Cosmopolitan Creoles and Neoliberal Mobility
By Melissa Stephens
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Published in Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization McGill-Queen's University Press; Illustrated edition (November 10, 2017)
“we,
there is no “we”
let us separate ourselves now,
though perhaps we can’t, still and again
too late for that,
nothing but to continue”
Serving as an engine for global modernity, the Caribbean has been constituted by histories of transatlantic slavery, indentured servitude, and anti-colonial struggle, as well as inter- and intra-regional migrations. However, since the 1970s, the region has been influenced strongly by the emergence of neoliberalism in the United States, the military and economic hegemony in the hemisphere. With its grounding in the logic of the market, neoliberalism promises an opportunity for the Caribbean to transcend the burdensome legacies of slavery and colonialism. This promise, of equality and mobility and freedom, poses difficulties to artists who perceive that neoliberalism has served only to reinforce inequalities, and who wish to imagine alternative forms of community in the region.
Barbadian artist Annalee Davis attempts such critique in On the Map (2007), an experimental documentary film short which addresses how gentrified forms of the Caribbean socioeconomic mobility produce racial hostilities, political disenfranchisement, and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. In significant ways, the film renders regional integration as being distinct from and detrimental to the work of community-building that is motivated by desires for decolonization.
Giving voice to the experience of documented and undocumented Indo-Guyanese migrant workers in Barbados, Davis’s film is set against the backdrop of a Caribbean region whose borders are being reshaped by neoliberalism and homeland security initiatives. The film explicitly engages the policy of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSmE), a regional economic integration scheme developed by the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CarICom) in 1989. The CSmE represents a multi-state strategy to consolidate formal economic and social relationships by promoting regulated forms of regional integration. Chief among its goals is the facilitation of a more flexible labour market, an aim which – as it has elsewhere in the world – antagonizes traditional state efforts to sustain borders in the interest of sovereignty and security. Davis’s documentary raises more questions than it can answer regarding how the Caribbean community is constituted by neoliberal markets and mobility regimes. However, by linking colonialist legacies of racism and classism to the political and economic practices of contemporary Caribbean states, Davis’s film invites a theorization of neoliberal identity politics in a region where identity has traditionally transcended the capture of the nation-state; as Shalini Puri has observed, On the Map visually expresses “the ‘tangled intimacy’ of Caribbean Relations.”
In this chapter, I address the tangled intimacies of neoliberal globalization, cosmopolitanism, and Creolization, as evinced by On the Map’s portrayal of racial and economic hostilities within the competitive migrant labour schemes of the region. My purpose is to explore the implications of what Davis calls the “complex Creole” for her poetic invocations. This culturally conscious identification, conjured in resistance to the xenophobia and neoliberal policy surrounding Caribbean labour migration, should remind us of “the co-existence of different cosmopolitan traditions” historically evident within the region.
Although often overlooked in dominant discourses of cosmopolitanism, the Caribbean has been defined as “cosmopolitan” because “everybody who is there came from somewhere else,” making it an intensely diasporic society, where “Creolisation, the cultural mix of different elements” is the really distinctive, indigenous trait of Caribbean culture, which makes the Caribbean individual “sort of a ‘natural’ cosmopolitan.” While On the Map inadvertently expresses solidarity with a Caribbean history of “‘cosmopolitanism from below’ – people driven across borders, obliged to uproot themselves from home, place and family, living in transit camps or climbing onto the backs of lorries or leaky boats or the bottom of trains and airplanes to get to somewhere else,” it does not self-consciously address what Françoise Lionnet describes as the “convergence between the concepts of cosmopolitanism and Creolization,” in its troubling production of “crucial nodes in the global network of militarized sites.” Shot on location in Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad, On the Map works to produce the complex Creole by documenting the emerging, shifting, and contested histories of regional consciousness and Caribbean identity. It interweaves voice-over narration, interviews with artists, and testimony from migrant labourers. Many of these voices assume a regional consciousness that is crucial to Davis’s notion of the complex Creole. Guyanese artist Peter Minshall, for example, explains that he is a white man who, rather than identifying as European or “Creole” in a white-settler tradition, claims that he is “Caribbean.”
Elsewhere in the film, a musician who claims to have relatives throughout the islands articulates the Caribbean as “one people, one region.”
In this way, On the Map works to establish the region as one that is Creole and, implicitly, cosmopolitan, urging audiences to rekindle memories of alternative Caribbean relations in order to challenge state-managed regional integration. So, though the work of “debunking the myth of [Caribbean regional] unity” is a stated agenda in the DvD’s post-film notes, what the film reproduces is a symbolically resonant form of identification rooted in a very particular historical experience of the Caribbean. As one critic explains,
“ any voice that lays claim to the complexity of what it means to be a Caribbean person, and names it – in this case, as creole – should not be surprised when other voices whisper about their exclusion. Indo-Caribbean people, for example, would not easily identify themselves as creole – complex or otherwise. So, ironically, the attempt to confront the Western gaze that has othered,” the Caribbean person in turn can itself be accused of othering those Caribbean people who do not [as Davis suggests in her poem] “commemorate the cobweb we have become.”
