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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the face of the destructive possibilities of resurgent nationalisms, unyielding ethnicities and fundamentalist religious affinities, there is hardly a more urgent task than understanding how humans can learn to live alongside one another. This fascinating book shows how people from various societies learn to live with social diversity and cultural difference, and considers how the concepts of identity formation, diaspora and creolization shed light on the processes and geographies of encounter.
Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham reveal how early historical encounters created colonial hierarchies, but also how conflict has been creatively resisted through shared social practices in particular contact zones including islands, port cities and the ‘super-diverse’ cities formed by enhanced international migration and globalization. Drawing on research experience from across the world, including new fieldwork in Louisiana, Martinique, Mauritius and Cape Verde, their account provides a balance between rich description and insightful analysis showing, in particular, how identities emerge and merge ‘from below’.
Moving seamlessly between social and political theory, history, cultural anthropology, sociology and human geography, the authors point to important new ways of understanding and living with difference, surely one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
A Note on Usage
Framing the Question: A Preamble
1 Shaping the Tools: Three Concepts
Social identity formation
Diaspora
Creolization
Conclusion
Notes
2 Exploring Difference: Early Interactions
Early explanations of difference
Babylon as metaphor
Kant: the flawed cosmopolitan
Civilization or Kultur
Herder’s intervention
Dancing and cannibal talk
Talking to each other: the beginnings of convergence
Conclusion
Notes
3 Locating Identity Formation: Contact Zones
Islands and plantations as contact zones
Islanded identities
Port cities as contact zones
Super-diverse cities
Conclusion
Notes
4 Expressing Merged Identities: Music
Encounters in Cape Verde
Diasporic and creolized identities in Louisiana
Authenticity and longing: the music of Cape Verde
Louisiana: the wellspring of popular music
Conclusion
Notes
5 Celebrating and Resisting: Carnival
Situating carnival and the ‘carnivalesque’
Mardi Gras in Louisiana
Carnival in Cape Verde
Carnival in London
Conclusion
Notes
6 Constructing Heritage
Mauritius: the era of creolization
The revival of diasporic heritages in Mauritius
Creolization in northwestern Louisiana
Decreolization and the recovery of a Creole heritage culture
Reaffirming creolization: Louisiana and Mauritius
Conclusion
Notes
7 Marking Identities: The Cultural Politics of Multiple Loyalties
French and Martinican: in harmony or at odds?
Marking difference from the metropole
Environmental markers: what lies beneath?
Social markers: Martinican or metropolitain?
Cultural or creole markers
Conclusion
Notes
8 Encountering Difference: A Conclusion
Concepts
Encounters
Spaces
Music and carnival
Other cultural practices
Heritage
Markers of identity
Conflict, cohabitation or creolization
Imagining the future
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Encountering Difference
Diasporic Traces, Creolizing Spaces
Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham
polity
Copyright © Robin Cohen & Olivia Sheringham 2016
The right of Robin Cohen & Olivia Sheringham to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0883-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cohen, Robin, 1944- author. | Sheringham, Olivia, 1981- author.Title: Encountering difference : diasporic traces, creolizing spaces / Robin Cohen, Olivia Sheringham.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015042065| ISBN 9781509508792 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509508808 (pbk. : alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Cultural fusion. | Assimilation (Sociology) | Emigration and immigration--Social aspects.Classification: LCC HM1272 .C64 2016 | DDC 306--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042065
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Robin Cohen wishes to thank research participants and friends in Cape Verde, Mauritius, Louisiana and Guadeloupe, including Maria Cândida Gonçalves, Vijaya Teelock, Lindsey Collen, Ram Seegobin, Robbie and Catherine Stephen, Arnaud Carpooran, C. Le Cartier, J. F. Lafleur, Rosebelle Boswell, Loran Medea, Sheila Richmond, Mary Gehman, Susan Dollar, Peter Gregory, Monique Bouyer, Terrence Mosley, Mary Wernet, Kathe Hambrick-Jackson, David I. Beriss, Michael S. Martin, Julien Merion and Rose-Lee Raqui.
