Gendering Creolisation: creolising affect

Anim-Addo, Joan. 2013. Gendering Creolisation: creolising affect. Feminist Review, 104(1), pp. 5-23. ISSN 0141-7789 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

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.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.15

Keywords:

gendered creolisation; creolising affects; intersectional representation; auto-theorising; Creole; Caribbean

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

English and Comparative Literature
English and Comparative Literature > Centre for Caribbean Studies

Dates:

DateEvent
July 2013Published

Item ID:

10105

Date Deposited:

28 Apr 2014 14:17

Last Modified:

23 Jun 2017 13:24

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10105

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