Dougla, Half-doogla, Travesao, and the Limits of HybridityPosted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-01-15 03:58Z by Steven |
Dougla, Half-doogla, Travesao, and the Limits of Hybridity
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 7, Issues 1 & 2 (Fall 2009)
30 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150
Jennifer Rahim, Senior Lecturer in English
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Discourses on Caribbean culture and identity have been, if anything, prolific and energetic in their manufacture and circulation of a virtual plethora of signs, an entire vocabulary of terms recruited to articulate the concept of the hybrid, whether biological or cultural, as a corrective, if not redemptive possibility for the region and beyond. Indeed, cultural discourses throughout the Americas have at one time or the other looked to hybridity like a raised standard to heal Empire’s poisonous legacy of Manichean systems of value applied to race and ethnic difference. Without a doubt, these discourses have been deployed in sometimes naïve, sometimes cunningly politicized ways. If anything, they have been most productive in providing an instructive archive of narratives that reveal the far from idyllic and democratic histories of forced and consensual interracial mixings and cross-cultural aesthetic practices that characterize the region’s evolution.
Whatever the names with which the ever expanding family of hybrid identities have been baptized—Mulatto, Mestizaje, Creole, Spanish, Cocoa Payol, callaloo, Travesaou, Dougla, and so on—all share the following features: their origination in the diasporic multiracial, multiethnic make up of Caribbean societies; their particular histories and politics of application in contexts of privilege associated with colour, class, gender, and physical appearance; their role in the promotion of a rhetoric of nationalist accommodation to salve tensions among diverse race and ethnic groups; their elevation as signifiers of a regional and/or planetary destination that will be the radical reconstitution of demeaning stereotypes instituted under colonialism; and finally, their shared histories of failure to convincingly realize the very possibilities for which they have been embraced given the uneven weighting of differences that comprise the “mix.”
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