Olivia Sheringham wishes to thank all her research participants and friends in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Cape Verde, including Richard and Sally Price, Dominique Aurelia, Paulo Athanèse, Patricia Donatien, Pascale Lavanaire, Gerry L’Etang, Gilles Alexandre, Roberte Verdan, Roger de Jaham, Patrick Chamoiseau, Christiane Emmanuel, Suzanne Laurent and Barbara Colombe in Martinique; Gerard Delver, Fred Reno, Léna Blou, Rose-Lee Raqui, Emmanuel Ibéné, Alijah, Carole, Nicole de Surmont, Julien Merion and Bernard Phipps in Martinique and Guadeloupe; and Josina Freitas, João Fortes, Manuel Lima Fortes, Tambla Almeida, Margarida Martins, Moacyr Rodrigues, Celeste Fortes, Manu Cabral, Kiki Lima and Jorge Martins in Cape Verde.
Interviews in French and Portuguese were conducted by Olivia Sheringham in Martinique and Cape Verde. (She has provided her own translations.) Interviews in Mauritius and Louisiana were conducted by Robin Cohen. To minimize the number of endnotes, we have simply indicated in the text that the source of information is an interview. Where appropriate, individuals have been identified by name.
On a personal note Olivia would like to thank Emma Klinefelter and James and Leo Cattell, while Robin likewise extends his thanks to Selina Molteno Cohen and Jason Cohen. He gives a special ‘thank you’ to Paola Toninato, his co-editor on The Creolization Reader (2010).
Both authors wish to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding this research (Grant number F/08/000/H) and the Oxford Diasporas Programme (http://www.migration.ox.ac.uk/odp/). Zoe Falk, Claire Fletcher, Jenny Peebles and Sally Kingsborough provided administrative and editorial support to us and to the programme at large. Colleagues who provided critiques and support include Josh de Wind, Khachig Tölölyan, Steve Vertovec, Ian Goldin, Nick Van Hear, Peggy Levitt, Jørgen Carling, Ralph Grillo, Denis Constant Martin and Edgar Pieterse. We particularly profited from Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s detailed reading of the manuscript.
We wish to acknowledge that some of the material in chapter 7 is reproduced from an article published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, February 2016.
A Note on Usage
‘Creole(s)’ (with a capital letter) refers to a person or people who are so identified by others or self-identify using that description.
When it appears in lower case, ‘creole’ is used adjectively, as in ‘a creole language’ or ‘creole food’.
The popular language in Cape Verde is ‘Krioulu’, which in Martinique is ‘Kréyol’. ‘Krio’ is widely spoken in Sierra Leone, while the majority of people in Mauritius speak ‘Kreol’.
Framing the Question: A Preamble
Jamaican-born Stuart Hall, who died in 2014, was one of Britain’s most perceptive and revered public intellectuals. Asked to define the key issue of the twenty-first century, he responded as follows:
How are people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different languages, different religious beliefs, produced by different and highly uneven histories, but who find themselves either directly connected because they’ve got to make a life together in the same place, or digitally connected because they occupy the same symbolic worlds – how are they to make some sort of common life together without retreating into warring tribes, eating one another, or insisting that other people must look exactly like you, behave exactly like you, think exactly like you?1
This book addresses Stuart Hall’s question. It is, of course, all too easy to list the countless examples of conflict between different ethnicities, nationalities and religions. News bulletins are replete with militant demands for ethnic exclusivity, minority-language education, religious orthodoxy and territorial separatism. Think, for example, of the conflicts between Kosovars and Serbs in the Balkans, Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Alawi, other Shias and Sunni in Syria or Russians and Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine. Instead of focusing on the many forms of ethnic and religious conflict, the potency of which we do not contest, this book is centred on how, when and where people of diverse heritages meet and converge, and why understanding this more positive outcome might be important for the future of humankind.
We decided to pursue a number of complementary strategies. We reasoned that new social identities arise at the formative moment of meeting (when initial stereotypes are generated), identities that become modified as encounters deepen and become more multifaceted. Social actors bring to these ‘thicker’ encounters what they cannot let go from their pasts and what they need to absorb, or want to embrace, from their present situations and contexts. This line of thinking induced us to develop and refine three seminal concepts – social identity formation, diaspora and creolization, all of which we delineate in chapter 1.
