TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1 Chapter One: Creolizing Feminism 11 Chapter Two: Creolizing Language 25 Chapter Three: Creolizing History 40 Conclusion 53 Works Cited 56 Introduction
They inhabited a confused universe, this Caribbean, with no center and no outward edge.
Where almost everything was foreign. Language, people, landscape even.
--Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise
What is really Swedish culture? In an era of population movements and communication satellites will it survive, or will it be enriched? And the questions are perhaps just slightly changed in the real centres of the world. What would life be like there without swamis and without reggae, without Olympic Games and ‘the Japanese model’? In the end, it seems, we are all being creolised. --Ulf Hannerz, “The World in Creolisation”
Among a new generation of post-colonial artists who are exploring the Caribbean as a microcosm of “the future world whose signs are already showing” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant 892) is the Jamaican-born poet, essayist, and novelist Michelle Cliff. Like many of her Caribbean literary counterparts, Cliff envisions creolization as a cultural process rooted deep in the colonial past but fast becoming a new force informing the identities of nations who have heretofore subscribed to Western European notions of “cultural purity” and ethnic hierarchy. While the blurring of cultural boundaries seems to be a late occurrence in the First World, the entire corpus of Cliff’s work is devoted to uncovering the history of interculturation that began with the Western European New World Discovery and continues to transform the cultural landscapes of countries like the United States and Great Britain. Cliff’s novels, in particular, mark the evolution in her thinking about the possibility of a coherent national culture, and the purpose of this thesis is to highlight the ways in which the theories of creolization set forth in Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and