#creolite

[caribbeanart]

A very thorough overview for understanding how concepts of race and identity differ in Latin America and the Caribbean and within the region. Can be especially hard to read if you're black (but should also be if you're any other race too honestly??).

Personally in my own experience, with respect to anti-black racism I have noticed: In the Caribbean there tends to be a lot of internalized racism and colorism. (I literally went to the DR last year and was surprised to see that the majority of people there are actually black—something I knew people here wouldn't believe if I told them.)

(Growing up with a mixed Jamaican family, a lot of my family members would glorify having lighter "red" skin and straighter "good" or "Indian" hair. Additionally, skin bleaching is very common in Jamaica and even men do it, calling it "fashion.")

With respect to my experience with Latin Americans in the States: I've noticed a blatant apathy towards black pain/suffering that knowing another language has made particularly all the more painful (I think racism from other people of color is a special kind of racism)

And a particular obsession in the form of fixating, categorizing, labeling, defining, and trying to "make sense of" me especially as a black person whose fluent in Spanish, with a level of detail that can only be described as disturbing (read: inhumane)

Topics I want to shed light on in this post not because I care about anyone's ego but because it's painful and disturbing and very much historical and intentional (see below) and the apathy needs to stop. The apathy is the racism, is the discrimination, is the trauma passed down and down through generations...

"Brazil carried out a particularly large whitening campaign. As Tanya Katerí Hernández states, 'The Brazilian branqueamento immigration project was so successful that in less than a century of subsidized European immigration, Brazil imported more free White laborers than Black slaves imported in three centuries of the slave trade' [...] At the same time, Afro-Brazilians were encouraged to return to Africa and Black immigration to Brazil was banned." "There has been ample research demonstrating that while on the surface, Latin American nations celebrate mixed-race heritage, in practice they actually maintain Eurocentric ideologies by denying the role of racial difference in access to political power, economic resources, and land ownership."

[dailyhistoryposts]

Aimé Césaire

Aimé Fernand David Césaire (1913-2008) was a poet and politician notable for the Négritude movement.

[Césaire]

Born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, France, a small island in the Caribbean Sea, to lower-class parents who struggled to provide for his education. Césaire, like the rest of Martinique, spoke French but considered himself to be Igbo and a son of Nigeria.

He attended school at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris on an educational scholarship, where he and two others founded the literary review L'Étudiant noir (The Black Student). This was essential to initiating the Négritude movement.

Négritude (French, a literal translation would be something like 'Blackness', and was a reclamation of the derogatory 'nègre') is a framework of critique developed by francophone intellectuals of the American diaspora during the 1930s. Its goal was to raise a "Black consciousness". It followed the Black radical tradition and followed Marxist political philosophy, disavowed colonialism, and argued for a Pan-African community among worldwide members of the African diaspora. Artistically, Négritude was influenced by Surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1937, Césaire married Suzanne Roussi, a writer, anti-colonialist, feminist, and Surrealist also from Martinique. Together they returned to Martinique, where they were active throughout World War II. They founded the literary review Tropiques and continued to write poems. In 1939, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (translation Journal of a Homecoming), a poem the length of a book and Césaire's masterwork, was published. It missed poetry and prose to discuss the cultural identity of Black Africans in a colonial setting.

[a younger Césaire]

In 1945, with the support of the French Communist Party (PCF), Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly. He would later resign from the PCF and found the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, with which he would dominate the political scene on the island. He would remain deputy for 47 straight years before voluntarily stepping down.

During his political career, Césaire continued to write. Notable workers include Une Tempête (The Tempest), a reworking of Shakespeare's play for a Black audience and Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), a denunciation of European colonialism and racism. Discours sur le colonialisme says that White colonizers, not the people they colonize, are savages. Césaire argues that modernism, slavery, imperialism, capitalism, and republicanism are linked and act as oppressive forces to empower colonizers. The text also argues that Nazism and the Holocaust was not a singular event in European history but a continuation of the tradition of barbaric colonialism.

