Introduction

2The phenomenon of creolization began with the colonization of the Americas, and in particular the islands of the Caribbean archipelago whose limited size created microcosms favorable to cultural interaction and the development of creolization. In the Caribbean, creolization began more specifically with the transatlantic slave trade (Brathwaite 1971) but cannot be reduced to interactions between European and African cultures alone, since other cultural elements, notably Amerindian and Asian, have also molded Caribbean cultures over the centuries. The virtual extermination of Amerindian populations, the settlement of European colonists, the transportation of slaves from West Africa and later indentured laborers from Asia have all shaped this exceptionally diverse area.

5The notion of creolization thus invites us to consider the colonial enterprise from a cultural angle, since, as Edward Said points out, imperialism is also reinforced in the cultural sphere (Said 1993: 9). This cultural domination expresses itself both by imposing the colonial powers’ culture and by appropriating and dispossessing colonized peoples of their own culture and knowledge. Instrumentalizing another group’s culture or cultural elements for the purpose of domination is one aspect of cultural imperialism and can be described as “cultural appropriation”. This notion is at the heart of contemporary debates and it refers to the re-use of cultural forms or practices by one group at the expense of another. Many authors point out that this controversial notion is only morally reprehensible when it occurs in a context of domination and unequal power (Young 2010, Young and Bunk 2012).

6Creolization and cultural appropriation are two phenomena that describe processes of cultural transfer and assimilation from one culture to another. However, creolization refers to a process that is inevitable, unpredictable and uncontrollable (Glissant 1996, Gilroy 1993), whereas cultural appropriation is defined instead as the use of cultural practices in a context of exploitation and domination (Coutts-Smith 1976). The notion of cultural appropriation, although generally applied to contemporary phenomena, also has a historical dimension. Contemporary practices considered acts of cultural appropriation have their roots in the history of colonization, which lies at the origin of most of today’s inequalities and power relations.

8We examine here how several contemporary Caribbean literary works offer a new perspective of creolization in relation to cultural appropriation in the Caribbean (neo)colonial context. The authors selected for our study do not use the term cultural appropriation, but we will show how their works allow us to gain a deeper understanding of this concept and how it relates to creolization. We posit that by revealing the inequalities inherent in creolization, these literary works help us view it in light of the effects of cultural appropriation. Thus, literary representations of cultural appropriation from the colonial period to the end of the 20^th century reveal new aspects of the cultural interactions that occurred in the Caribbean space, and these aspects enrich the authors’ discourse on creolization.

10To study literary representations of the flaws and imbalances of creolization, this article draws examples from a wide selection of contemporary writings, and invites us to read the novels, short stories, and essays of Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid (1949-), Jamaican writers Michelle Cliff (1946-2016), Olive Senior (1941-) and Marlon James (1970-), and Barbadian-born American writer Paule Marshall (1929-2019). Of course, other authors could have been included to shed further light on these issues. However, this selection is fairly representative of the contemporary literary context, since it includes works from the 1930s to the 2000s, a wide variety of literary genres (novels, short stories, essays) and authors from different countries (Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua), including some who belong to the Caribbean diaspora in the United States and England. This article proposes an aesthetic and literary approach to creolization and cultural exchanges in the English-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora. It examines how literary works imagine specific and subjective viewpoints on forced exchanges between cultures in a colonial and postcolonial context and in the Caribbean diaspora in England and North America. While it is not possible to give an account of the historical facts associated with cultural phenomena, the study of literary works highlights in a unique way how the writing process reveals the past. In dialogue with the human and social sciences, these writings offer valuable interpretative leads and ways of understanding the facts by appealing to the emotions and imagination.

11First, we examine how the authors have addressed the dominant colonial culture’s appropriation and usurpation of certain practices under slavery. In this section, we notably analyze the case of religious practices and botanical knowledge.

12In the second part, we observe how the authors represent creolization in contemporary Caribbean societies. We show that they reject all utopian visions of creolization, which are marked by the racial, social and sexual inequalities inherited from colonization. We also explain how these literary representations reveal how marginal populations, such as women and indentured workers are excluded from creolization theories.

