Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film by H. Adlai Murdoch (review)

This comparative study of Caribbean presence in post-World War II London and Paris highlights "the ways in which Caribbean diaspora identity is articulated" (13) in literature and film. In chapters 1 and 2, Murdoch provides a compelling theoretical and historical articulation of how, in the process of migration to Paris or London, the cultural creolization of the Caribbean encounter is reproduced and displaced to the metropoles. He convincingly demonstrates that there is "a critical second creolization for the Caribbean diaspora in its new European home" (76), especially for Europe-born children of migrants. He demonstrates that a racially essentialist understanding of British and French national identities as white has been repeatedly challenged by post-World War II postcolonial migration in general and Caribbean migration in particular and that both the metropoles' and the migrants' cultures have been changed and creolized in the process of intermingling.

Murdoch then proceeds to analyze how various cultural producers (most of whom were born in the metropoles from families of Caribbean descent or with biracial backgrounds) have creatively articulated black Britishness and black Frenchness and provided imaginative representations of multicultural England and France. Chapter 3 focuses on two black British novels, Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004) and Zadie Smith's hilarious debut White Teeth (2000). Both novels use multilayered narrative and linguistic strategies to represent the complexities of multicultural Britain. In particular, Murdoch highlights the stylistic changes used by both writers to represent narrative voices ranging from educated, middle-class migrant to white working-class English characters. In chapter 4, he analyzes two francophone texts that figure characters in exile, Maryse Condé's Desirada (1997) and Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia (1996). Condé's peripatetic, adrift female protagonist appears to fit the pattern of postmigrant literature studied by Murdoch to a lesser extent than the other texts, something Condé would probably relish given her dislike of categorizations. The final chapter compares a British film, Horace Ové's Playing Away (1986), and a French film, Pascal Légitimus's Antilles-sur-Seine (2000). Like White Teeth, both represent metropolitan Caribbean communities in a comedic mode and Murdoch traces how they play on stereotypes and mimicry to stage cross-cultural encounters and highlight Caribbean solidarities in the metropoles.

Murdoch is a leading scholar of francophone postcolonial Caribbean literary studies. With this book, he establishes himself as a comparatist as well. Although he mentions that Stovall's term "second-generation immigrant" is "nonsensical," given that migration is not a nationality (60), he unfortunately continues to use the misnomer throughout. Apart from this small problem, the book provides an extremely valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial studies and European literary and film studies in at least three ways: it theoretically refines the concept of creolization, it contributes to much-needed redefinitions of France and the United Kingdom as multicultural, and it foregrounds the aesthetic qualities of the works under study.