VIRANJINI MUNASINGHECornell University

Theorizing world culture through theNew World:East Indians and creolization

A B S T R A C TThis article is an ethnographic inquiry into theproduction of theory. In it, I specifically ask why theconcept creole has assumed such significancetoday for theorists working outside the Caribbean forinterpreting the dynamics of cultural change globally.Relocating creole in its historical and regionalcontext, I analyze how and why interculturation, anessential feature of creolization that is championedby global theorists, is transformed into acculturationwhen creolization theory is applied to East Indiansin Trinidad. I argue that creolization fails as theorywith respect to East Indians because of its ontologyas a schizophrenic theory, that is, one in whichtheory and ideology are conflated. I call for areconceptualization of creolization theory by firstrecognizing the limitations imposed by suchinstances of epistemological collapse. [creolization,global culture, Caribbean, East Indians,anthropological theory, Trinidad]

It used to be that there were only some handful of historically recognizedcreole cultures, mostly in the plantation areas of the New World, but nowwe sense that creole cultures may be turning into more of a genericterm, of wider applicability.

Ulf Hannerz, 1996

Five centuries after the accidental landing of an ambitious Genoanexplorer on Guanahani (a small island in the Bahamas), theCaribbean is apparently being discovered again, this time by the-orists who are looking for alternatives to Enlightenment episte-mologies. The very historical particularisms that prompted social

scientists and humanists of an earlier era to slight the Caribbean now seducethem, with the region offering itself as an anachronistic laboratory of theglobal future and, possibly, even as a place that harbors utopian solutionsto the vexing postmodern problems of porous boundaries and ceaselessheterogeneities.1

In this article, I ask why creole, a concept long identified with theCaribbean, has assumed such significance today for theorists working out-side the region.2 I analyze some problematic implications of this crossoverby locating the creole concept in a specific history and context to maketwo separate but related points. Historically mooring creolization not onlypoints out certain ironies in global investment in this local term but also,more interestingly, allows me to evidence a particular kind of theoryschizophrenic theory. I argue that the very attributes that theorists cele-brate as fundamental to creolization and that make it attractive for globalappropriation3such as processes of interculturation, the simultaneousentertainment of multiplicity, and the creativity of cultural productionare conspicuously absent when the term is applied to East Indians in theCaribbean.4 Understandably, then, those scholars most engaged with thequestion of creolization and East Indian exclusion see little redemptionin the conceptAisha Khan, for example, has theorized the weakness ofthe creole concept vis-a`-vis East Indians to argue that creolization, as a

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American Ethnologist Volume 33 Number 4 November 2006

fiction that invents the Caribbean (2001:294295), ulti-mately reinforces the very preconceptions of culture it claimsto dismantle, and Shalini Puri (1999, 2004) sees creolizationas having exhausted its potential for a radical politics partlybecause of its complicity with the nationalist project and itsinability to deal with East Indians; hence, her call for an alter-native dougla (a Trinidadian of mixed African and Indianancestry) poetics.5

In a more optimistic spirit, my purpose here is to ana-lyze precisely how creolization fails as theory by using theethnographic example of the exclusion of the East Indianin Trinidad. This inquiry leads me to argue that creoliza-tion fails as theory because of its peculiar ontology, whichcombines theory with ideology. Such schizophrenic theo-ries, which are indelibly stamped by their generative cir-cumstances (historicity), I argue, carry within them theirown limit points. My motivation for rooting the creole con-cept in its productive context and its historicity stems fromthe conviction that creolization does have analytical utilityfor theorizing culture beyond the Caribbean.6 Foreground-ing historicity allows me to sketch out the different histor-ical moments and related discursive political economies(Maurer 2002) that produced creolization theory as ideol-ogy in the Caribbean. Historicity exposes the limit pointsof creolization.7 East Indians, as I illustrate below, are thoselimit points.8