The extent to which signifying practices of Creole identification are collective is contestable; however, as I shall be arguing, those signifying practices animate a politics of resistance by making connections between the residuum of colonial history and the neoliberal present.
Poetry forms a key part of the film’s experimental critique of the Caribbean community, beginning by embracing Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “rhythmic tidalectics.”
In On the Map, selections of Brathwaite’s poem “Genesis” accompany the watery imagery of Guyana’s Kaiteur Falls, including the lines “so when God created Caribbean, he took a pebble, skidded it along the water with a sound of our own & this is how it went: his archipelago: my vision: your poem.” Taking Brathwaite’s call outward to the poem’s auditor as an occasion for her own poetic response, Davis offers “I Celebrate the Chorus of the Creole Chant,” a poem that begins with the claim, “I am the complex Creole / My context is the Caribbean.” Part of the complexity is the admission that “there is more chaos than community” and “some feel like foreigners.”
Nevertheless, she continues to “celebrate the chorus of the Creole Chant,” and, in a Whitmanesque refrain, she disavows singular affiliations: “I cleave to no church, temple nor country.” Like “Genesis,” “Complex Creole” is epic in its historical reach to include “centuries” of imagery. It depicts:
“ An archipelago crocheted into a crossbreed
Of carnival, class and comes
Cognizant of Columbus
And the Commonwealth.
That created these confused colonies
Correctly criticized for the callous treatment
Of the Amerindian
And the reconstitution
Of a Caribbean caste system.”
Nonetheless, Davis’s poetic voice is empowered by a soulful process of healing:
“ I anoint myself with a communion of
Cinnamon, coffee and cumin Cocoa, cotton and cane
It is with composure and compassion that
I conceive my compatriots as compatible
Whether Cuban or Guyanese,
Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jew.”
In turn, Davis claims to be “[c]onfidently confirming a conglomerate / Who speak patois, Papiamento, Spanish and Creole.” Creole identification is envisioned as a multiply affiliated subject position; those who would promote “corruption” or “conflict” she would “outcast … from the community.” As Karen Fog Olwig explains, Caribbean cosmopolitan practices have both reproduced and challenged Enlightenment discourses and civilizing missions. Among African-Caribbean populations, she finds that these traditions are “mutually constitutive.” In her poetry, Davis, places a condition on inclusion within the Caribbean community: individuals must uphold the social traditions of “‘linking up’ with others” and the “negation of strangerhood,” or they must leave.
According to Fog Olwig, this “vital dimension of Caribbean social practice and self-awareness that we can call cosmopolitan” is rooted in the social practices of African slaves who, as strangers to new land, to new masters, and to each other, cultivated “an openness to strangers” which became “an important basis of the strong Caribbean migration tradition that emerged in the post-emancipation period.” Davis’s “complex Creole” is therefore part of a longstanding tradition, but perhaps it is one that needs revitalization in a neoliberal period that may capitalize on linkages between cosmopolitanism and Creolization.
Such claims for Creole complexity support the film’s critique of Articles 45 and 46 of the CSmE, both of which focus on the facilitation of the free movement of Caribbean nationals within the region. Because they focus almost exclusively on “labour” and “skills,” these articles assume a portability that is interrogated in the film, to the extent that such portability privileges the mobility of a professional elite. Davis responds by offering a poetics of creative regeneration produced in the neoliberal age for a historically migratory population. She highlights the productive proximity of differences among inhabitants of the region, a situation and orientation which she implies has had the potential to spark creative and supportive relationships that policies like the CSmE fail to facilitate. Davis imagines the individual “I” of her poem as “a coalition / Of combustible matter” which is nevertheless “a civilized collective,” although she acknowledges the difficulty of establishing intimate and trusting social relations, because the Caribbean is “a community that isn’t convinced / Of the credit of cultural producers.”
Arguably, Davis is striving for “critical relationality” in this poetic articulation of difference, a praxis which for Carole Boyce Davies “asserts the specificity of the other, but works together and from each in a generalized purpose of resistance to domination.” Domination in this film is associated with the multi-state prioritization of a gentrified neoliberal mobility regime enabled primarily for the Caribbean professional classes, while the precarious lives of the region’s more socially and economically vulnerable constituents lack security and protection. Such a mobility regime privileges a cosmopolitan elite and works against “critical relationality,” which Boyce Davies explains “is not interruptive or a series of interruptions … nor does it embrace the hierarchy embedded in subalternization. Rather, it argues for the synchronic, multiply articulate discourses, which operate braid-like or web-like as a series of strands are woven.” Notably, the image of the braid is also resonant with a French Caribbean perspective of Creole identification as the expression of non-totalitarian totality.