We also noticed a decided lack of compelling historical explanations with which to situate the beginnings of cultural difference. Was difference, as some religious accounts suggest, a result of God’s will – an act of divine punishment for humankind’s effrontery in seeking to reach for celestial power and understanding? (The story of the Tower of Babel exemplifies this narrative.) Did difference arise as a result of genetic mutation, migration and the differential adaptation to new environments, an inference that might be derived from a Darwinian starting point? Were differences simply inevitable, a sort of instinctual heterophobia driven by mutual distrust or terror as people who looked and acted differently, or spoke mutually unintelligible languages, encountered each other for the first time? In chapter 2 we look in some detail at these initial contacts between disparate peoples and show how cultural boundaries were imagined, constructed and transgressed.
Having addressed our problem conceptually and historically, we thought it indispensable to complement ‘the when’ with ‘the where’. Initial encounters between strangers, essentially driven by trade and exploration, later gave way to the production of tropical commodities, the expansion of industrial production and (now) to the globalization of finance and services. As we argue in chapter 3, particular contact zones (islands and plantations, port cities and ‘super-diverse cities’) embody these shifts in the political economy and provide the main sites, the creolizing spaces, in which emergent societies, shared social practices and new identities emerge.
Subsequent chapters provide empirical descriptions and comparative analysis of cultural encounter and convergence. Using arresting and instructive examples from original fieldwork, we show how diasporic resources are evoked and new social identities emerge, sometimes only in embryonic form. In chapter 4, we focus on language and music. Next, we consider how the celebration of carnival (chapter 5) and the construction and reconstruction of heritage (chapter 6) provoke a complex interplay between new and old identities, between diaspora and creolization. In chapter 7, we analyse how conflicting tugs of identity are ‘marked’ in terms of representation, cultural theory and political loyalties.
We conclude the book by indicating the way in which our account illuminates how people learn to live with difference, which is, as Stuart Hall’s prescient remarks signalled, surely one of the most challenging issues of our day (chapter 8).
Notes
1
Stuart Hall, ‘Living with difference: Stuart Hall in conversation with Bill Schwarz’,
Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture
, 37, 2007, pp. 150–1.
1Shaping the Tools: Three Concepts
Social identity is the first of our three organizing concepts (the others being diaspora and creolization). It is a relatively recent construct in mainstream social sciences, yet now seems to be of ubiquitous concern. This stronger need to form or defend social identities is probably a reaction to the increased connectivity associated with globalization and the greater volumes and diversity of migration of all types (forced, semi-free, free, male or female, and from nearly all ethnicities, religions and nationalities). Identity construction arises among migrants, refugees and settled populations and involves assertions or reassertions of ethnicity, nationalism and religious observance as well as an embrace of more cosmopolitan possibilities. When do these manifestations of social identity result in different and contradictory trajectories? When, by contrast, do they intersect or converge?
Unlike social identity, diaspora and creolization are of much older provenance. Diaspora is an idea that ancient Greeks developed and that Jews appropriated and re-burnished for contemporary purposes. The term was conventionally deployed to represent a history of exile and dispossession, a sense of co-solidarity with other members of the dispersed group; it is associated with the development of myths of a common provenance and home, as well as determined efforts to establish or re-establish a homeland. If the term was to be generalized, the first task was to move it beyond its near exclusive usage to describe Jews (and to a lesser extent Armenians and Africans), and to transcend the trope of victimhood. This task was accomplished by social practice – as more and more groups (mainly ethnically denoted) described themselves as diasporas – and by the interventions of a number of social scientists, who liberated the notion from its old anchor points and gave it wider conceptual purchase.1
A contrasting form of identity formation to diaspora is the idea of creolization, our third organizing concept, which centres on cross-fertilization between different societies as they interact. One must immediately confess that this term has a remarkable plethora of near synonyms – hybridity, métissage (French), mestizaje (Spanish), mestiçagem (Portuguese), interculturalism, multiculturalism, multiculture, pluriculture, transculturation, cultural pluralism, syncretism and mixity. No doubt, we have missed a few besides. Without going into a detailed etymological and historical explanation of each expression, the ones we consider paralleled and complemented our intentions are briefly amplified below:
Hybridity
has been used in recent years, particularly in cultural studies and literature, to signify overlapping cultural traditions and the creations of ‘third cultures’. Hybridity had unfortunate origins in the history of racial science and plant biology, indicating vigour combined with sterility and, in extreme versions, degeneracy, but a more positive use has now been widely accepted. One dissenting voice argues that because discussions of hybridity have become so pervasive, non-hybrid elements are ‘rejected, silenced, or exterminated from cultural discourse’.