The exclusion of East Indians at the local level does notmean, however, that East Indian exclusion is embedded inthe creole concept when it is deployed globally. My point isthat when local concepts become globally appropriated, theproductive contexts (historicity) that make a theory simul-taneously an ideology get lost in translation. Global appro-priations of creolization largely work on the presumptionthat this theory is a redemptive analytic. If creolization isto be conceptually refined to have general applicability asa theory of culture change, then I believe it is important toacknowledge the various registers at which creolization canwork as theory. The ethnographic example from Trinidadserves to heighten awareness that theories can have differ-ent ontologies, that there can exist, on the one hand, puretheories like habitus or alienation and, on the other hand,schizophrenic theories like nation or creolization, whichconflate theory and ideology. This is, of course, not to denythat all theories are ideological, in that they are socially andhistorically situated, but this perspective recognizes that theideological weight of theories is scalar and not uniform. Itfollows that the significance of the ideological in theory isscalar, as evidenced, for example, in the ontological distinc-tion between a theory of alienation and one of nation. Peopledo not ordinarily talk about their status of alienation fromsocietyit is the business of academics to theorize aboutsuch a condition; by contrast, nation is a familiar term andalso a topic of lay and theoretical discourse. Therefore, thenation concept, I argue, is similar to the creolization con-

cept, in that its ontology signals a state of epistemologicalcollapse (Munasinghe in press). My preoccupation here iswith this schizophrenic kind of theory and its attempts atupward mobility through its claim to pure theory. By an-alyzing how creolization works in relation to East Indians,I deliberately foreground the blind spot of creolization the-ory that compromises this claim, as an initial step towardtheoretical refinement that can allow for new possibilitiesfor a theory of creolization at a different (more abstract)register.9

World culture as creole culture

The turn to the Caribbean for new conceptual tools is largelyanimated by the implosion of paradigms that reverberatedthrough the disciplines in the 1980s, which coincided withspecific economic, aesthetic, sociocultural, and geopoliticaldevelopments. Globalization reigns supreme as the privi-leged signifier of todays flows of capital, commodities, peo-ple, and information, which some argue are markedly dif-ferent from those of other epochs (Appadurai 1996). Thisdynamic state of affairs precipitated by a perpetual trans-gression of boundaries (tangible and virtual) threatens tounravel not only the sociopolitical institutions and subjec-tivities of modernity, such as the nation-state and its uni-tary homogeneous subject, but also received knowledgepractices premised on Enlightenment epistemologies (Puri1999). Across disciplines, theorists charting new conceptualterrain are acutely aware of a disjuncture between disci-plined theoretical concepts and the processes and ethosstructuring the contemporary (empirical) world they aresupposed to decode. Such discord, however, is hardly novelin the Caribbean, where academic orthodoxies regardingconcepts such as family, peasant, religion, race, eth-nicity, capitalism, modernity, and, especially, culturewere seriously challenged by the regions complexity fromthe very inception of their application (see Trouillot 1992).As Antonio Benitez-Rojo observes, in reference to the laborsof scholars trained in postindustrial societies, The new(dis)covererswho come to apply the dogmas and meth-ods that had served them well where they came from,cantsee that these refer only to the realities back home. So theyget into the habit of defining the Caribbean in terms of itsresistance to the different methodologies summoned to in-vestigate it (1996:12).

No doubt, it is this reputed history of resistance to the-oretical orthodoxies that now renders the Caribbean a the-oretical hotbed. My point, however, is that if conventionaldogmas and methods were long challenged by the Caribbeanreality, then the contemporary turn to the Caribbean bysome theorists needs to be situated in a more recent histori-cal moment, when those very dogmas and paradigms are nolonger thought to have relevance to the realities back homebecause home is becoming increasingly like the Caribbean.

