American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South ed. by Martin Munro and Celia Britton (review)

When the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies recently decided to publish its new series in the form of a single annual volume, it provided an ideal platform for more extended, thematically focused edited collections. With this latest publication — a real editorial triumph—Martin Munro and Celia Britton have brought rare insight and intelligent organization to a reflection on a shared history and geography, as well as a set of fascinating cultural encounters between the American South and the francophone Caribbean — or what Munro and Britton refer to neatly as the 'circum-Caribbean'. The collection is divided to three broad categories, each of which focuses on the many varied connections, convergences, or divergences between the Caribbean and the American South. The first section is devoted to the multiple ways in which creolization is understood, depending on where and when one invokes the term. Several richly informative articles help to provide historical context, particularly the nineteenth century, with the enforced migration from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana following Haitian independence. Mary Gallagher's article gives an intriguing account of the colonial explorer Lafcadio Hearns as a founding theorist of creolization. Other essays (Angel Adams Parham, Typhaine Leservot) discuss creolization as a kind of mapping back on to America of the deconstructed identity politics that result from creole theorization, and Barack Obama (Valérie Loichot) becomes the surprising figure through which to imagine such destabilization of racial categories. The second section concerns the importance of music, and most notably jazz, in this historical narrative. Munro's discussion of rhythm as 'one of the most durable and adaptable markers of creolization' (p. 116) brilliantly links James Brown's prophetic use of new rhythmic forms to Caribbean writers' emphasis on rhythm as a vehicle for social and political transformation. Jeremy Lane takes up this idea of the powerful political implications of jazz, in a subtle reading of a number of allusive but telling references to jazz music in Frantz Fanon's texts, in which he aligns traditional jazz with his critique of the politically disabling essentialism of Negritude. Articles by Jean-Luc Tamby and Jerome Camal then extend the analogy of music and politics further, and look to Édouard Glissant's counter-discursive poetic language as aesthetically analogous to Miles Davies's post-bebop musical style. Finally, the volume explores the many complex intertextualities linking the work of William Faulkner, as a product of the slave-owning class in plantation society, to the work of two of the towering literary figures of the francophone Caribbean: Glissant and Maryse Condé. Glissant's reading of Faulkner, and the 'unsayable' in his novels, becomes the central focus of all the readings in this final section. Britton's essay, a fitting end to an excellent collection, finds not just intertextual links, but surprising literary debts to Faulkner in both Glissant's and Condé's novels, although their typically creative inflections of Faulkner's own obsession with ancestral crime provide a perfect example of the deep, yet deeply ambivalent, sympathies linking the American South to the francophone Caribbean.