Caribbean culture is synthetic and adaptive rather than authentic

Evidence

The legacy of the plantation is highly implicated in every aspect of the Caribbean. It has produced and sustains a syncretic, hybrid, transitory reality characterized by a corpus of values and institutions that maintains social integrity. Such integrity is universally recognizable throughout the region. But the region was created, from the start, as a space of transitory impermanence after the almost total extinction of its indigenous population. Caribbean reality has emerged almost in opposition to this notion of impermanence. Nevertheless, at its core, it is forced to accommodate a never-ending assault by a global and international environment and a multiplicity of ever-changing cultural, social, economic, and political forces. The result is an extremely pregnable Caribbean, constantly penetrated, while struggling to maintain its own sense of integrity and the notion of a definitive character. But there is nothing “authentic” about its socioculture and very little that has not originated from abroad. Everything is “adapted, reimagined, reinvented” (Stavans, 1995:60) to suit the needs of a domestic condition, constantly buffeted by external pressures, needs, and demands. The region’s character is described by one its writers and theorists as “chaos-shock, mixture, combination, alchemy” (Taylor 1989:136). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3190 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Different constructions of creolite have produced and reinforced virulent forms of territorial nationalisms. These have foreclosed opportunities for regional integration. Representations and practices of racial and cultural purity have prevailed in the face of hybridity. They have been at the root of endemic racial conflict in the region. Conceptualizations of white purity continue to reinforce and legitimize a system of globalized dependency. Creole nationalism continues to hide the pervasive and overarching presence of domestic racial capitalism. The way out of these dilemmas points in the direction of a new narrative of liberation to displace the representations and practices of the repressive cultural order of creolite. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3277 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rerouting functions as a norm of dislocated Caribbean art — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 261; Post-plantation Caribbean literatures inverted the colonial landscape convention and built self-made traditions — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 405; Caribbean culture is creolized adaptation of foreign imports, not authentic tradition — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3190 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Caribbean culture is creolized adaptation of foreign imports, not authentic tradition #expands (0.97) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3190
• Caribbean culture forms through routed intermingling rather than rooted continuity #expands (0.93) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 489
• Hybridity rhetoric in the Caribbean produced purity-based nationalist conflicts #complicates (0.79) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3277
• Caribbean Creole culture diverges by island despite shared plantation history #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3209