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Consider, for example, the condition of cultural mix-ture, the trademark identity of the Caribbean since colonialtimes, which fated the region to pariah status and justifiedcolonial exploitation in an era when nations constituted thedominant political order (Munasinghe 2002). Cultural mix-ture as perhaps a normal and even a positive attribute beganto be considered within academia only relatively recently. AsStewart, articulating the contemporary opinion of many in-terdisciplinary scholars, notes,

Cultural borrowing and interpenetration are today seenas part of the very nature of cultures. To phrase it moreaccurately, syncretism describes the process by whichcultures constitute themselves at any given point intime. Todays hybridization will simply give way to to-morrows hybridization, the form of which will be dic-tated by historico-political events and contingencies.[1999:41]

The aberrations that defined the Caribbean in an ear-lier era are now perceived as normal because the rest ofthe world is becoming more like the Caribbean.10 It is withinsuch broader historical shifts that one needs to contextual-ize efforts of anthropologists such as Stewart (1999), Stewartand Rosalind Shaw (1994), and Fernando Coronil (1995) toreconceptualize older theoretical models of mixture with dif-ferent genealogies, such as syncretism and Fernando Ortizs(1995) concept of transculturation.

The irony, then, is that the Caribbean, which, until re-cently, was largely dismissed by social scientists because itsparticular history and its social and cultural character defiedformal North Atlanticcentered classificatory divides (Mintz1977), is now assuming significance in social-scientific andhumanistic academic fields for those very reasons. Thisseemingly positive valuation of the region is based on twodiscrete but interrelated suppositions: first, a teleology thatlocates the Caribbean (in its moment of conception) as epit-omizing the forces enveloping the whole world and, as such,constituting an almost utopian crystallization of things tocome for the rest of the world;11 second, that regionallyspecific analytical concepts generated to clarify complexlocal sociocultural, historical, and political processes havebroader analytical utility.12

In his 1987 study of Nigerian popular culture, the an-thropologist Ulf Hannerz, who is recognized as an authorityon global culture, identifies the creole concept as an analyticto understand how forces of globalization produced diver-sity through interrelations instead of increasing homogene-ity. Hannerz finds the standard approaches to the study ofcomplex societies inadequate:

It is not that we have no past of attempting to understandlarge-scale cultural systems and their change. It is ratherthat much of this past does not now seem very usable. Socultural studies could well benefit from a fresh start in

this area, one that sees the world as it is in the late twen-tieth century. Scattered here and there in anthropologyrecently, there have been intimation that this world ofmovement and mixture is a world in creolisation; that aconcept of creole culture . . . may be our most promisingroot metaphor. [1987:555]

In a later work, Hannerz develops this idea:

To me . . . creole has connotations of creativity and ofrichness of expression. Creolist concepts also intimatethat there is hope yet for cultural variety. Globalizationneed not be a matter only of far-reaching or completehomogenization; the increasing interconnectedness ofthe world also results in some cultural gain. Again, abit of this and a bit of that is how newness enter theworld. . . . But we can get beyond the merely rhetori-cal uses, to delineate what we call creole culture moreprecisely. . . . What is at the core of the concept of cre-ole culture, I think, is a combination of diversity, inter-connectedness, and innovation, in the context of globalcenter-periphery relationships. [1996:6667]

For Hannerz, creole becomes a way of framing global pro-cesses associated with heterogeneity, interconnections, andcreativity. The attributes of a theory initially formulated toexplain local circumstances now resonate at the global level,making the theory globally relevant.

Creolization has captured the imagination of theoristsseeking new conceptual ground because of the ambiva-lences the term evokesprocesses of fragmentation anddestabilization of pure origins and centers, refusal of syn-thesis or resolution, impurity, mimicry, contradiction, un-evenness, and multiplicity (see Khan 2001). The concept istheoretically seductive because it is emblematic of a creolesensibility that is set against the totalizing or universaliz-ing impulse of North Atlanticcentered thought that seeksresolution or synthesis (Balutansky and Sourieau 1998).13

