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gendering creolisation: creolising affect

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Feminist Review

Abstract

Going beyond the creolisation theories of Brathwaite and Glissant, I attempt to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation, and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as ‘physiological things’ contextualised in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation, I seek, importantly, to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects. Brathwaite's proposition that ‘the most significant (and lasting) inter-cultural creolisation took place’ within the ‘intimate’ space of ‘sexual relations’ is key to my argument. In the light of this, I consider how Creole cultural knowledge about affect—as the primary motivational system inclusive of fear, anger, outrage and so on—might be identified, and what constitutes such Creole knowledge within which affect might be embedded. How might Glissant's relationality and Creole literary texts add to this knowledge? I focus primarily on three texts: Clarke's The Polished Hoe, Collins’ The Colour of Forgetting and Morejón's ‘Amo a mi amo’/‘I Love My Master’. Each text on which I draw is selected for its intersectional representation of gender relations, ‘knowledge about sexual difference’ and its representation of Creole subjectivities within the context problematised here as the ‘demonic ground’. Moreover, as auto-theorising texts, they represent both narrative and meta-narrative of a creolising of affects in and against the economy of the slave plantation. Each represents also a stage or aspect of the development of subjectivities and an affective community that inform this intervention concerned with theorising against consolidated, universalising and Eurocentric conceptualisations of affect. In the process, I attempt to offer a differentiated cartography and literary archaeology of affect.

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Notes

  1. Morejón's ‘Amo a mi amo’/‘I Love My Master’, with translation by Jean Andrews, may be read in its entirety in this volume, as well as in the collection Black Woman and Other Poems/Mujer negra y otros poemas (2001) from which it is taken.

  2. I make no distinction between emotion and affect. For a useful survey of the field in the light of such distinction, see Gorton's (2007) valuable review article.

  3. Several models of creolisation theory have evolved since Brathwaite's (1971) thesis. Perhaps the most influential is that of Glissant, for whom relationality is pivotal (see Poetics of Relation, 1997). Neither thinker, however, has considered questions of gender, though of interest to this discussion is the fact that both are also perhaps known equally for their creative writing.

  4. See, for example, essays by Viv Golding (2013), Mina Karavanta (2013) and Karina Smith (2013), each of whom, in this volume, elaborates upon what Karavanta describes as ‘text bodies that stage and perform the work of affective memory’ (2013).

  5. See Smith in this volume who, in examining Janie Cricketing Lady, comments on the writing of silence (Smith, 2013).

  6. I use Caribbean and Creole interchangeably. The former refers to the region and the latter to the culture.

  7. See Susan Thomas's essay in this volume for some discussion of the sexual ‘seasoning’ involved in gendered creolisation (Thomas, 2013).

  8. Shepherd's writing of a journal entry describing a reported ‘petticoat rebellion’ by enslaved women in 1816 argues that such rebellion was a ‘standard feature of the slave system’ (Shepherd, 2002: 17).

  9. Mina Karavanta's essay in this volume offers an extended discussion on the concept of ‘counterwriting’ (2013).

  10. In the context of the American plantation system, Morrison (2000: 46) refers to ‘my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it’.

  11. An example is the USA's ‘one-drop’ rule, which designates anyone with a drop of black blood as black. Hence, there is a differentiated emphasis concerning race in the US context, despite a similar plantation history out of which Morrison, for example, writes.

  12. There is a growing body of work on creolisation theory. The emphases of Brathwaite and Glissant relate most clearly to this discussion.

  13. Ahmed's distinctions, though useful, do not entirely overlap my own here where enslaved bodies are actually capital that can be and was exchanged.

  14. For a more detailed treatment of women's punishment on the plantation, see Anim-Addo (2004).

  15. Examples are the eighteenth-century historian Edward Long and the ‘Lady of Quality’, Janet Schaw (see Anim-Addo, 2007a).

  16. The fictional Bimshire is based on Barbados. Monahan writes of his ‘puzzlement’ in the face of race denial when researching on the island (see Creolizing Subject, 2011).

  17. There are resonances here with Guillen's ‘Ballad of the Two Grandfathers’ (see Guillen, 2002). The significance of the patriarch is very much at issue in plantation circumstances.

  18. That masking becomes a strategy in the literature is discussed elsewhere (Anim-Addo, 2007a).

  19. Morejón's poetry is little known to readers of English. Her literary awards include the National prize for Literature in 2001 and the LASA prize, 2012.

  20. ‘Brief History of Juliana’ discovers a post-slavery plantation owned by a Scot who freely ‘breeds’ the women with the effect that children and grandchildren are of similar age (Anim-Addo, 2007b).

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Anim-Addo, J. gendering creolisation: creolising affect. Fem Rev 104, 5–23 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.15

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