13The study concludes with a reflection on cultural interactions within Caribbean diasporas. While the writings examined clearly show that Caribbean cultures continue to undergo transformations in contact with other cultures in a diasporic context, they also denounce the appropriation of certain aspects of Caribbean culture by the dominant Western (European and American) cultures. We notably delve into how these works describe the internationalization and commercialization of traditional Caribbean music and condemn the use of “primitivist” aesthetics by Western painters.

14These literary works shed a historic and aesthetic light on cultural interactions and emphasize the continuity in the contemporary context of cultural appropriations that occurred in the Caribbean’s colonial past.

1. The origins of cultural appropriation: representing culture as an instrument of colonial domination

15Many Caribbean writers, both men and women, have depicted cultural interactions during the period of colonization and slavery, thus helping to unearth the roots of racial inequalities that are still prevalent on the islands of the archipelago. In this first section, we examine more particularly how these authors deal with cultural imperialism through narratives of cultural appropriation. Although this term is not directly used by the authors, and this contemporary notion was not used in colonial times, we suggest that contemporary postcolonial literary works reflect the debates of their time on questions of cultural appropriation and how they relate to colonization. The works of Jamaica Kincaid and Marlon James very explicitly illustrate how some cultural practices and knowledge, notably religious and botanical, were stolen and used as instruments of colonial domination.

17Kincaid’s works frequently mention botany as a practice, but also as a science studied at school (in her novel Annie John for example). In her botanical essays, the writer plays with the ambiguity of her status as a narrator (between reality and self-fiction) to present herself as a gardener and botanist. This questioning of the narrator’s position is associated with a reflection nourished by history on the practice of botany. Botanical gardens, such as St John’s on the island of Antigua, hold a special place in her writing. In My Garden (Book), the author-narrator sees botanical gardens as a demonstration of British colonial domination:

Often, when I am walking through a botanical garden, I come across a specimen or a replica of a landscape that makes me say to myself, Oh, this is the back yard of someone else, someone far away, someone’s landscape the botanical garden can make an object. (Kincaid 1999: 148)

18In this excerpt, the landscape is presented as an object, a fixed, stereotyped image that can be endlessly and identically reproduced. Kincaid further points out that this landscape is someone else’s, another people’s landscape. Gardener-colonizers anchor their domination by imposing a model of landscape and cultivation, but also by appropriating the landscapes they transplant from one end of the planet to the other, wrenching them from their geographical, social, and cultural context. Botanical knowledge and specimens are appropriated, stripped of their meaning and cultural value, then transformed into objects of consumption and instruments of domination. Jordan Stouck points out that gardening is a continuity of the materialistic conception of nature imposed by colonial doctrine:

Caribbean horticulture was in many respects continuous with colonial practices, not only in laying claim to the land and its products but also in the materialistic aspect of exploiting foreign resources for maximum profit. (Stouck 2005: 107)

19Colonial botany appears in Kincaid’s writings as one of the main instruments of cultural appropriation and colonial domination: it allows European powers to establish their cultural and economic hegemony over colonized peoples and lands.

20Similarly, gardening is described as an instrument of domination over nature, an act of appropriation and a symbol of colonial conquest. In an interview with Kathleen Balutansky, Kincaid explicitly establishes this link between gardening and power:

It’s always an expression of power, though it looks so benign. It looks wonderfully unthreatening, but it’s an exercise of power. (Kincaid and Balutansky 2002: 793)

21Moreover, the writer links gardening to the desire of possessing exotic objects or plants from afar:

A gardener is a person who at least once in the gardening year feels the urge to possess completely at least one plant. (Kincaid 2005: 32).

22Thus, gardening and botany are presented as acts of appropriation, of taking possession of plant specimens and, consequently, of imposing a hegemonic vision of plant life.