2
Syncretism
is used mainly to describe the fusion or selective adoption of religious beliefs, an arena of social interaction that is discussed by us from time to time. Charles Stewart notes that syncretism was mainly used for religious mixing and refers to its ‘objectionable but nevertheless instructive past. If this past can be understood, then we are in a position to consciously reappropriate syncretism’.
3
Interculturalism
is perhaps the newest term to be deployed to signify cultural convergence. Its great virtue is that it evidently transcends the segmentation implied in multiculturalism. Interculturalism has been favoured by progressive educationalists and frequently used in their rather restricted circles. However, it is gaining increasing acceptance in international agencies and the United Nations and is chosen in a valuable discussion of ‘community cohesion’ in Britain.
4
Though our argument draws on all three concepts, our favoured expression is creolization, a more deep-seated idea – firmly anchored in historical experiences, scholarly use (particularly in linguistics) and popular practice. For at least five centuries there have been creole languages, self-described Creole peoples and creole/creolizing societies. We explain below how we use the term.
Social identity formation
In general, interest in social identities has increased dramatically over the past 30 years – to such a degree, indeed, that it has become a dominant theme in anthropological and sociological studies. Historically, this is surprising given that most of the grand figures in these disciplines (luminaries like Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski) managed perfectly well without recourse to the idea of social identity. These thinkers were not so naive as to assume that ethnicity, nation, community, class or religion (‘gender’ was rarely used) were fixed and unyielding social categories, but none foresaw the extent to which some identities would become so malleable. It may be that the scholars we list are too easily and conventionally chosen and that an alternative early genealogy of identity-related thought can be found in Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead or C.H. Cooley, particularly in the latter’s idea of the struggle of the marginalized minority to escape the impress of conformity dictated by the majority. This different intellectual provenance is discussed in Richard Jenkins’s account of social identity. However, he also dates the paradigmatic shift more recently, declaring that ‘identity became one of the unifying themes of social science in the 1990s and shows no signs of going away’.5
Three accounts are emblematic of this shift:
Erik Erikson moved the study of identity from an examination of how the ego and personality adjust over a lifespan (the traditional domain of psychology) to that of the social roles individuals are called upon to play. The idea that there might be a tension between these processes was vital to his notion of an ‘identity crisis’.
6
A number of other social scientists have picked up and diffused the sociological aspects of his analysis.
An influential work by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann generated a conviction in social constructivism that almost became an article of religious faith among some social scientists.
7
Their work fed a radical anti-essentialism that questioned any given historical fact or material entity, let alone the contours of any group identity. In other words, representation, imagination and social action could construct, destroy or reconstruct reality itself.
8
Given such a radical programme, it was perhaps a modest enough claim to suggest, as Benedict Anderson did in his famous account, that the nation was also an imagined community.
9
Paralleling the shifts in academic thinking were changes in the real world as the axes of political mobilization shifted away from class politics to the politics of identity. A wide range of communities – ethnic, racial, gender-based or religious – proclaimed their distinctive programmes amidst an array of other voices clambering to be heard.
The outcome of these intellectual interventions and social changes was to shatter any notion of fixed social identities. The social world became a world of identity flows, boundary formation/deformation, frontier zones, blurring, uncertainty, hybridity and mixtures rather than one marked by purity, homogeneity, timelessness and bounded entities.10 This new emphasis on fluidity resonated with many aspects of an increasingly globalized world. Improved connectivity had brought many cultures into eye contact, sometimes into collision. Increased resistance to neo-liberal versions of global capitalism reactivated old religious beliefs and new social movements alike. The more varied origins of international migrants meant that alien ways appeared not only on television screens, but also as lived realities in local communities. For radical social constructivists, this was predictable and explicable. Modernity, with its attempt to integrate differences through ideology, citizenship and the nation-state, had to yield to the ambiguous and complex world of postmodernity, where grand narratives explained nothing. Reality was reduced to radical contingency.
