Abstract
Creolization (in the sense of cultural mixing or crossover) is a “miracle begging for analysis. Because it first occurred against all odds between the jaws of brute and absolute power, no explanation seems to do justice to the very wonder that it happened at all.”1 The wonder has now apparently been demystified. With the poststructuralist turn, renewed attention to political dynamics in cultural production has unearthed submerged yet persistent interstices within culture, formerly imagined as a seamless system. The interstices have revealed ways in which cultural domination is never completed. Culture is not merely a manifestation of institutional and material reality, constraining and coercing human actions, consciousness, and reflections. Instead, culture is the key avenue for shaking or even breaking the “iron jaws of power.” Power is not “absolute,” however “brute” it may be.
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Notes
Michael-Rolph Trouillot, “Culture on the Edge: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context,” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Future, ed. B. K. Axel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 189.
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23.
Christoph Brumann, “Writing for Culture: Why a Successful Concept Should Not Be Discarded,” (Special Issue: Culture—A Second Chance?) Current Anthropology, 40 (1999): S1–S27;
Marshall Sahlins, “Two or Three Things that I Know About Culture,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5, 3 (1999): 299–421.
Pnina Werbner, “Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-racism, ed. P. Werbner and T. Modood (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1997), 1–26.
Aisha Khan, Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 5.
Richard Price, Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008);
Richard Price and Sally Price, “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove,” Cultural Anthropology, 12, 1 (1997): 3–36; Trouillot, “Culture on the Edge: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context,” 189–210.
Viranjini Munasinghe, Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 197;
Viranjini Munasinghe, “Theorizing World Culture through the New World: East Indians and Creolization,” American Ethnologist, 33, 4 (2006): 549–562, 553.
Munasinghe, ibid.; Khan, Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad; Aisha Khan, “Creolization Moments,” in Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. C. Stewart (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), 237–253;
Aisha Khan, “Good to Think? Creolization, Optimism, and Agency,” Current Anthropology, 48, 5 (2007): 653–673.
Teruyuki Tsuji, Hyphenated Cultures: Ethnicity and Nation in Trinidad. PhD Diss., Florida International University, Miami, FL, 2006;
Teruyuki Tsuji, “Mothers—Hyphenated Imaginations: The Feasts of Soparee Ke Mai and La Divina Pastora in Trinidad,” in Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean, ed. K. Mahabir (New Delhi: Serials Publications, 2010), 169–191.
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969);
Lynn Meskell, “Objects in the Mirror Appear Closer than They Are,” in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 51–71.
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Julius Bautista and Anthony Reid, “Introduction: Materiality in a Problematically Plural Southeast Asia,” in The Spirit of Things: Materiality and Religious Diversity in Southeast Asia, ed. J. Bautista, South Asian Program Publications (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 1–10; Meskell, “Objects in the Mirror Appear Closer than They Are,” 2005.
Charles V. Carnegie, “Strategic Flexibility in the West Indies: A Social Psychology of Caribbean Migration,” Caribbean Review, 11, 1 (1982): 10–13, 54; Tsuji, Hyphenated Cultures: Ethnicity and Nation in Trinidad; Tsuji, “Mothers—Hyphenated Imaginations: The Feasts of Soparee Ke Mai and La Divina Pastora in Trinidad.”
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), 148.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963; Charles V. Carnegie, Postcolonialism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
See, for example, Mervyn C. Alleyne, “Acculturation and the Cultural Matrix of Creolization,” in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, April 1968, ed. Dell Hymes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 169–186.
See, for example, Edward Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona: Savocou Publications, 1974).
Robert C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Robert C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001);
Charles Stewart, “Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory,” in Creolization: History, Ethnography, and Theory, ed. C. Stewart (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), 1–25; Khan, Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad; Khan, “Creolization Moments”; Khan, “Good to Think? Creolization, Optimism, and Agency.”
Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction,” in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–50;
Michael Rowlands, “A Materialist Approach to Materiality,” in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 72–87; Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion; Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory; Meskell, “Objects in the Mirror Appear Closer than They Are”; Bautista and Reid, “Introduction: Materiality in a Problematically Plural Southeast Asia.”
Naoki Kasuga, “Ima naze rekishi ka” [Why history matters now], Bunkajinruigaku, 69, 3 (2004): 373–385; Khan, “Good to Think? Creolization, Optimism, and Agency.”
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© 2015 Michal Jan Rozbicki
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Tsuji, T. (2015). Toward the Materiality of Intercultural Dialogue, Still a “Miracle Begging for Analysis”. In: Rozbicki, M.J. (eds) Perspectives on Interculturality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484390_4
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