Consider, for example, some of the features celebratedby theorists of New World cultures and identities: In theFrancophone Caribbean, according to Kathleen Balutan-sky and Marie-Agnes Sourieau, [Edouard] Glissant under-scores the unlimited creative dimension of creolizationits infinite openness, its resilient dynamics, its fluidityalltriumphantly conveyed through the multiple facets of theCreole language (1998:4). Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoi-seau, Raphael Confiant, and Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar, thecontroversial Creolists of Martinique, write, At the heartof our Creoleness we will maintain the modulation of newrules, of illicit blendings. For we know that culture is nevera finished product, but rather the constant dynamic searchfor original questions, new possibilities, more interested inrelating than dominating, in exchanging rather than loot-ing (1990:903). For Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the Barba-dian poet, essayist, critic, and historian, who was one of the

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earliest proponents of the creolization model as formulatedin the West Indies, the condition of mixture or impurity em-bodied by the intermediate colored population was neces-sary for the emergence of a new culture that was native to theCaribbean. Balutansky and Sourieau claim that Brathwaitewas one of the first to posit that the liberating process ofcreolization originates from the unrestricted interaction ofcultures (1998:5).

But, it is precisely this privilege of unrestricted interac-tion that is denied to East Indian culture in the Caribbean inBrathwaites own model of creolization. If creolization as atheoretical concept can afford to include cultural elements atthe global level, what is it about East Indians in the Caribbeanthat makes them such impossible creole or creolizing sub-jects? The answer in part lies in a troubling paradox thatemerges in the local context of Trinidad: The very principlethat defines the creole concepts analytical utility and genius,one might say, for global applicabilityinterculturationistransformed into the less illustrious principle of accultur-ation when applied to East Indian peoples and cultures inTrinidad.

Creole culture as Caribbean culture

In his recent call for a methodological refinement of the cre-olization model, Trouillot characterized processes of cre-olization in the Caribbean as the product of a repeatedmiracle (1998:9). The processes are miraculous becauseAfro-American cultures were born against all odds . . . [they]emerged against the expectations and wishes of plantationowners and their European patrons. They were not meant toexist (Trouillot 1998:10). The emergence of Afro-Americancultural practices is testimony to the resilience and ingenuitywith which those shackled for life created their own imagi-native universe (Geertz 1973) within an oppressive systembent on denying their very humanity. That one never losessight of the particular historical context from which vibrantcultures emerged in this part of the Americas is an endur-ing concern for some theorists of creolization (Mintz 1996),who remain skeptical of current academic trends toward ap-propriating creolization to describe larger global processesof cultural fragmentation. As Mintz argues, What typifiedcreolization was not the fragmentation of culture and thedestruction of the very concept, but the creation and con-struction of culture out of fragmented, violent and disjunctpasts (1996:302, emphasis added). From this perspective,creolization demands that scholars pay attention to a spe-cific historythat of colonialism in the New Worldand itsattendant institutionsthe plantationslavery complex.

Only within the oppressive terms set by the plantationslavery complex can one understand the processes of inter-culturation that generate cultural forms indigenous to theNew World. The analytical prowess of the creolization con-cept lies in its circumvention of the more conventional di-

chotomy posed between acculturation and retention to un-derstand cultural development in situations of contact.14 Atleast in theory, creolization acknowledges the creative ca-pacity of Caribbean peoples to forge new cultural forms thatescape representations of diasporic peoples as mere repro-ducers of traditional forms or as assimilators of dominantcultures. This same principle can be said to apply to lan-guages: Creole languages are understood to be products ofmixtures between European and various African languagesintroduced to plantation societies. Interestingly, creole lin-guistic models, which served later as templates for culturalmodels, appear to operate in a less exclusionary fashion. Per-haps this is because the end points of the linguistic creolecontinuum are not necessarily conflated with Europe andAfrica but, instead, point to different geographic configura-tions of plantation settings. It is more than coincidence thatthe more inclusive theories of cultural creolization analyzingCaribbean culture tend to be those that are heavily deriva-tive of linguistic models such as Drummonds (1980), whichdoes include East Indians. Such inclusivity, however, tendsto be the exception rather than the rule in cultural modelsof creolization.15