23Kincaid deepens her reflection on colonial botany and the appropriation of botanical specimens in her essay “Among Flowers” which recounts her trip to the Himalayas in China, where she went to collect seeds. This work places the author-narrator in the paradoxical situation of the botanist: she exposes the mechanisms of colonial domination through the appropriation of nature by taking on the role of seed collector and colonial botanist explorer seeking to possess nature. Through an extensive use of irony, the author-narrator takes on this dual role, notably when she expresses the seed collector’s feeling of omnipotence when encountering a rare plant in nature:

They [gardeners] feel godlike, as if they had invented it. (ibid.: 32-33)

24With a touch of humor, Kincaid shows the power granted by the possession and mastery of nature. Botany is thus described as the appropriation, adaptation, and transformation of natural specimens through their transplantation from one continent to another.

25Moreover, Kincaid exposes the materialist dimension given to nature by the colonial enterprise when she mentions that the Sherpas who followed and assisted them as they collected plants, considered their undertaking absurd:

Finding us and our obsession of their native plants ridiculous […]. But we had paid for this […]. (ibid.: 63)

26In this passage, Kincaid’s (once again ironic) discourse reflects the ambivalence of her relationship with botany: by showing the point of view of Western botanists, she denounces the commercial aspect of gardening, the materialistic relationship with nature inherited from colonization and the absurdity of going to collect seeds in the Himalayas. In the same way, the plants in My Garden (Book) are also reduced to consumer objects that can be ordered from a catalog:

Those wonderful weeping wisterias (or so they looked in the catalog: wonderful, inviting, even perfect). (Kincaid 1999: 14-15)

27Wisteria and all the other plants in the gardening catalog are presented as material goods that can be acquired. This passage sounds almost like an advertisment with the repetition of the [w] sound in the three positive adjectives that describe the plant.

29The physical appropriation of botanical specimens raises the question of the appropriation of their use, whether for food, medicine, or even religious purposes. Among many Afro-Caribbean populations, plants play a central role in syncretic and creolized religious practices, and notably in Obeah. Also, various elements of the environment (rivers, oceans, thunder, etc.) embody spiritual entities. In the former British colonies, Obeah, closely related to voodoo, refers to a set of medical and religious practices used by African slaves for a variety of purposes ranging from healing to rebellion or revenge. It is a syncretic religion that was creolized because it results from African religious practices and Amerindian beliefs assimilated into European Christianity (see Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2000). Many historians, such as Diana Paton (2015), Kelly Wisecup, Toni Wall Jaudon (2015) and Randy Brown (2011) have emphasized the importance of these rituals for the survival of slaves on plantations, and the power held by those who practiced them. Randy Brown (2011) explains that Obeah was often associated with slave revolts and emancipation, but these practices could also be extremely violent on plantations, where physical brutality was central to the exercise of power. Furthermore, as Wisecup and Jaudon (2015) remind us, Obeah was not only used by slaves, but also raised much interest among colonizers, who quickly ceized these rituals for themselves.

30Marlon James, in The Book of Night Women (2009), imagines how European planters could have appropriated Obeah religious practices. His novel is a neo-narrative of slavery that follows the story of a young slave, Lilith, on the Jamaican plantation of Montpelier at the turn of the 19^th century. She seeks to escape from the hardships of toil in the sugarcane fields by climbing the hierarchical ladder of slave society. She also witnesses women conspiring to bring about an island-wide slave rebellion, for whom Obeah plays a crucial role.

31At the beginning of the novel, a slave dies on the Montpelier plantation. The symptoms of her illness lead Irish foreman Robert Quinn to conclude that the young woman has died of dysentery. Isobel, the young Creole daughter of the neighboring plantation owner, laughs at the foreman’s naiveté. She believes that the young slave was not the victim of a disease but of an Obeah spell. A heated debate follows between Isobel and Quinn who describes these practices as retrograde and primitive:

How in the age of Christ could so many be swayed in this… this darkness? (110)

32While the master and foreman reject and despise these practices as superstitious, obscurantist and contrary to science, Isobel is aware of the power that can be gained from appropriating these practices:

A wise master would do well to understand their ways. Even use them. (110)

