#creolisation

On Rasta continuum in Cuba

In defiance of the orderly classification of race and religion, Indo-Trinidadians participate in and contribute actively to what is commonly labeled as the “African” Orisha tradition. Houk (1995, 135) describes these Indo-Trini participants as mainly interested bystanders, though he estimates their presence as being up to 10 percent of the Orisha tradition, including notable shrine leaders and drummers. The influence from Indo-Trinidadian culture moves beyond the individual level of participation in community to theological influences from Hinduism. Aiyejina and Gibbons remark, “So strong is the inter-penetration of Africa and India in Trinidad that, in the context of the Orisha tradition, Osayin is perceived by some Orisha practitioners as having an Indian dimension and Hindu deities are represented in many Orisha chapelles or in separate Hindu chapelles within the same yard” (1999, 198).9 In addition to there being Indo-Trinidadian adherents to Ifá/Orisha and the theological influence of Hinduism, there also exist cultural and political sites of support between sectors of the respective communities.

Granted, Harris can sometimes sound like an unreconstructed hippy and Glissant a New Age spiritualist; but both are very aware of the violence that both creates and sustains human cross-cultural interaction. They just seek to not privilege the violence and inequity as the end of the interaction, and they dare try to understand how productive those brutal interactions have also been. They challenge us not to reduce history to the violence of interaction; or at least, not without paying equal attention to the products of that violence. In fact, it was Glissant who made what I consider the single most controversial claim in the history of racial conversation in the Americas, if not the world. “Western thought,” he writes in Caribbean Discourse, “although studying it as a historical phenomenon, persists in remaining silent about the potential of the slave trade for the process of creolization.”[10] Few would publicly make such a statement, at least not in the United States or the Caribbean. He’s challenging us to engage the potential of slavery, to see slavery as the laboratory of modernity that we imply yet hesitate to fully attribute. And that a Black thinker (anyone, really; but particularly a product of chattel slavery) to suggest that slavery is being silenced for its productive contributions—that anything positive be publicly attributed to the enslavement of Black people—is remarkably contentious; yet it is the silent assumption upon which much thought and culture rests. Sadly, in terms of public articulation, the closest thing we have to that argument is that old tradition of salvific racism where whites tried to convince Blacks that they should be grateful to slavery for having brought them to the light of Christ or into the Western world

Kamau Brathwaite Is DEAD

L’idée de génie, c’est de prendre une poignée d’îles et un peuple de 400 000 personnes pour une métaphore de l’humanité à venir. Glissant a aussi apporté cela : le lieu de l’évènement matrice, de l’évènement qui désigne l’avenir, ce n’est pas New-York ou Shanghai. Ce n’est pas nécessairement un lieu de puissance. Prenez les banlieues françaises : les produits culturels sont américains, la langue est française, la nourriture est tantôt italienne, tantôt chinoise, l’origine est africaine. Le monde entier devient le carrefour du monde entier. Pour comprendre le devenir de l’humanité, cette vision est une extraordinaire boîte à outil.