Because of the near annihilation of the native Carib andArawak populations, Caribbean cultures have been primar-ily forged by diasporic peoplesEuropeans, Africans, andAsians. Creolization emerged as the key analytical conceptfor examining the processes of cultural adaptation, change,and synthesis within deeply hierarchical relations wherebynew cultural forms were developed in the New World by piec-ing together elements derived from Old World cultural ori-entations. The concept of creolization was derived from theword creole (or its Spanish equivalent, criollo)a combina-tion of the two Spanish words criar (to create, to imagine,or to settle) and colon (a colonist, a founder, or a settler;Brathwaite 1974:10). Although the meaning of creole variesdepending on context (Allen 1998), in general, it refers topeople who are culturally distinct from the Old World pop-ulations of their origin (Bolland 1992:50). In the BritishCaribbean, the term creole refers to a local product whichis the result of a mixture or blending of various ingredientsthat originated in the Old World (Bolland 1992:50).

In Trinidad, Creole, as a proper noun, signifies people ofprimarily African ancestry, whereas those of European an-cestry are signified by an adjectival prefix, as in French Creoleor white Creole. East Indians, in contrast, are not consideredCreole. Creole, then, signified all those of African and Euro-pean ancestry who were born in and committed to the NewWorld. As such, Creole societies were those that emergedout of a colonial arrangement around the plantationslaverycomplexthe result of a complex situation where a colonialpolity reacts, as a whole, to external metropolitan pressuresand at the same time to internal adjustments made neces-sary by the juxtaposition of master and labour, white andnon-white, Europe and colony, [and] European and African

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. . . in a culturally heterogeneous relationship (Brathwaite1974:1011). This anatomy of definition allows one to seehow the semantics of the creole concept, signifying pro-cesses of creation and indigenization, become annexed notonly to a particular historical periodcolonialism and slav-ery in the New Worldbut also to specific diasporic popu-lations. Such foundational empirical features function notonly as the conditions of possibility for the emergence ofcreolization theory but also as constitutive features of thetheory itself. The explanatory power of creolization is limitedprecisely because of the concepts conflation with an empiri-cal field encompassing specific actors located in a particularplace and timethat is, African slaves and European masterswho were intimately bound to each other by deeply hierar-chical relations structuring the plantationslavery complex.

The implications of this conflation become evidentwhen one considers how East Indians are represented whenthey are active participants in a creolized milieu. I drawexamples from different historical periods that engage notonly lay and political perceptions but also those of theoristsof creolization to illustrate the resonance among lay, polit-ical, and academic positions on the question of the cre-olized East Indian. I begin with Alfred Mendess short storyGood Friday at the Church of La Divina Pastora (1932).16

La Divina Pastora (the Divine Shepherdess), a statue of anAmerindian girl who was ordained the patron saint of allCapuchin missions by Pope Pius VI in 1795, was broughtfrom Venezuela to Siparia, Trinidad, by a Roman Catholicpriest during the 19th century (Anthony 1997:190). Becauseof the statues reputed healing powers, the Church of La Div-ina Pastora became a site for pilgrimage and festivities. EastIndians have long been known to worship this saint, accord-ing to some, because of a case of mistaken identity: EastIndians in SipariaHindus and Moslemsclaim La DivinaPastora as their own. For they point out that she is the patronsaint of Indians, without bearing in mind that the Indian inthis case refers to the natives of the Americas, and not topeople from India (Anthony 1997:191). Mistaken identities,as manifested in the appropriation of saints belonging toother religions, were the fortuitous circumstances throughwhich new and vibrant cultures emerged in this part of theworld. Yet consider Mendess reaction to seeing East Indiansin such a creole milieu:

