Eulogizing Creoleness?: Éloge de la créolité and Caribbean Identity, Culture, and Politics

This essay introduces part 1 of a special section on the créolité movement—“Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité”—in which a variety of essays explore and assess the impact, twenty-five-plus years on, of the controversial manifesto by Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé. Éloge de la créolité has been much discussed and critiqued in relation to Antillean politics and literature; its claim to replace essentialist racial identities with an ever-evolving diversalité has been disputed by a variety of other authors from the Caribbean and beyond. The essays here fall broadly into four categories—intellectual contexts, politics, literature, and ethnography. This introduction asks, does the concept of créolité have a future in the current situation of Antillean writing, which has lost much of its momentum, especially in relation to writing from Haiti? (Part 2 of “Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité” will appear in Small Axe 55, in March 2018.)