ABSTRACT
Defining cultural identity is a perilous task. Social theorist Stuart Hall equates it with representations, or the way people express some common understandings about who they are and how they are distinct from others – the concept of culture viewed anthropologically as a people’s distinct “way of life”. Since a few decades now, Literary, Cultural, and Postcolonial studies alike have largely adopted the notion of hybridity to express a sense of cultural identity that is not viewed as fixed, bounded, and neatly othered. The term “Creole” (Criollo in Spanish) is generally used in the hemisphere as an equivalent for “born locally,” and it applies to people, clothing, food, spices, plants and animals, music, and ways of daily life in general. The Creolists established distance from the literary movement on “Negritude,” which previously aimed to rehabilitate African heritage, influentially impersonated since the 1960s with the writings of the poet, essayist, and leading political figure Aime Cesaire.