And so we entered the church. There was, I felt, somemistake when we entered. What I saw I could not believe.I still do not believe in what I saw at that moment and allthe succeeding moments. If you entered a lunatic asy-lum and heard no insane scream, no senseless speech,no battering of head against hard partition, you wouldstop and wonder if you really were in a lunatic asylum.If you entered a Christian church and could hear onlythe hullaballoo [sic] of Hindustani chatter, the patter-ing feet of children and the shrieks of babies, you would

wonder if you were in a Christian church. . . . And as forthe evidence of my eyes,it was the most incongruous,most amazing sight I had ever seen. Almost every pew inthe church was filled with East Indians. The aisles werecongested with little groups gesticulating and hotly en-gaged in choruses of conversationon what topics I donot know. Shrewd guesses might suggest the blackeyepea crop, the village feud, or perhaps how Mulemeahwas raped by Sookdeo. [1932:8]

Still in a state of shock and disbelief, Mendes observes an EastIndian family make offerings at the altar, and his attention isdrawn to a large silver crucifix: I look down upon the figureof Christ and play with the fancy of its miraculously risingup and using the cross as a weapon for striking the idolatersout of the house of God (1932:10).

Shaken by what they have just witnessed, as Mendesand his companions leave the church, they notice a blackman lying prone beside a pillar of the church with his face inthe dust (1932:11), which prompts one of the companionsto remark: There lies the only Christian in the place to-day(1932:11). To which Mendes replies, Could I end on a finernote? (1932:11).

I use this story to illustrate two points: first, the extent towhich East Indians themselves were creolized, within barelytwo decades of the end of indenture (1917);17 and, second,the inability of nonEast Indians, like Mendes, to acknowl-edge that East Indians had been and continued to be a vi-tal force in the genesis of new cultural forms indigenous tothe New World. Thus, whereas the black man is accordedthe privilege of conversion, East Indians remain idolaterswho violate a sacred Catholic space. The possibility thatEast Indians could simultaneously be Hindus or Moslemsand worship Catholic saints is beyond Mendess comprehen-sion. It is, indeed, ironic that Mendes, a Trinidadian of Por-tuguese ancestry, should have found this event so disturb-ing. One of Trinidads earliest novelists, Mendes belongedto the white and Creole (black and colored) middle-classintelligentsia of the 1930s, whose members were commit-ted to generating truly West Indian forms of art, particu-larly literature. In their efforts to fashion a national litera-ture that defied bourgeois colonial and Victorian moralities,they turned to the lower-class Creole urban communities,especially to the Afro-Caribbean woman of the yard, forinspiration (Rosenberg 2000). Transgressions of conventioncombined with the innovative disposition to draw from nu-merous cultural coordinates to create forms indigenous tothe New Worldcharacteristics now easily associated withcreolizationprovided the grist for their nationalist mill.It was precisely the creolized behavior of Afro-Trinidadianlower classes that Mendes and his compatriots reveled in andchampioned. Given this, how, then, does one make sense ofMendess bewilderment or, even, disgust when faced withthe spectacle of creolized East Indians?

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Similarly, many East Indians, even today, are quick tocondemn others within their fold who stray from whatare perceived as traditional Indian mores and practices.One Ramdath Jagessar, a stalwart of Hinduism, recently ex-pressed dismay at the behavior of East Indians at Hinduweddings:

When the pundit is performing the ceremony, . . . not toomany people are witnessing it. Some are eating, otherstalking . . . some are listening to the music and some do-ing vulgar dancing. Outside on the road, the young menare standing up by their cars with the trunks open likecrocodiles mouths and pulling out drinks from styro-tex boxes. A lot of them are with stereos and equalizersblasting non-Hindu music and giving the pundit com-petition. Is that Hinduism? A few people dont want tohave meat or alcohol in the wedding house, so they haveit next door and invite their friends quietly to go over.What kind of hypocrisy is this? . . . As soon as the pun-dit leaves you can sometimes see the place cleared andcalypso starts to play, and a full fete breaks out. Some-times they cant wait for the pundit to go and they keepnudging him to get out of the way. [1986: 2021]

Whereas Mendes finds the behavior of East Indiansincomprehensible, Jagessar acknowledges these transgres-sions, but only with dismay because, for him, creolization istantamount to acculturation to Afro-Caribbean values.