Négritude, and Césaire's contributions to it, continue to resonate across the world. Afro-Surrealism, Creolite, and the Black is Beautiful movement all continue the tradition of Négritude.

[lekol-maron]

Et voici nos cousins, Luniversité maron ! Son instigateur, Jean-Pascal Lauret, la définit comme un moyen, pour les personnes n’ayant pas accès à la culture, d’accéder à des savoirs vernaculaires ou scientifiques, qui peuvent les toucher particulièrement car ils s’inscrivent dans l’insularité et la créolité. Il propose ainsi, chaque samedi, une conférence gratuite avec des intervenants bénévoles.

Voyez plutôt cette définition du mot “maron”, qui correspond clairement à nos propres objectifs, au sein de Lékol maron :

“Il faut voir dans le mot Maron, l’esprit de liberté plutôt que la volonté de se cacher. Nous ne sommes proches d’aucun parti politique. Nous n’avons aucun statut : pourquoi aurait-on besoin d’un statut pour échanger ou partager du savoir ? Nous fonctionnons volontairement sans argent et sans aide des collectivités pour garder la totale liberté dans le choix des conférences et des conférenciers. Le conférencier et moi-même sommes bénévoles. Les salles sont mises à notre disposition et les conférences sont gratuites. Je considère que chacun de nous peut faire énormément de choses sans argent et aussi très peu de chose avec beaucoup d’argent.”

Merci Brandon, pour cette belle référence ! Je vous invite à visiter la page Facebook de Luniversité maron : https://www.facebook.com/LuniversiteMaron/

[ethicopoliticolit]

Creolization's genesis in sixteenth-century urban New Spain resides in an immersion in the cultural practices of power. Becoming a creole literally involved navigating the judicial maze with the intent of exploiting the possibilities offered by legal obligations and rights. This definition reminds us that persons of African descent, the first people identified as creoles (*criollos*) before 1560, did not configure their culture through the physical environment, diet, language, beliefs, kinship practices, and community structures alone. Creole culture included the customs, laws, and institutions that upheld the larger social structure and came to include an ability to navigate the various institutions of absolutism. [Para.] Cognizant that their competing juridical identities created an exploitable tool, Africans and their descendants seized the opportunity. Though patricians posed a serious physical threat, individuals drew on their creole consciousness for specific tactics. In this process, their command of Spanish—which shaped the ability of Africans and their descendants to represent themselves before scribes, royal officials, and ecclesiastics as royal subjects and devout Christians—played an important role. Even recent arrivals from Africa, *bozales*, immersed themselves in a new linguistic environment soon after landing in New Spain, acquiring fluency in the Castilian lexicon and morphology of power. Eventually, *bozales* learned to enlist the protection of crown and clergy, who, as representatives of the Spanish sovereign, often stood at odds with individual patricians. [Para.] This strategic awareness—the defining feature of creole consciousness—enabled the plebeian population, which included persons of African descent, to employ the law in their defense. As litigants, persons of African descent modified their life circumstances, yet they rarely, if ever, threatened to undermine Spanish rule. But in enabling a semblance of cultural autonomy, the litigious nature of Africans and their descendants also insinuated both slave and free even further into [the] workings of Spanish absolutism.

Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Indiana, 2003), 2-3.

[musiqueaupoing]

Article ecrit a 4 mains en relecture avant parution a la rentree. Treme state of mind!! #treme #neworleans #nola #article #culturalstudies #sociologie #minorites #histoiresubalterne #commun #creolite #tvprogram #davidsimon @amelieflamand @babmusique

[fatehbaz]

“Find yourself a secret name and fight with it”.