The poetic invocation of a complex Creole identification can be read to signify Davis’s politics of solidarity with the exploited labouring subjects of this particular film; however, the implications of this gesture are never explored. Nor does On the Map consider how state managed discourses of Creole identification can privilege certain Creole histories to promote particular kinds of regionalism that suit neoliberal ideology. While the film’s premise that “the Caribbean has been a migrant region for five hundred years” serves to remind us of the enduring and constitutive violence of plantation slavery, its characterization of the region as “one of the largest experiments in hybridity” should prompt us to consider how the Caribbean serves as a case study for cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization.
Indeed, such experimentation demands the critical review of outcomes. Shalini Puri’s critique of Caribbean state discourses of hybridity calls into question the cultural logic of Creole identity, which historically links mixed-raced identity to African and white European heritages. Chinese, Indo-Caribbean, and indigenous populations, among others, are not easily integrated into this version of mixed-raced ancestry. The film’s focus on Indo-Guyanese workers provides an opportunity for its Cosmopolitan Creoles and Neoliberal Mobility in Annalee Davis audiences to reflect upon how neoliberal integration policies, focused on the regulation and facilitation of free movement for Caribbean nationals, are related to the “experiments in hybridity” associated with earlier coercive migratory histories.
Experiences of migration are shaped by the historical particularities of socioeconomic circumstances and political rights. For the Caribbean Diaspora, the “Creole continuum” has been a concept used to signal the fact that there are variations in degrees of familiarity with the Caribbean regional uses of Creole language and culture. Creolization, as a process, has been theoretically celebrated as historically effecting the dissolution of “the old formal categories” of “ethnic identity” to promote “an identity that would not be the projection of a unique and sectarian root, but of what we call a rhizome, a root with a multiplicity of extension, in all directions.”
Linked to “ancient maroonage, which was the quest for new traces,” Creolization animates “ambiguity, discontinuity, traces, and remembering” to produce “unpredictable results” and an “unprecedented conception of identity.” The invocation of Creole identification has, therefore had symbolic power for creative and political imagination. Here, Creolization may be linked to “cosmopolitanism from below,” working against the Enlightenment cosmopolitanisms and universalizing ideals noted by Kent and Tomsky in the introduction to this book. The Caribbean “Creole continuum” invokes a dynamic relation between regional and diasporic Caribbean cultures; as linguistic and cultural practice, the Creole continuum is historically rooted in Caribbean processes of indigenization and anticolonial responses to slavery and colonialism, but it is changing in relation to contemporary conditions. While we might understand the Caribbean Diaspora as an articulation of a global cultural citizenship – a kind of Caribbean cosmopolitanism – it seems that world citizenship, as a cosmopolitan ideal, remains untenable.
Despite their cosmopolitan history within and beyond the region, Caribbean people are without reparation for violent histories of slavery and colonialism, and the region continues to feel the persistent weight of disenfranchisement within a global market economy. One might, therefore question the practical meaning of a world citizenship, not just culturally or politically, but in ethical and socioeconomic contexts. For those of us who are not Caribbean, we might consider the possibility that, given the very uneven experiences of enfranchisement felt within the region and in the Diaspora, some Caribbean populations might rightly regard world citizenship – which is necessarily different from the claim to “one people, one region” – with suspicion.
The regional history of Creole social formation is often directly related to the survival strategies of Africans enslaved by the plantation economy. In turn, the plantation has figured in creative and theoretical works, as well as in the literature of political economy and elsewhere, as a configuration that continues to resonate with the landscapes of late capitalism. “Although the plantation has vanished,” Glissant argues that “Creolization is still at work in our megalopolises … where the inferno of cement slums is merely an extension of the inferno of the sugarcane or cotton fields.” Glissant thus forges a link between the so-called peripheries and centres of capitalist development. Within “the Americas” he finds that “languages are emerging or dying” and that “the old and rigid sense of identity is confronting the new and open way of Creolization. This phenomenon probably has no political or economic power. But it is precious for mankind’s imagination, its capacity for invention.” In this view, both the slum and the plantation are linked by survival strategies that respond to a genealogy of racialized socioeconomic violence. Davis’s invocation of complex Creole identification, then, could be read as signifying upon a historical set of transformative social practices, perhaps perceived as lost or as waning in the neoliberal age, which can be reinvented and shared among Caribbean residents who feel the exploitative effects of colonialist legacies in the contemporary period.