33For her, this religion is “serious” (111), and its use can have far-reaching effects. Far from being obscurantist or contrary to knowledge, Obeah is a form of knowledge that needs to be appropriated in order to better dominate others. Isobel’s position is ambiguous, and her thoughts remain opaque to the reader: is this a genuine cultural appropriation of a slave belief by the colonist, or simply a manipulation of that belief? Since Isobel was born in the Caribbean, we can assume that her childhood was imbued with the magico-religious beliefs of the slaves, and that this is effectively an appropriation, even if it is used for purposes of domination, i.e., to establish the cultural, political, and economic supremacy of the planters. Isobel finally convinces the master and foreman that it is essential to use these rituals to control a plantation:

To be master over the niggers means having an intimate knowledge of their every move. (113)

34Isobel, who knows the Obeah rituals, gives the order to place candles planted with a nail all over the plantation. The ceremony holds an irrepressible power over the slaves:

The canefield couldn’t be more quiet if everybody was dead. (114)

35A heavy silence weighs on the plantation as the ritual unfolds. Once the candles have burned down to the nail, some of the slaves enter a state of trance that reveals their guilt:

Then a woman drops to the ground like she having a fit. Another one, stumpy and fat, start to run, chattering balderdash that nobody can understand. (115)

36The reaction to the Obeah ritual is physical, as are the repressive measures taken by the planters: panic-stricken slaves are then tortured and killed. The scene of the Obeah ritual is immediately followed by a description of the extreme violence unleashed on the slaves:

Wilkins have the driver tie them down to the ground instead of hanging them up and he drip pig fat on them. Then he set fire to they pussy and cocky hair, all the time chatting judgement which he say come from the good book of Leviticus. (115)

You have to risk it or you won’t get close to the power or the horror of it […]. I actually think this kind of antiseptic, clipped, edited version of violence I see in literature sells it short. If you don’t read the scene of the murder of a child and find it unbearable, then that scene failed. I think people are used to violence, but they’re not used to suffering […] what I’m saying is that violence comes with consequences and suffering and I don’t blink at either. (James and Preston 2017)

38The description of these cruel acts is a choice, the choice to be realistic and reject superficial suggestions. It goes against the grain of watered-down representations of slavery. Thus, James’ novel establishes a continuity between the violence of cultural appropriation and the physical violence perpetrated by slaveholders, two forms of violence aimed at establishing the planters’ domination over the enslaved populations. By revealing the immense physical brutality of slavery, this novel simultaneously sheds light on the strategies of cultural domination used by the plantation masters. Isobel’s character, more than the others, embodies the cruelty of slavery (in this scene, she is an attentive spectator of all the torture scenes). She is the instigator of this cultural domination, which includes a form of appropriation. In other words, cultural domination (the act of imposing a way of life or culture considered superior) is achieved through forms of cultural appropriation, including of religious practices. Isobel’s character reveals the deep links between appropriation and repression.

39The knowledge and rituals of colonized peoples are stolen and used in a context of violent encounters between European cultures and African, Amerindian, and Asian cultures. In the case of the appropriation of botanical knowledge, the origin (Amerindian, African) of this knowledge is totally erased, while European botanical science (the only legitimate one from now on) absorbs and appropriates the knowledge of colonized peoples. Without directly using the words of cultural appropriation, Kincaid and James use different literary strategies to emphasize the colonial roots of this process in their writings.

40For them, the creolization phenomenon coincides with these practices of cultural appropriation in colonial times. Creolization therefore appears to be marked by similar relations of domination. Some Caribbean writers, from the late 1970s onwards, started to present in their works a vision of creolization that addresses the cultural inequalities between the different cultures that come in contact. In the second part of this article, we examine the notion of creolization and how literary works associate it with the process of cultural domination and subjugation to (neo)colonial powers, as they did for cultural appropriation.

2. Questioning the utopia of creolization

41In contemporary Caribbean societies, the persistence of relations of domination casts doubt on the utopian imaginary of creolization. Writers such as Olive Senior, Paule Marshall and Michelle Cliff depict a bitter creolization, in which European cultures are imposed on colonized populations to the detriment of their own despised culture, which persists only as a trace. These authors describe a situation of colonial alienation similar to the situation examined by Frantz Fanon (1952) and Edward Said (1977), who analyzed the psychological effects of the colonial gaze on colonized people and the internalization of racism.

