Creolization is a limitless, diffracting métissage that never becomes fixed.

Evidence

What took place in the Caribbean, which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible. It is not merely an encounter, a shock (in Segalen’s sense), a métissage/’ but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the se a, in harmony and in errantry. … If we posit métissage as, generally speaking, the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, it,; elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts, whereas certain forms of métissage can concentrate one more time. Here it is devoted ta what has burst forth from lands that are no longer islands. … Its most obvious symbol is in the Creole language, whose genius consists in always being open, that is, perhaps, never becoming fixed except according ta systems of variables that we have to imagine as much as define. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 239

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely distinguishes creolization from métissage: creolization diffracts and remains open, while métissage can reconcentrate as a synthesis of two differences — the exact mechanism contrast at stake in whether identity can avoid collapse.
• XREF: Directly serves the strategic-essentialism inquiry: creole ‘never becoming fixed except according to systems of variables’ is a candidate empirical mechanism for holding identity relationally without residence in essentialism.