Following the near collapse of the global financial system in September and October 2008, the wheel turned again. For a start, nationalism has resurfaced – in an ugly xenophobic form in Russia, South Africa, Greece and Israel, and in a determined reassertion of the modernist project (which we may crudely describe as integration through citizenship) in Europe, Canada, Australia and many other places. Old-fashioned demands for protectionism and anti-foreigner sentiment have emerged from under the apparently tranquil, fluid surfaces of the transnational. Led by cynical politicians, threatened working classes and the unemployed have frequently embraced such sentiments. Even the early Obama phenomenon, which looked so promising to a world battered by the neo-conservative nostrums of unilateralism and militarism, was marked by evocations of Lincoln, a swelling patriotism in the USA and a determined attempt to reconstruct a new unum from the new pluribus.11
Five forms of social identity
Despite this new swirl of sometimes liquefying and sometimes congealing identities, we can condense the possible outcomes for those seeking to define or redefine their self-conceptions, or identity trajectories, in the face of the challenges arising from globalization, international migration and other rapid social changes.12 We delineate five major forms of social identity formation, which are described below and illustrated in figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Five forms of social identity
a reaffirmation of felt (namely socially constructed) primordial loyalties to
sub-national entities
like clan, tribe, ethnicity, locality or language group;
a revival of
nationalism
, particularly in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union, the fragmentation of the Balkans, the terrorist incidents of recent years and in response to current global financial and migration crises;
a recasting of
diasporic identities
and other supranational and transnational identities such as world religions (for example, the
ummah
or global Catholicism) and world language groups (for example,
francophonie
);
a linking and blending with other groups through a process of
creolization and hybridization
; and
the development of a universal spirit that transcends any particularities and simply stresses the quality of being human, namely the
cosmopolitan
possibility.
We have arranged the sequence on a spectrum from the narrowest to the broadest forms of social identity, starting at the top of figure 1.1, then moving in a clockwise direction. As the Venn diagram clarifies, the boundaries of identity formation are not mutually exclusive; synchronicity and overlapping is common. One example is that the reaffirmation of religious belief has both suband supra-national aspects. It is nonetheless useful to separate the main forms of social identity analytically. Let us say a little about the trajectories numbered 1, 2 and 5, before turning to our formative concepts of diaspora and creolization (numbered 3 and 4).
Sub-national identities
It is at the level of clan, tribe, ethnicity, locality or language group that significant challenges to the nation-state have arisen. To give some obvious examples of sub-national movements, clans are often more salient than the Somali state itself. Tribes remain significant units of sociality in some parts of Amazonia, Africa and the hill provinces of India. Ethnicity, seen either as a euphemism for tribe or as a more inclusive concept, has provided significant challenges to the nation-state in many parts of the world. Likewise, religions have refused to become fully subordinate to state control, have often claimed exemption from state laws (as in the cases of Mormons, Mennonites and Rastafarians) or sought to gain adherents across national frontiers. Pope John Paul’s proselytizing missions in his Popemobile, the reawakening of the global Islamic ummah and the claims of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad are three examples. Local loyalties have survived two or three centuries of state centralization. Thinking merely of Europe, we need only evoke the cases of the Basques, Chechens, Welsh, Scots, Bretons and Catalans to make the point. Finally, despite the advance of the six major world languages (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi/ Urdu, Arabic and Portuguese), smaller languages have remained resilient in many places.
Nationalism
The very idea of multiculturalism (still sustained in official discourse in Australia and Canada but contested or opposed in other places) is recognition enough that the monochromatic vision promoted under the aegis of modernity has been significantly attenuated. In many places, the nineteenth-century phrase ‘one space for each race’ now sounds like a ridiculous claim and an absurd demand. Even the modified view of a single language, one set of public laws and norms, a shared national secular school system, a citizen army, a single exclusive citizenship and national sovereignty – all these ideal elements of nation-states have been significantly eroded.