42Also, in many literary works, the utopia of creolization is challenged by the exclusion from the Creole identity of marginalized characters, notably women, but also the descendents of indentured workers. Contemporary writers denounce a limited vision of creolization which, for decades, has obliterated the role and perspective of the populations involved, i.e., women, Amerindians and so on. It is no coincidence that in the late 1970s and early 1980s many women writers appeared on the Caribbean literary scene and denounced these discriminations (Donnell 2011: 127). More than a decade after independence, they shed new light on the pitfalls of creolization and the exclusion of women from the construction of a Caribbean national identity and the theorization of a creolized culture. As early as the 1990s, critics such as James Arnold (1995) and Maryse Condé (1993) explained that this national identity was based on a masculine ideal that stood in opposition to the feminization of colonized cultures in colonial ideology. Arnold points out that the role of women in cultural creolization has been largely ignored by male critics, and even mentions a sexualization or a masculinization of the creolization process (as do Condé 1993, Pouchet Paquet 2009 and Misir 2006).

For as if to confirm the charge that she was a witch, in a few months, Miss Coolie had transformed the yard from a weed-filled place to a magical garden in which she grew things which at the time were new to us. (Senior 1989: 9)

44The witchcraft mentioned in this passage is usually (from a Eurocentric perspective) attributed to women, and is notably associated with poisoning (Paton 2012). Miss Coolie uses the plants she grows to prepare Indian dishes, but this food seems strange to the villagers and is perceived as an attempt to bewitch and poison them, reflecting the villagers’ fear of cultural corruption. Miss Coolie’s culture, considered pagan and evil, is erased in favor of the dominant culture, and Miss Coolie, the “Snake Woman”, must shed her skin to adapt to a society that refuses change.

45Other short stories by Senior show how non-European cultures are despised by Jamaica’s upper classes. In “The Tenantry of Birds”, the main character, Nolene, remembers how, as a child, she used to spend every summer with her cousins in the country where she discovered a different Jamaican culture, an oral culture made of tales and legends from Africa. Every time she returned home, her mother would criticize the influence of her cousins and would forbid her to sing the songs she had learned over the summer, rejecting the Afro-Jamaican popular culture in favor of the European colonial culture, especially the culture of the United States. In Nolene’s memories, vacations in the countryside gradually gave way to trips to Florida and the United States, where she was exposed to American culture in movie theaters, amusement parks and zoos.

46Writings by Caribbean women insist on the erasure of dominated cultures, and particularly on the rejection of knowledge transmitted by women, considered inferior and even dangerous, as seen above in Senior’s short story where Miss Coolie is accused of witchcraft. This is especially the case in Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven, where the schoolteacher of the main character growing up in the 1950s in Jamaica, describes the knowledge transmitted by women in Caribbean societies as “false” knowledge:

False knowledge [that] was held in the minds and memories of old women. (No Telephone: 69)

47Many authors describe the supremacy of British culture in colonial education in Caribbean schools. Jamaica Kincaid, for example, repeatedly criticizes the mandatory memorization of Wordsworth’s Daffodil Poem by all schoolchildren in the British colonies. The character Lucy in her eponymous novel must suppress the urge to cut down the first daffodils she sees once she lives in the United States. The daffodils, objects of Lucy’s revolt, symbolize the alienation of colonial education which imposes cultural references unsuited to the Caribbean context. One aspect of the colonial project is to shape colonial subjects in the image of the colonizers, as expressed by Macaulay in “Minute on Education”, a treatise about India, where he advocates for the creation of a “class of intermediaries”:

Between us and the millions whom we govern –a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect. (quoted in Bhabha 1984: 128)

48The most striking illustration of this imitation can be seen in the high-ranking civil servants in Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1992). Set on a fictitious Caribbean island, the novel addresses the issue of neo-colonization and international (particularly US) economic and humanitarian dependence. In this passage, the high-ranking officials on the imaginary Bourne Island are caricatured imitations of British colonial officials:

