Caribbean culture forms through routed intermingling rather than rooted continuity

Evidence

His central concern is with the syncretic and creolizing, transcultural logic that he argues is characteristic of the region, giving rise to different versions of Africa, India, and China, and mixing together Christianity, Hinduism, and voodoo alongside the variously English, French, and Spanish cultures of the original colonists. All this has produced the particular cultural syntheses that constitute contemporary Haiti or Martinique, as opposed to Barbados, Trinidad, or Jamaica. … Rather than seeking any continuity of transmission of cultural roots, he argues for the need to trace the complex routes through which given cultural elements have been transformed and reworked in different contexts. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 489

Categorization

• XREF: The roots-versus-routes distinction is the same transatlantic/diaspora framework that appears in later postcolonial and Islamophobia readings about how ‘homelands’ are imagined and reworked in the diaspora. — connects to: Rerouting functions as a norm of dislocated Caribbean art — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 261
• DEFINE: Offers the defining distinction between ‘roots’ (continuity of transmission) and ‘routes’ (transformation through context) that scaffolds the diasporic aesthetic concept.