ABSTRACT
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, postcolonial writers, and theorists as well as scholars of the African diaspora, working primarily in the humanities, established broad connections between migration and diaspora, on the one hand, and the hybridization of languages, identities, aesthetic forms, and cultural practices, on the other. In order to better understand what diasporas are, it is necessary to complicate our present understanding of creolization, which contributes to diasporic cosmopolitanism in vital ways. The relation of diaspora to cosmopolitanism frequently depends on how diasporas creolize in particular circumstances, what kinds of diaspora consciousness and double consciousness they develop, and especially what their economic and class dimensions are. Most importantly, however, it is necessary to reconceptualize what hybridity is, what its relation is to creolization, and whether it can be identified with cosmopolitanism.