They were all […] drinking imported whisky, scorning as a matter of status the local rum […]. All wearing dark-toned, conservative, heavy English suits in spite of the hot night. […] And their manner, as they stood there listening with carefully controlled expressions and neutral eyes, was in keeping with their dress. Reserved, almost formal (one or two of the older men called to mind some slightly outmoded, upper-class Victorian gentlemen of the turn of the century) […]. (Marshall 1992: 53)

49This excerpt illustrates the imitation –conscious or unconscious– not only of British style and lifestyle, but also of a British attitude. Besides the irony of this stubborn imitation of the European way of life, it also shows a desire for transparency between appearance and identity: if appearances are to be trusted, British clothes worn in the tropical heat could be a sign of Britishness, and therefore of a certain superiority. As it turns out, this imitation is presented as a sign of superiority only in its intention, because a certain ridicule emerges from these caricatured characters. The example of civil servants who eagerly conform to a caricatured, conservative image of the Victorian Englishman shows the alienation of the population of British post-colonies who aspire to become part of European culture and identify with a fixist image of the European. The imitation of colonial culture, which Homi Bhabha (1994) calls “mimicry”, belongs to the process of colonial domination and is a form of colonial alienation. Bhabha draws on Fanon’s writings to define his concept of “mimicry” as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (122). This mimicry is built around an ambivalence of identity since it necessarily slightly varries from the European model and thereby challenges domination. In this slight difference that opens a crack in domination, creolization can occur. The caricatured aspect of Marshall’s characters reveals this variation in the imitation, which, according to Bhabha, is eminently subversive:

[It] reverses “in part” the colonial appropriation by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer’s presence; a gaze of otherness. (126)

50While revealing the alienation imposed by colonialism, this mimicry also highlights the cultural and racial inequalities it implies. It also nuances the binary opposition between a dominant and a dominated culture.

51Cultural hierarchies that assign non-European cultures to an inferior position are a legacy of colonization. Frantz Fanon points this out when he insists on the importance of questioning this classification:

The unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. […] There is first affirmed the existence of human groups having no culture; then of a hierarchy of cultures; and finally, the concept of cultural relativity. (Fanon 1964: 31)

52Moreover, according to Fanon, this inequality is the direct consequence of colonial ideology. The persistence of colonial hierarchies several decades after Caribbean independence casts doubt on the forms of creolization claimed by political parties, intellectuals, and popular artists in their nationalist discourses. Many critics and intellectuals point out that while Caribbean nationalist and independence movements have opposed existing colonial hierarchies, they have also partly preserved certain racist, sexist or homophobic stereotypes. Stuart Hall also claims that the imaginary of national identities is intrinsically based on the exclusion of some sections of the population (Hall 1996). These exclusions are the work of political parties and their representatives (see Barnes 1995, Stubbs 2003, Lewis 2012, or Kelly 2019), but the discriminating nationalist discourse is also present in popular culture, and particularly in the songs known as calypsos (Rohlehr 1991, Puri 1997). Critics also denounce how women have been erased from the Caribbean literary canon and the school curricula developed at the time of independence, and how an exclusively male imaginary identity has been built by writers of the independence period such as C.L.R. James, Edward K. Brathwaite, or George Lamming (see Condé 1993, Arnold 1995, Edmondson 1999, Misir 2006, Pouchet Paquet 2009).

53So, although creolization is inevitable, it has been marked by the legacy of slavery and by social, racial, and sexual inequalities. The writings examined here reveal a skewed, alienating creolization, reminiscent of colonial domination. They show that these hierarchies are still present in the Caribbean and that they structure Caribbean societies, their culture, and their landscapes. The Caribbean is potrayed as a hierarchical space, in which the categories established under colonization persist.