Nonetheless, nationalism – briefly defined here as the territorial expression of a social identity – still has great allure to the many nation-peoples who do not have it. There are approximately 200 nation-states and more than 4,000 ‘ethno-cultural entities’, members of which generally accept life in a plural society, but sometimes demand the creation of new nation-states.13 Clearly, it is unlikely that all these claims will be fulfilled, so the frantic attempts of the newer claimants to gain recognition have accelerated. There are at least two stateless nations – Kurds and Palestinians – who show no likelihood of giving up their struggles; the Kurds, however, may benefit from the carnage of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq. Since the nineteenth century, the collapse of empires has generated nation-states; it was thus with the Ottoman, French and British empires and the pattern resurfaced with the end of the USSR. Often narrow forms of nationalism emerge, including murderous attempts to ensure social uniformity by ethnic cleansing. Establishing India and Israel created vast numbers of refugees and, albeit to a lesser extent, so too did nation-state formation in the Baltic, Balkans, Caucasus and other parts of Eurasia.
Beyond this phenomenon, the revival of nationalism has also taken place among longstanding resident groups in response to sub-national threats of secession or autonomy, or transnational threats, such as the pace of regional integration, the perils of economic and cultural globalization and the perceived threat to national distinctiveness posed by immigration – both by refugees and migrants in general. The growth of right-wing political parties in France, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Austria and the UK provides compelling evidence of this point. However, the growth of nationalism is not confined to these new nations or to right-wing movements. Outbursts of xenophobic violence directed against migrants and refugees have shaken precarious democracies such as South Africa, which boasts the most progressive constitution in the world. We might add to this volatile nationalist cocktail the manipulative tactics of populists such as Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Vladimir Putin in Russia. Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the continuing war in eastern Ukraine demonstrate the danger of open appeals to ethnic and national solidarity.
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the most universal form of social identity in the sense that it entails the rejection or diminution of all other social categories in favour of the idea of being human.14 It is, of course, an old idea, alluding to the openness of Athenians to outsiders in classical times. This was famously celebrated in Pericles’s funeral oration. ‘We throw open our city to the world,’ he declaimed, ‘and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality.’15 As Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen argue, the idea of cosmopolitanism has been revived as the term seems simultaneously to transcend the nation-state model, connect the local and the global, respond to the anti-essentialist turn in social science and represent complex repertoires of allegiance and identity.16
At first sight, the term also seems serviceable for our primary purpose – looking at when and how societies mix and merge. We were indeed tempted to deploy the idea of cosmopolitanism, but rejected it on three grounds. First, it still mainly evoked a state-led initiative or political project led from above by the intelligentsia or a political class.17 We wanted, by contrast, an explicitly bottom-up concept. Second, it implied a normative posture – the superiority of humanism – which is attractive but flawed, for, as Stuart Hall perceived, ‘the masking or disavowal of difference always involves the operation of some kind of power over “the other”’.18 Third, we need to recognize that non-universal social identities are remarkably persistent, probably because they respond to the human need to locate temporally, spatially, genetically, psychologically, emotionally and socially. Social identities merge, converge, disappear, reappear, get flattened and reconstructed, look backwards, sideways and forwards. Cosmopolitanism captures none of these inflections, these twists and turns of social identity formation from below. To meet these objectives we turned to ‘diaspora’ and ‘creolization’.
Diaspora
In its revisionist form, the new use of the idea of diaspora was very much part of the transnational and anti-essentialist turn in the study of social identities characteristic of the 1990s and ‘twenty noughties’. It came to serve many functions, but, in particular, it spoke to the ways in which we could understand old minorities that had never fully integrated, and new migrants who wanted to, or had been forced to, maintain their cultural and social ties to their countries of origin. It captured and still captures a more mobile world, a world of belonging and alienation, of home and away, of political inclusion and social exclusion. Though its universality was always disputed, in a welter of studies of international migration and ethnic relations, ‘diaspora’ became the keyword to explain the hitherto inexplicable world of contemporary migrants (see table 1.1).