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By the time of its publication in 1989, Eloge de la Creolite signaled a departure from the earlier [...] movements [...] [and an] embrace of a cultural theory [...] linked to and anchored in Caribbean ecology. Eloge de la Creolite displays a remarkable sensitivity to the role that imperialism played in fashioning [...] understandings of human subjectivity and the environment and the neo-colonialist forms of exploitation which continue to threaten [...] the environment [...] of these islands. [...] Eloge de la Creolite insists [...] French Antilleans can [...] “look positively at all that pulsates around us” [...]. This passage alludes to the interlocking histories of both the French Caribbean [island ecologies] and the people who inhabit them: [...] Indigenous populations; the forced migration and enslavement of African slaves [...]; the decimation of the islands’ flora and fauna and the introduction of non-native monocultural crops [...]; French colonial rule and its assimilationist tendencies [...]. To demonstrate his point, Glissant articulates a spatio-temporal poetics in which landscape and other ecological metaphors are linked to history and memory, particularly in his 1958 novel La Lezarde and later in Mahagony (1987). [...

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Published two years after Eloge de la Creolite [...], Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco is [...] [a] concrete and complete elaboration of the ideals of Creolite. [...] While culturally specific to Martinique, the Texaco community [...] is the very condition of possibility for [...] survival. [...] [A]s the novel opens we are told that “to escape the night of slavery and colonialism, Martinique’s [communities] will, one generation after another, abandon the plantations, the fields [...].”

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In Texaco, there is no barrier between landscape, history and person. Each is an integral and constitutive part of the other. [...]. Texaco is the name of this “space of placedness” for community and [a leading character] Marie-Sophie’s secret name:

So I took a a deep breath [...] and [...] I named myself a secret name. It came to my mind with natural simplicity. When it rang in my head, I felt my languors disappear, my hair stand on end [...]. At the center of a flood of words bustling in my head, my secret name began to throb in lewoz rhythm which shook my bones [...].

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[T]he Texaco quarter is not just a flattened slate available and waiting for human inscription. Nor is it just a particular urban space standing as a bulwark against colonialist discourses aimed at assimilating Creole language, culture and traditions into the dominant French “order” [...]. In concrete terms, Texaco as habitus is the generative source of action and thought for [...] the community. [...] Marie-Sophie’s gesture -- whittling bamboo, packing down the earth [...] -- concretize the improvisation and innovation inherent in the habitation of place. Texaco is “embodied history [...]. It is the active presence of the whole past [...].” Place and Self [...] are thoroughly enmeshed, not fused into a singular essentialized whole. There is a continual reshaping and reconnecting [...].

In the words that the Old Black Man of the Doum maroon community offered as council to Marie-Sophie, “Find yourself a secret name and fight with it.” (”Fight” here translates the original text’s use of the French verb for to beat / pulsate, as in sense of a beating heart.) [...]

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Facing this undulating land [...], Marie-Sophie accesses the liminal space of the interrelations of identity, community and the non-human, environmental elements [...]. It is in this liminal space, this bridge between historicized cultural encounters on, in and through colonized landscapes that the ceaseless process of exchanging transformation which marks the Caribbean’s “irruption into modernity” takes place [...].

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In representing the critical entanglements of the human and non-human environmental elements [...], Chamoiseau offers a [...] portrait of the particular ways in which both human and environmental cultures absorb, recuperate, divert, struggle with, let slip, and (re)appropriate the sedimentation of human and natural history without being wholly or predictably circumscribed and subsumed by the other.

And while Marie-Sophie describes her modest hutch as “nothing, just something against the sun,” this hustch, her habitation, “it was my anchor in City. I was entering myself directly into that very old struggle.”

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All text above by: Keithley P. Woolward. “Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco or the Ecology of Caribbean Identity.” Journal of West Indian Literature Vol. 24 No. 2 November 2016. [Bold emphasis and italicized first line in this post added by me.]