54Caribbean literature thus reflects the fragmentation of island spaces. In addition to the divide between town and country represented in many of Senior’s short stories in the Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989) collection, such as “The Tenantry of Birds” mentioned above, but also in “The Two Grandmothers” and “Arrival of the Snake Woman”, many other spatial fractures are presented in the region’s literary works: between city and shantytown in Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven, between tourist attractions and agricultural spaces in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People or between the reservations designed to isolate the Amerindian populations from the rest of the island in Jean Rhys’s “Temps Perdi” and Voyage in the Dark. This fragmented Caribbean space, portrayed by Derek Walcott (1992) as a broken vase, calls into question the utopian vision of the cultural creolization found in the Caribbean. These divisions and hierarchies expell African, Amerindian and Asian cultural elements to the margins of cultural interaction. Racial, social, and sexual categories stand in the way of the creolization of cultures because they establish rigid separations between population groups. The writings examined here offer the perspective of characters on the margins of the utopian creolization imagined by the intellectuals of the independence period. Women and indentured Indian or Amerindian populations are often excluded from cultural transmission, and their culture is discredited and erased from national identities. From the late 1980s onwards, English-speaking Caribbean authors have been changing the way creolization is understood by means of literary works that reveal its imbalances and the perpetuation of European and colonial cultural domination. In literary works, creolization which is a legacy of colonialism, is shown to be a difficult, problematic process, hampered by the imposed burden of a dominant culture, that takes place, in Glissant’s words, “in a bastardized and unjust fashion” (Glissant 1996: 7). Even in Glissant’s book, this “bastardized” and “unjust” creolization is opposed to a creolization that recognizes the equivalent value of its different inputs. This utopia is strongly criticized by contemporary Caribbean writers who explore the relationship between colonial domination and cultural interaction in the Caribbean, and invite us to consider creolization and cultural appropriation as two facets of the process of cultural domination. Beyond the archipelago, the interactions between Caribbean culture and other dominant cultures raise similar issues and invite us once again to examine them in light of the concept of cultural appropriation.

3. Internationalization: representing cultural appropriation beyond the Caribbean

Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (Hall 1990: 235)

56Identities and cultures change and evolve in the diaspora, extending the process of creolization outside the Caribbean region. Yet, cultural interactions are often obstructed by the same cultural hierarchies mentioned above, as in the Caribbean. In this final section, we examine how certain aspects of Caribbean culture have evolved outside the Caribbean and been appropriated by Western culture.

57Literature has often denounced the way in which Caribbean cultures are caricatured, whether in the colonial exhibitions in London and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s described in the novels by Jean Rhys (1939) and Michelle Cliff (1996), or in music or painting. This article focuses more particularly on the latter two cultural domains, music and painting, as presented in Abeng (1995), a novel by Michelle Cliff and After Leaving Mr MacKenzie (1931) by Jean Rhys.

59Michael Randolph Alleyne (1995) analyzes how Western economic interests have transformed some of the elements of Caribbean culture, particularly music. Her thesis shows that the Caribbean’s economic dependence on the United States and Europe has shaped musical production in the Caribbean, often at the expense of artistic creation and political demands. “Linstead Market”, another workers’ song, is also quoted in the book:

Carry me ackee go a Linstead Market
Not a quatty-wuth sell
Carry me ackee go a Linstead Market
Not a quatty-wuth sell
Lord, what a night, not a bite
What a Saturday night
Lord, what a night not a bite
What a Saturday night. (Cliff 1995: 82-83)

60This traditional song is sung by Jamaican women working at the market, and it tells the story of a mother who fails to sell any fruit and is afraid that her children will go hungry. The narrative voice of Cliff’s novel comments on the adaptation and marketing of this song:

One song was arranged in calypso tempo, all smiling children and ever-bearing trees. It was a lament, a traditional song of marketwomen. (Cliff 1995: 82)

61Jamaican culture has been stripped of its meaning and context, and appropriated for economic gain. Ironically, this song, which originally expresses the suffering and economic misery of produce sellers, suddenly has an exotic appeal: it contributes to a phantasmagorical vision of the Caribbean islands, paradise islands where children are happy and nature is generous, and in Cliff’s novel, thereby alienating the people who sang it. What’s more, these representations of the commodification of Caribbean music stand in stark contrast to the novel’s title, Abeng, which refers to a shell (also known as a conch shell or lambi) that produces a sound when blown into. The epigraph at the start of the novel states that the lambi served a dual purpose during the days of slavery: it signaled the return to work on plantations, but also enabled the maroons to communicate with each other using messages that could not be understood by the colonists. In contrast to appropriated and commercialized music, this instrument thus represents the sound of resistance to slave domination.

