Beyond Universality and Particularity: Glissant, Creolization, and Caribbeanness

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: Distinctio, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, course: Extended Study, language: English, abstract: Accordingly, we have to resist two extreme poles and their respective inherent dangers: on the one hand we are confronted with a potential reproduction and perpetuation of imperial patterns through universalizing discourses, whereas, on the other hand, narratives of cultural separatism, which are sometimes based on notions of cultural purity and essentialist forms of identity, often tend to ignore the dynamics of cross-cultural contact and exchange and may even turn unwittingly into forms of cultural racism. We should, however, bear in mind that processes of cross-cultural contact (the examples of colonialism itself and the practices it gave rise to, such as for instance the transatlantic slave trade, immediately spring to mind) more often than not involve stark asymmetries of power.