[eunice-bee]

I crossed 2 oceans just to celebrate this wonderful day with my long time friend. We don't agree on anything and we're incredibly different, but those differences make for a rich, truthful friendship. So happy I could celebrate the beginning of your new life with a man so wonderful. #weddingoftheyear #mauritiuscanadianwedding #island #creolite (at Case Noyale)

[atelierrayzijlstra]

On the work of Ray Zijlstra (Aruba, 1966) One of the pieces in this exhibition is the canopy in three parts. This work shows dance-like journeys of a nude, between water and another elemental fabric. Carved upon the body of the nude male youth are Polynesian-derived island patterns: the patterns appear to the only marker, the sole anchoring-sign upon the man, pinning down this floating body. The youth floats in a state of levity, between the timeless islands of fishermen, and their opposite: an invasive, cybernetic, aggressively virtual and detached world. Island-time is met and ruptured by another era: one of cyberpunk, resulting in fluctuation. Two very different worlds, in terms of space, meaning and color come together, never to separate: like in a symbiosis between unlikely adolescent lovers, who ride towards hedonistic destruction, euphoric. Teenage lovers are convinced that despite their singularity, difference and loneliness they are absolutely One. The artist conserves this dynamism and exuberance in all his work. A series of cut-outs show delicate slightly Matissean scissoring, fanatical embroidery, photographic experimentation that warp the visual mind. The masculine form of a pearl-diver (an archetype noted by the critic, seemingly unintended by the artist) manifests in pearls that adorn the surfaces of the man's anatomy: nakedness dressed only in the gloom of shadows, skin covered in patterns (“like from Fiji,” reveals the artist, but these could just as well as pre-Columbian or African, pre-colonial.) A fisherman's net protrudes from the image as if it were turning to hologram. Though the youth seems warrior-like, he is also softened, floating about freely, alive, in the painfully awakened state of psychoactivity. Gravitation is collapsed by twisted space. A man floats, falls, in what could be the Caribbean sea, at once making embryonic movements of a fetus inside the Mother, in the water of a Female (who is not the ocean, so much as the playful gravity-deprivation of a cybernetic world from the cyberpunk racy novels of the 1980s.) In the canopy ''The Brain'' hangs a male nude with fuzzy limbs embroidered in plush, returning to animal state, or to children's books, but with crystal head: it is, indeed the brain. Maybe it is also a punk singer, Sid Vicious, hair painted white...but Zijlstra will fall still before conjecture. A chimeric meeting, between vastly contrasting worlds, reflects the artist Ray Zijlstra's own passage: a childhood interrupted between Aruba and other Antilles islands of his parentage, and Eindhoven, the technological and corporate-industrial city of the Netherlands where he came of age. References and archetypes of a creole past are there, enabling adventures. Friction with the new surroundings elope into a spirited, exuberant playfulness. There is no ending of contrasts, no ''catharsis'' sought in the easily politicized: the complex identity is more powerful when an underlying current, and behind the scenes, a phantom identity is toying with the control panel, turning the pressure of gravitation to a lunar scale, making people float. When identity is not centrepiece, it is in the control-panel room (to not say “the cock-pit”) Before, or during viewing the work of Arubian-Antillean-Amsterdam bred artist Ray Zijlstra, it is advised to listen to the music of Sun Ra. But that is not to imply jazz or even space-jazz underlies the work of Zijlstra: his figuration is in a way a form of cyber-punk, some of the works finely embroidered upon layers of newspaper even repeat the “God Save the Queen'' in harsher terms than Sex Pistols or The Clash, only this time directed at the Dutch Juliana (grand-godmother of Maxima Zorreguieta) rather than at England's more square and sober queen. Allen Ginsberg once said “Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!” Ray claims to be anti-political while constantly discussing conspiracy theory and politics, themes that are inextricable from visual cyberpunk. Some of the feathers embroidered into Zijlstra's tapestries and newspaper-canvases seem to have been plucked from precisely that source. Zijlstra was born on Aruba to Dutch/Antillean parents, spending part of his childhood years on the neighboring island Curacao, until the family moved from the Antilles to the South of the Netherlands (Eindhoven), still a child. Upon being asked his date of birth, the artist who one would expect to be demure about such questions answers “1966—perhaps the same year that Miriam Makeba came out with the song Pata-Pata'' Stunned by the reference, I ask him how come I had not heard of this Antillean song—the word Pata-Pata in Papiamento is a vernacular word for ''filled to the brim'' or ''packed'' as in a party or a crowded dance. He tells she Makeba was a South African diva, then touring Europe, and unable to return to the country because of political statements. “So she is the left-wing version of Celia Cruz,'' I conclude. The African element is as present as the other influences upon Ray from his creole, Caribbean past, his childhood and parentage—creole, or Antillean, is a key influence, rather than specifically ''afro-futurism''. What work then, to better befit an artist of creolite and immigrant experience than the tapestry. Tapestry, layers, and the newspaper cut-up (recalling the uncanny experimentalism of William S Burroughs' and Brion Gysin's cut-up experiments) seem to be the specialty of this multi-dimensional artist, who contains within him a playhouse of experimentations, a playfulness that leads to adventure (the best destination of playfulness) and his objects exude a dark sense of humor, the tranquil seriousness of the Antillean island meeting the jarring, amused technocracy of the Netherlands. It is often said that an artist is the one who succeeded at conserving the most important parts of his childhood: when at work, such an artist could appear to be a self-analytical, self-reflective creative child, with stronger hands. Zijlstra has not only kept the pearls of childhood creativity: he has also ripped and taken with him the best of adolescence and teenage years, such as the coming of age as a young Antillean in the Netherlands finding freedom, jokes, romance and above all Punk for the first time. He is exposed here, fresh and vivacious and lascivious as ever. Zijlstra will insist that his figuration is conceptual—despite that he is ascetic when it comes to any conceptual sales-talk, preferring to fall entirely deafmute. He believes—he knows the interpretive process of the audience is their creative process, and the importance of allowing that fragile process to weave its invisible web. None of that prepared, bottled intellectualism that has long ago been revealed as what it was, sales-talk of the art-world. No conceptual weapon-wrench may be shoved into that interpretive mystery-web, the temporary autonomous zone occurring between the viewer and the art-work on show. What Ray values most of the Dutch and Amsterdam half of his upbringing is that ethic not to be found on our islands, that of non-interference, anonymity, a permissive a-parochialism. His work flirts with nihilistic voidness, but then shies and swims away from it, too delicate for nihilism. He defends the act of tapestry, threadwork and embroidery as indeed masculine work, referring to the gobelin of medieval Europe, among other examples. Yet, undoubtedly his feminine side is irrepressible. Arturo Desimone 2017

