ABSTRACT
The Caribbean has long been at the forefront of ‘globalization’. Many of the defining features of what is understood as globality have long been present here, including transnational flows of trade and investment, mass migration to and from far-flung parts of the world, intermixture of many ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups, and dynamic processes of ‘creolization’. It has become a prime location for the emergence of transnationalism, both in terms of its uprooted people and its hybrid texts, spoken languages, diasporas, and music travelling across world markets. Not only does each Caribbean society embody and encompass a rich mixture of genealogies, linguistic innovations, syncretistic religions, complex cuisine, and musical cultures, but these ‘repeating islands’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996 [1992]) have also exported their dynamic multicultures abroad, where they have recombined and generated new diasporic forms. The processes described as ‘creolization’ are crucial to understanding the contemporary expansive discourse of ‘globalization’, and in this chapter I consider the many different meanings of creolization in relation to a self-asserting ‘global culture’ that has arisen as the latest discursive construction of Western modernity.
