Créolisation,Créolité,Martinique,and the Dangerous Intellectual Deception of “Tous Créoles!”

Abstract

Glissant’s approach to créolisation does pose pivotal questions especially when considered from the perspective of the Martiniquan experience. Privileging a pragmatic posture, it evidently does not account for the climactic symbolic discrepancy and unavoidable moral pressure that powerfully define the conscious and unconscious outlook on the respective African and European identity constituents as they are related to culture and race, which in turn determine the ethics of the said créolisation. The latter is unbendingly advocated as a process in which all parts are proportionally and “categorially” analogous. Glissant proposed a project aiming at reshaping the way one does Relation in the world. He did so from the model elaborated by the epistemological work of the African, a party that is constantly disparaged. However, he does not do this party justice by making first and unembiguously explicit the particularizing nature of its work. The African critical philosophical contribution is not earnestly rendered. It is this African philosophical input that provides the process and its result, their substantial meaning and distinguishing specificity. I would therefore like to discuss the axiological implications of Glissant’s pragmatic assertion to show how, carrying this pitfall, the formalization and systematization of créolisation sow confusion and exacerbate negationism as well as the everlasting sets of prejudice held against Africa as evidenced in Martinique.