[mektext]

http://ift.tt/2ozq2LL for Papers—“Creole Formations: Constellations of Créolité in Haitian Contexts” http://ift.tt/2pSUkKj

http://repeatingislands.com/2017/04/23/call-for-papers-creole-formations-constellations-of-creolite-in-haitian-contexts

[musiqueaupoing]

A LIRE ICI

Un rebond à la passionnante histoire des musiques créoles proposée par Bertrand Dicale. Où il est question d'hybridité, de sédimentation, d'invention, de dissémination, de circulation, de mouvement, de rhizome. Où il est question de musiques et de créolité.

[thisistherising-blog]

It was Cesaire's Negritude that opened to us the path for the actuality of a Caribbeanness which from then on could be postulated, and which itself is leading to another yet unlabelled degree of authenticity. Cesairian Negritude is a baptism, the primal act of our restored dignity. We are forever Cesaire's sons.

Confiant et al, In Praise of Creoleness

[curiousityclub]

RIP Edouard Glissant

Last week the Martinique-born novelist, poet, essayist and philosopher Edouard Glissant died at the age of 83. He was not only an important Caribbean author of the 20th century, he was also one of the fathers of the cultural concept of "Créolité". He expanded the mostly afro-centric view on Créolité to what he called "Antillanité", a "Caribbean identity [that] came not only from the heritage of ex-slaves, but was equally influenced by indigenous Caribbeans, European colonialists, East Indians and Chinese [..]." 

via (with bibliography)