Table Of ContentThe Creolization of Theory
Edited by Françoise Lionnet & Shu-mei Shih
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Durham & London 2011
© 2011 Duke University Press
AH rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-fi-ee paper @l
Designed by Jennifer Hill. Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Ine.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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~ 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 1 INTRODUCTION
The Creolization of TheOl-y
Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet
37 1 ONE
Symptomatically Black: A Creolization of the Political
Barnor Hesse
62 1 TWO
and Postcolonial Representations: Comparative
Anne
83 1 THREE
Crises of
Cheah
112 1 FOUR
Material Histories of Transcolonial Loss:
Theories of Melancholia?
Liz Constable
142 1 FIVE
From Multicultural to Creole
'"t''\lP,-,C'
Collaborative Works
Liao
1-"1YIIT_,V/111
vi Contents
1
159 1 SIX
I Am Where I Think: Remapping the Order of Knowing
Walter 1V1ignolo
193 1 SEVEN
Taiwan in ModernityjColoniality:
Orphan of Asia and the Colonial Difference
Leo Ching
207 1 EIGHT
Toward a Diasporic Citizen?
From Internationalism to Cosmopolitics
Étienne BalibaJ"
226 1 NINE
"The Forces of Creolization":
Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe
Fatima EI-Tayeb
255
the Antilles: Interview wHh rl,",,,,,.,,"" Glissant
H
Andrea
"'v1'HI'J'OfT,,H"
262 1 B
Creolization: Definition and
Dominique Chancé
Translated by Eve re tt
269 1 REFERENCES
293 CONTRIBUTORS
297 1 INDEX
K OWIL DG le
ur foremost thanks go to the contributors in this book for their deep
engagement with the issues that concern aIl of us, and Julin Everett
for her intellectual input as an interlocutor and translator, not to mention
her much-appreciated help with editing and compiling the manuscript. VVe
also thank Rachelle Okawa, who stepped in at the last minute for final edit
ing and technical help.
Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press has been a most supportive edi
tor, and we are grateful to Mandy Earley, Rebecca Fowler, and William G.
Henry for their invaluable assistance.
Many colleagues at different institutions in the United States and abroad
have invited us to present our work-in-progress and engaged with its ideas;
the members of our uc-wide Multicampus Research Group (MRG) in
Transnational and Transcolonial Studies inspired our first collective vol
ume, NIinor and the of California Office of
the President which the
,"",,"rV'lT,,'Dn
UCLA, Pauline Yu, then dean of
director of the Asian American Studies
'<'U',UHhHJ.J,
ter; and the deans of International Institute provided addition al financial
contributions, as did the Cultural Services of the French Consulate in Los
Angeles. TI1e UCLA Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies supplied
the needed space and staff" support.
Shu-mei would especially like to mark the visual contribution by her
un de Hung Chang, whose artistic itinerary between Fushan, Seou!, Taipei,
Paris, New York, and San Francisco exemplifies multiple processes of geo-
specifie creolization in his one of which from the Paris
book. would like to thank him his art
\'iii
1
and for being such a great artist -uncle. He is one of two artists in her large
maternaI Chang clan, whose members have remained connected despite
being scattered to different parts of the world by the Chinese civil war, the
Korean War, and the cold war.
Artists, musicians, travelers, and storytellers have echoed one another
across the colonial worlds of the Creole Atlantic and lndian Ocean, link
ing contact zones in which identities are woven into a thick cosmopolitan
fabric made of the tangled knots of diverse memories. Françoise thanks
her Mauritian family, especially the Mauritian linguist, poet, and dramatist
Dev Virahsawmy and the scholar Danielle Tranquille for showing the way
by writing and translating Kreol Morisien. Creolizing cultures are oriented
toward the future and cannot afford to dwell on the lacunae of memory, but
knowing that detwra tipetal rouz pa fer banane serves to put both past and
future into perspective.
We both thank the Aacqumeh Native American poet Simon Ortiz for
allowing us to use the poem that opens this collection.
INTRODUCTION
c
Slnl-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet
This America
has been a burden
of steel and mad
death,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek
Simon From Sand Creek
Tu dimunn pu vini kreo!
Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. it is increasingly
used to describe many forms of cultural contact, including both reciprocal
sylnr[leÎ[n(~'al \'--"-',-u<.tUj:;'-''' across a wide range of cultural formations.
al11C11rODOl()Ql:st Palmié (2006) have warned
Vrc."",h""
against facile appropriations of the concept. While we too argue in this book
against the easy universalization of the notion of creolization, we are inter
ested in putting the notion to more use. Our goal here is twofold: to
about the forms of intellectual and political em.angleIlle:nrs
nllPC'T1r\!'1C'
the aC2lUeITIY: il1to