Beyond the world of social scientists, cultural, literary and postcolonial studies rapidly incorporated the idea of diaspora. For example, Chariandy argued that the concept of diaspora could be used to illuminate contemporary forms of progressive cultural politics. Although he recognized that we were still ‘struggling to develop adequate terms for the profound socio-cultural dislocations resulting from modern colonialism and nation building’, he found in diaspora the potential to show how ‘historically disenfranchised peoples have developed tactics to challenge their subordinate status’. Diaspora studies would ‘help to challenge certain calcified assumptions about ethnic, racial, and above all, national belonging and … forge new links between emergent critical methodologies and contemporary social justice movements’.19
A weighty intellectual and political agenda was thus assigned to ‘diaspora’ and, arguably, it was always an error to load so much onto a single concept. When the inevitable doubts set in over the utility of the concept and its increasingly profligate use,20 the opposite danger of over-scepticism arose. We argue that diaspora continues to work as an insightful way in which to understand an important trajectory of social identity construction, one marked by incomplete subordination to a single national identity, on the one hand, and a continuing sense of belonging to an original homeland or a more loosely imagined ‘home’, on the other. Between the two poles of integration and attachment to homeland are many transnational practices (including remittance-giving, family visits, food preferences and sporting loyalties) that survive or thrive as ‘diasporic traces’.
Table 1.1 Diaspora
Definition
Virtues
Diasporas display strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness.
Reflects the transnational and anti-essentialist turn in the study of social identities.
Diasporas articulate a common cultural or religious heritage and share a belief in a common fate. This heritage is shared transnationally.
Speaks to the ways in which we can understand old minorities that failed fully to integrate, and new migrants who wanted to, or had been forced to, maintain their cultural and social ties to their countries of origin.
Diasporas are marked by dispersal, often traumatically, from an original homeland to two or more foreign destinations.
Captures a world on the move, a world of belonging and alienation, of home and away, of political inclusion and social exclusion.
Additionally, or alternatively, diasporas are formed following migrants’ search for work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions.
Provides a prism through which the displacement and exodus of refugees can be viewed.
Creolization
In selecting creolization in preference to other related ideas, we found a concept that had deep historical resonance, not one that was simply cooked up for the sake of novelty. The expression ‘crioulo’ was first deployed in the fifteenth century when Portuguese and African cultures interacted on Santiago, one of the islands of Cape Verde. It later spread across the Atlantic to the New World and many other places. Creolization is about the mixture and continuing admixture of peoples, languages and cultures. When creolization occurs, participants select particular elements from incoming or inherited cultures, endow them with meanings different from those they possessed in the original culture and then creatively merge them to create totally new varieties that supersede the prior forms (see table 1.2). Creolization thus evokes a ‘here and now’ sensibility that erodes old roots and stresses fresh and creative beginnings in a novel place of identification. In a diasporic consciousness, by contrast, the past provides a continuing pole of attraction and identification.
Theories of creolization are exemplary cases of polysemy; that is, they have multiple meanings, among which we mention the three most important strands:
The targeted use of creolization refers to cultural contact in extreme conditions of trauma, isolation and repression, notably on the islands and plantations of the Caribbean, which are seen by some scholars to be the paradigmatic case of creolization. Stephan Palmié, in particular, has perhaps been the most vociferous and articulate voice arguing for limiting the term. He is unconvinced that a theory originating in linguistics can be applied in other disciplines, which he fears will lead to a ‘massive confusion of analytical tongues’. He also avers that the general use of creolization theory has become a postmodern weapon unjustly deployed, as he sees it, to attack older, and still valid anthropological theory.
21
The broader use of creolization refers to the prior case of Cape Verde, and to recognized creole societies in countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Nicaragua, the Guyanas, Cape Verde, the Caribbean islands and coastal zones on the edge of the Caribbean Sea, Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles, Liberia and Nigeria. The substantial mixed heritage populations in Brazil, South Africa and the USA have also been re-examined through the lenses of creolization. More daringly, the diverse mix of peoples found in contemporary cities has triggered the idea that new forms and sites of creolization are emerging. Transcending its manifestations in particular countries and settings, the Swedish social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz has provocatively suggested that we all live in a ‘creolizing world’.
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The third strand of creolization theory provides a contrast between alternative outcomes of creolization. The first suggests a largely stable cultural synthesis, or ‘third culture’, exemplified by the francophone Caribbean expression
‘créolité’
(creoleness). The second insists that creolization is a continually iterative and sometimes messy process. In particular, theorists such as Édouard Glissant maintain that creolization, in its old settings and in new ‘megalopolises’, is an unending ‘inferno’ replete with ambiguities, discontinuities, diversity and transience.
