least, then, any reconsiderations of the complex construct that is the diasporic Caribbean will compel us to revise long-held notions of the role and place of center and periphery in a post/colonial context and to bring into play important concepts of location, cultural fusion, and creolization as a means of interrogating and displacing rigid assumptions of identity drawn on an ever-evolving modernity and an incessant cycle of migrant movement. As Simon Gikandi puts it in his introduction to a special issue of Research in African Literatures on the black Atlantic, what is important to keep in mind, however, is the ambiguous ways in which margins and centers are conflated or blurred, the process of fusion and fission that brings them together and also separates them. Our challenge . . . is perhaps to recenter such contrapuntal relations in any diasporic or postcolonial studies agenda. Given the rapidly increasing challenges associated with locating the center or the periphery of Caribbean culture within a global context of migratory modernity, where increasingly peripatetic subjects live out the lack of grounding and perpetual motion that characterize the period, or with defining the Caribbean as an African diaspora (with its implicit resonances of exile and return), what are we to make of the plural cultural traces that are the hallmark of the region, of its assimilation and transformation of the global and the local, the imported and the indigenous into regional patterns of ethnocultural affirmation, or of the challenge posed by what Gikandi succinctly terms some concrete intellectual encounter with Africa itself (5)? The boundaries and corollaries are indeed legion here, and to make irrefutable claims concerning patterns of permanent identification risks enmeshing any emerging conceptualization of diasporic identity for the region within competing categories of race, representation, and discourse.

But perhaps the most far-reaching implication of this discussion for the Caribbean diasporic presence on the metropolitan mainland is this: if, as Lacan postulates, self-identity is constituted within the gaze of another, then ultimately both populations are mutually interpellated, interrogated, displaced, transformed, and redefined by this constitutive recognition of difference. Such an ongoing, interactive encounter thus relocates many critical categories, including diaspora, ethnicity, and culture, such that they are no longer defined simply by traditional boundaries of race and place, Britishness, Frenchness, or Caribbeanness.

What is at stake here goes beyond such relatively straightforward issues as an identifiable Africanness or Indianness of Caribbean culture, the formative role of colonial metropolitan influence, or the extent to which any of these axes have been harnessed to, or infiltrated by, the various other ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, or musical forces that were also displaced by, into, and across the region. While all of these factors certainly played a role in the development of recognizably Caribbean identity patterns, it would probably be foolhardy even to attempt to establish some sort of hierarchical sliding scale that would measure and account for the place of each element in some sort of geocultural, transnational Caribbean Chain of Cultural Being. Such measurements are almost impossible to fix with any reasonable degree of certainty, particularly given the variability and specificity of colonialism’s social and political exigencies as they were carried out across the individual islands. Indeed, given the congruence of routes, pathways, and histories that creatively collided in the region and the seemingly infinite interweaving of a variety of ethnic and cultural influences, what emerges from this maelstrom of post/colonial place(s) is the creative openness undergirding any framework of Caribbean identity whether within the region or outside it.

It should by now be clear that attempting to account for the Caribbean experience in diasporic terms is a tricky proposition at best; the history of the Caribbean and its people does not conform to traditional diasporic patterns and exigencies of exile, dispersal, and return. Nor, for that matter, do we discern a single national entity of overwhelming political and psychological importance looming large on the diasporic horizon, a place that mediates both origin and return. Ultimately, these protean practices exploit the implicit slippage between voluntary and forced migration, a dichotomy exacerbated in the Caribbean context by a diachronic perspective that ranges from the inception of slavery, through the arrivants on contractual indentureship that followed emancipation, to the arrival of Portuguese and Syro-Lebanese groups around the end of the nineteenth century, to the labor-driven mass exodus to various metropoles of the late twentieth century. In these terms, it is beyond question that transnationalism and diaspora are key tenets in the region’s historical and symbolic framework. As Mimi Sheller asserts, It has become a prime location for the emergence of transnationalism, both in terms of its uprooted people and its hybrid texts, spoken languages, diasporas, and music traveling across world markets. Not only does each Caribbean society embody and encompass a rich mixture of genealogies, linguistic innovations, syncretistic religions, complex cuisine, and musical cultures, but [they] have also exported their dynamic multicultures abroad, where they have recombined and generated new diasporic forms (174). Diaspora’s central principle of an identifiable, if chimeric. national entity cedes, then, in the Caribbean case, to a transnational and transcultural inscription of identity, grounded in communities and locations eventuated in history and expanding and protean in the present. Such a vision of the fluid imbrication of nation and identity works to further Paul Gilroy’s somewhat ironic observation that nations are presented as entirely homogeneous cultural units staffed by people whose hypersimilarity renders them interchangeable (British Cultural Studies 225). In this Caribbean context, then, the importance that can be ascribed to an intrinsic ethnocultural difference militates against the urge to inscribe a singular imagined natal territory as diaspora’s ineluctable defining characteristic; rather, as Brent Hayes Edwards suggests, we should conceive of diaspora here as a frame of cultural identity determined not through ‘return’ but through difference (12). The persistence of perceptible differences and similarities within a larger, overarching framework of slippage and reciprocity propels and consolidates the idea of nonassimilation that Robin Cohen cites as critical to certain components of the diasporic condition: it is still necessary to the notion of diaspora that they ‘creolize’ or indigenize not at all or only in a very limited way and continue to retain their link, sometimes their dependence, on the ‘motherland’ (Global Diasporas 24). Certainly, while the geographically and politically fragmented Caribbean is not in this sense a motherland, it is nevertheless incontrovertible that the region as a whole figures as home for those who are away.

But such abstract notions of implicit marginalization cannot and do not account for the totality of the Caribbean migrant experience. These expatriate communities, particularly those that came into being in the wake of the migration movements to the European metropoles begun in the postwar period, while often homogeneous and endogamous, are also hybridized in their turn through their cultural exchanges with the larger British and French communities, such that their implicit homogeneity is then placed in question. In other words, those areas of