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Derek
Walcott suggests that the fitting together of the fragmentary is characteristic
of Antillean
art,
which does not present a seamless or perfect unity of the fragmentary but
results in a
multiplicity,
reflected in the topographic image of the drifting archipelago of islands,
broken
off
from the mainland.
For
other Caribbean theorists, bricolage has come to be seen as a cultural process
that could also serve as a model for articulating identity in an increasingly
globalized world. Such a perspective is reflected in Françoise Vergès’s
definition of the relationship between bricolage and creolization:
Creolization
is about bricolage drawing freely upon what is available, recreating with new
content and in new forms a distinctive culture, a creation in a situation of
domination and conflict. It is not about retentions but about
reinterpretations. It is not about roots but about loss. It must be distinguished
from cultural contact and multiculturalism because, at heart, it is a practice
and ethics of borrowing and accepting to be transformed, affected by the other.
In the current era of globalization, processes of creolization appear in zones
of conflict and contact. They are the harbingers of an ongoing ethics of
sharing the world.
Raphaël Confiant.......sees the Creole
person as cohabited by different gods or as a site where the pieces and parts of identity are
constantly mingling and disentangling, simultaneously embracing and excluding one another.
Confiant argues that this intermingled experience also applies to the domains of cuisine,
clothing, technology, and language. He reaffirms the view, previously articulated in the Eloge
de la Créolité,9 that a pluralistic identity prefigures globalization.10 Confiant’s description of
Creole bricolage seems to imply a utopian outcome in which the processes of colonization,
creolization, and globalization enable new forms of identity formation and processes of
communal enrichment through pacific intermixtures and aggregations.
While Confiant’s literary works offer more complex treatments of cultural fragmentation,
this affirmation is problematic because he ignores the possibilities for cultural impoverishment
as a result of the deliberate obliteration or unconscious repression of cultural fragments.
person as cohabited by different gods or as a site where the pieces and parts of identity are
constantly mingling and disentangling, simultaneously embracing and excluding one another.
Confiant argues that this intermingled experience also applies to the domains of cuisine,
clothing, technology, and language. He reaffirms the view, previously articulated in the Eloge
de la Créolité,9 that a pluralistic identity prefigures globalization.10 Confiant’s description of
Creole bricolage seems to imply a utopian outcome in which the processes of colonization,
creolization, and globalization enable new forms of identity formation and processes of
communal enrichment through pacific intermixtures and aggregations.
While Confiant’s literary works offer more complex treatments of cultural fragmentation,
this affirmation is problematic because he ignores the possibilities for cultural impoverishment
as a result of the deliberate obliteration or unconscious repression of cultural fragments.
Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses
of Bricolage
Knepper, Wendy.
Small Axe, Number 21 (Volume 10, Number 3), October 2006, pp.
70-86 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
