Caribbean identity is a fusion of African, Asian, and European elements, never pure.

Evidence

Their “routes” are anything but “pure.” The great majorities are “African” in descent—but, as Shakespeare would have said, “north-by-north-west.” We know this term “Africa” is, in any event, a modern construction, referring to a variety of peoples, tribes, cultures, and languages whose principal common point of origin lay in the confluence of the slave trade. In the Caribbean, “Africa” has since been joined by the East Indians and the Chinese: indenture enters alongside slavery. The distinctiveness of our culture is manifestly the outcome of the most complex interweaving and fusion in the furnace of colonial society, of different African, Asian, and European cultural elements. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 830

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘routes not roots’ distinction and the constructedness of ‘Africa’ as a category forged by the slave trade — foundational vocabulary for diaspora studies.
• XREF: Connects to the constructed-nation and imagined-community framework of Anderson that later fuels the nation/imagination thread of the Islamophobia toolkit; also resonates with the ‘Other’-construction theme.