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Although we have been attentive to the strands in creolization theory outlined above, in this book we have focused strongly on discussions about creolized popular cultural practices (especially in food, carnivals, music and dancing), syncretic religions and creole languages. Whereas these have been studied for decades, the new understandings of creolization emerging in sociology, anthropology and the study and practice of cultural politics have permitted significant reinterpretations. Interestingly, some of the same forces employed to underwrite the concept of diaspora are also used to legitimate creolization. Mobile, transnational groups are seen to practise shared forms of social behaviour, just as diversity and international mobility have crisscrossed and sometimes deeply subverted dominant, formerly more monochromatic cultures. It is this last quality that lends credence to the notion that cultures are no longer as bounded or autonomous as they perhaps once were and that complex and asymmetrical flows have reshaped inherited social identities in new ways. While we accept that creolization had its locus classicus in the context of colonial settlement, imported black labour and a plantation and/or island setting, by indicating that there are other pathways or possible theatres of interaction with similar features, we argue that creolization has gained a potentially universal applicability.
Table 1.2 Creolization
Definition
Virtues
When creolization occurs, participants are required to, or freely, select elements from incoming or inherited cultures.
Mainstreams in social theory a concept that emanates from the periphery, not the core.
Social actors evolve meanings different from those they originally possessed, then create merged varieties of attitudes and behaviour that supersede prior forms.
Avoids the unfortunate biological underpinnings of the notions of ‘hybridity’ or ‘mixed race’.
Creole societies, cultures and languages are ‘structured in dominance’; that is, one culture dominates, but no culture fully disappears.
Refers to real historical, contemporary and evolving languages, societies and cultures.
In acts of resistance, new ideas, folkways and sensibilities are born.
Celebrates creativity in developing alternative languages and folkways.
Conclusion
We have framed our investigation as a response to the question, ‘How do people of different heritages who find themselves in a common space forge some kind of shared sensibility?’ We concede that there are other possibilities. They can wage endless war with each other – a Hobbesian nightmare of unyielding hatred, genocide, racism and xenophobia. They can ignore each other, living in parallel universes, sharing only the most minimal of interactions and the most restricted of common spaces. We openly express our starting point in saying that, instead of considering all possibilities, we want to focus on how people can interact with each other in more innovative and positive ways, how they can create new cultural forms and identities while drawing on older identities and collective memories.
This collective process of identity formation results in a number of possible outcomes and trajectories that we have described earlier. For the purposes of understanding how new social identities and practices emerge, we see people bringing to the interaction some level of valorization of their past identities (where they are from), just as they embrace some elements of other cultures they encounter (where they are at). Shared identities thus emerge as a combination of part recovering, part experienced and part imagined possibilities, processes that we think are usefully conceptualized through the prisms of diaspora and creolization. How these shared identities have happened historically and experientially form the remainder of this book. We have ranged far and wide in our examples, drawing on research experience and long residence in Brazil, the Caribbean, West Africa, Europe and South Africa. We have undertaken specialized fieldwork in four sites – Cape Verde, Mauritius, Martinique and Louisiana – contexts where the delicate dance between diaspora and creolization diverges and converges in significant and illustrative ways. Within each site, we have deployed secondary analysis of written material (including grey literature) in English, Portuguese, French and, where possible, a local creole language. This has been augmented by visits, interviews, participation in salient events and a study of popular culture (including dance, carnival, music, art, religion and heritage construction).
In chapter 2, we turn to the evolution and representation of difference and how intercultural communication began.
Notes
1.
See, notably, William Safran, ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’,
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies
, 1(1), 1991, pp. 83–99; William Safran, ‘The Jewish diaspora in a comparative and theoretical perspective’,
Israel Studies
, 10(1), 2005, pp. 36–60; Khachig Tölölyan, ‘Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless power in the transnational moment’,
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies
, 5(1), 1996, pp. 3–36; and Robin Cohen
Global Diasporas: An Introduction
, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2008.
2.
Haim Hazan,
Against Hybridity: Social Impasses in a Globalizing World
, Cambridge: Polity, 2015, p.2. The most notable and heroic effort to rescue hybridity from its unfortunate origins was undertaken by Homi Bhabha. See Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs taken for wonders: questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817’,
Critical Inquiry
, 12(1) 1985, pp. 144–65.
3.
Charles Stewart, ‘Syncretism and its synonyms: reflections on cultural mixture’,
Diacritics
