Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage

Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.

—Derek Walcott

Aux Antilles, le mélange s’est fait sous le mode de la diffraction, de l’hétéroclite, du «bricolage culturel» au sens de Lévi-Strauss.

(In the Antilles, mixture occurs through the mode of diffraction, of the heteroclite, of “cultural bricolage” in Lévi-Strauss’s sense of the term.)

—Raphaël Confiant

Caribbean identities, linguistic transformations, religious beliefs, music, cuisine, and aesthetic practices have been shaped by the fragmentation and intermixture of various traditions. 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.¹ From a sociological perspective, Raphaël Confiant sees creolization itself as dependent on the intermixture of fragments through bricolage, the process of taking the materials at hand and using them in an improvisatorial fashion.² 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.³

This article examines some of the ways in which bricolage has been theorized in relation to Caribbean colonial history, creolization, and créolité, highlighting the ethical difficulties involved in recuperating bricolage as a mode of Caribbean identity and aesthetics, particularly in the contexts of postcolonial perspectives and globalization.

The figure of the bricoleur and the concept of cultural bricolage are introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind. In contrast to the engineer who proceeds in an abstract, methodical, and scientific manner, Lévi-Strauss defines the bricoleur as someone who proceeds in an improvisatory fashion.⁴ For the bricoleur, Lévi-Strauss says, “the rules of the game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous.”⁵ The work of bricolage is contingent on all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.⁶ Bricolage is a mode of interpreting and adapting existing materials to new circumstances or needs. While the result may be a new or reformulated myth, tool, a house, a language, or a discourse, it is important to note that Lévi-Strauss does not see it as a deliberate project-oriented view, but rather as an adaptive mode of being in the world. Bricolage refers to a process, a mode of activity or being in the world, and the result, the object, text, or outcome of this activity.

This is a particularly important point when it comes to the definition of creolization as a process, with créolité as one of its by-products.⁷ In “Créolité et francophonie: un éloge de la diversalité,” Raphaël Confiant describes the Caribbean as both the product and ongoing process of cultural bricolage, stating:

Aux Antilles, le mélange s’est fait sous le mode de la diffraction, de l’hétéroclite, du «bricolage culturel» au sens...