62Caribbean literature not only addresses the appropriation of music, but also of certain aesthetic practices in painting. Julia, the main character of Rhys’s novel After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, goes to a London Museum where she admires and describes a painting, which, according to critic Geneviève Abravanel, is almost certainly by Modigliani, although the painter’s name is not mentioned:

This picture is of a woman lying on a couch, a woman with a lovely, lovely body. Oh, utterly lovely […]. A sort of proud body, like an utterly proud animal. And a face like a mask, a long dark face, and very big eyes. The eyes were blank, like a mask, but when you had looked at it a bit it was as if you were looking at a real woman, a live woman. (Rhys 1931: 52)

63Modigliani’s painting, Le Grand Nu (1917), with its primitivist aesthetic, appropriates traditional African sculpture techniques, as shown by the repetition of the word “mask” in the quote above. However, the lascivious pose of the female model suggests that the artist’s gaze on African culture is masculine and European, and above all that the woman is animalized, reified, and reduced to her sexuality. Abravanel argues that the choice of a primitivist style to represent a nude woman inevitably suggests a fantasized, eroticized elsewhere. Le Grand Nu, writes Abravanel, plays a key role in the representation of Julia’s alienation in Rhys’s novel. The nude model comes to life in the character’s imagination:

I felt as if the woman in the picture were laughing at me and saying “I am more real than you. But at the same time I am you. I am all that matters of you”. (Rhys 1931: 53)

64By identifying with a woman reduced to the status of sexual object, Julia renounces her own subjectivity. This exerpt from Rhys’s novel seems to suggest that, by appropriating an African aesthetic, considered primitive, the European painter can establish his dominance not only over African culture, but also over his female subject. Françoise Lionnet argues that in their writings, Caribbean women writers unveil the mechanisms of domination conveyed by Western culture:

Their voices echo the submerged or repressed values of our cultures. They rewrite the “feminine” by showing the arbitrary nature of the images and values which Western culture constructs, distorts, and encodes as inferior by femininizing them. (Lionnet 1989: 5)

65The presence of Modigliani’s painting crystallizes the weight of colonial and patriarchal alienation that subjugates the protagonist of Rhys’s novel, who is a kept woman who depends on men for her livelihood. By absorbing Modigliani’s voice as intertext, Rhys also highlights the oppressive nature of certain artistic representations that she uses to illustrate relations of domination.

66This shows how Caribbean authors are addressing cultural appropriation in their writings and denouncing the way in which the meaning of artistic practices, in this case music and painting, can be hijacked and reinforce racial and sexual prejudices. By means of various literary devices (sarcasm and irony in Cliff, ekphrasis and prosopopoeia in Rhys), these writers reveal and denounce the hijacking of certain aesthetics, their commercialization, and the obliteration of their origins.

Conclusion

67Contemporary Caribbean writers have initiated an aesthetic and historical debate on cultural interactions within the Caribbean and on the encounter between Caribbean and Western cultures outside the Caribbean. Their writings imagine and recreate a historical continuity between the cultural and scientific imperialism of early colonization, the pervasiveness of racial, social and sexual inequalities in the contemporary Caribbean, and the cultural appropriation associated with the internationalization of Afro-Caribbean cultures. Their works help us establish links across time and space between different forms of cultural domination in the Caribbean. The limits of creolization, the plundering and denigration of colonized peoples’ knowledge, the imposition of European cultural practices and the appropriation of artistic practices for commercial purposes are shown to be the consequences of the cultural domination inherited from colonization. Using a wide range of literary devices ranging from irony and prosopopoeia to the imagination of ambiguous narrators and a crude depiction of slave violence, these authors expose the inequalities embedded in the process of creolization, and offer the perspective of marginalized characters, for whom cultural interactions are often a source of suffering and are inseparable from the historical violence of colonization.