Chapter 2 - Caribbean Identities and Diversifying the Creole Mix

Summary

While the rich ethnic diversity of the Caribbean has been mobilized discursively in the postcolonial Caribbean as a resource to represent multicultural unity (especially in national mottoes like Jamaica’s ‘Out of many, one people’ and the Trinidadian ‘Together we aspire, together we achieve’), the social relationships between different ethnic groups have also been charged with tension and conflict. Caribbean literature in the late twentieth century represents the histories of ethnic/racial rivalries and divisions, but also the solidarities and criss-crossing creolizations that occur in everyday interactions and that mobilize class, gender, sexuality and generation as points of alliance. The recognition of literary styles and critical frameworks distinctive to Indian-Caribbean literature and Chinese-Caribbean literature has developed in the twenty-first century, although it has remained relatively understudied and theorized. These literatures must be read through the lenses of feminism, dougla identities and queer identities to sustain a fullness of their interpretations, in both scholarly and secular/societal settings.