The Hindu weddings I witnessed in Cambio (duringfieldwork in 198990), a predominantly East Indian vil-lage situated in the heart of the sugar belt in CentralTrinidad, confirmed Jagessars anxieties. Villagers movedeffortlessly, back and forth, among various culturally de-marcated spacesmovement not conceived here aslinear temporality or space in a literal sense. Rather, thewedding activities of those Sunday afternoons seemed toembody diverse cultural strainsthat is, cultural practicesand beliefs that are ideally (see Drummond 1980) associatedwith East Indians, Creoles, Europeans, or even modernitysimultaneously.18

Hindu brides invariably would wear a Western-type veiland a yellow sari for the initial part of the ceremony andalways changed into an elaborate white wedding gown be-fore departing to the in-laws house. Similarly, grooms wouldchange into Western attire at the end of the marriage cere-mony. Indian classical singing performed by a hired groupor Indian film music blaring from the stereo of the brideshome would often compete with the calypso and U.S. popmusic pounding from the stereos of the cars parked on theroadside by the cane fields. While the women and little chil-dren sat diligently observing the ritual and helping out withthe preparations for the feast, men invariably hung out atthe adjacent snackettes (bars), by the roadside, or in theneighbors house, where liquor was in ample supply. Just asmen had found creative ways to circumvent the prohibition

against consuming alcohol during Hindu ritual events, vil-lagers also managed to get around the taboo of eating fresh(meat, usually duck, chicken, or goat) during these same oc-casions by arranging for a neighbor to prepare taboo foods.Guests, including my husband and me, were periodically in-vited next door for shots of rum and generous portions ofdeliciously bitter (spicy-hot) duck curry. As soon as the of-ficiating pundit left, the dancing began. Men, by now wellintoxicated with rum or beer, usually began wining (a typ-ically Afro-Caribbean style of dancing involving the gyrationof hips that is highly sexually suggestive), and nearly alwaysa few bold women joined the fete. The spectacle of womenwining in publica practice traditionally considered taboobut increasingly common in todays Trinidadwas usuallygreeted with embarrassed shrieks of laughter and amuse-ment, although a few men and women looked on disdain-fully and condemned the vulgarity of the ladies gettingon.

Whereas Jagessar interpreted similar orientations assigns of East Indian acculturation to Afro-Caribbean pat-terns, I suggest that such instances evidence processes of in-terculturation; the simultaneous enactment of multiplicitydrawing from several idealized cultural models that an ab-stracted theoretical model of creolization eloquently speaksto.19 At any given moment, these weddings drew on diversecultural patterns that Trinidadians cognitively associate withidealized cultural spacesthat is, with cosmopolitan, West-ern, Afro-Trinidadian, and Indian norms and values. To re-duce this complexity to a mere instance of acculturation,as Jagessar does, is to deny East Indians the creative dispo-sition to effectively combine diverse cultural strains in theprocess of becoming East Indians in an irrevocably Trinida-dian or even Caribbean fashion that attests to their verycreolization.20

Theorists of the creolization model also eclipse the EastIndian dimension of creolization. With the exception of a fewscholars, such as Drummond (1980), Patricia Mohammed(1988), Daniel Miller (1994), Rhoda Reddock (1996, 1998),and, most recently, Frank Korom (2003), who place East In-dians squarely within the process of creolization, most the-orists either bypass East Indians altogether in discussions ofcreolization or, when they do acknowledge the creolizationof East Indians, they transmute it, as does Jagessar, into aprinciple of acculturation.21 From such a perspective, EastIndians are destined to be either culture bearers or as-similators and only rarely culture creators.22 The reasonsfor this tendency are largely historical, a consequence ofthe semantic configuration of colonial race hierarchies cou-pled with the relatively late entry of East Indians into theCaribbean that functioned to represent East Indians as out-side the process of interculturation.

The work of Brathwaite, the pioneer of the creolizationthesis, exemplifies this tendency. In The Development of Cre-ole Society in Jamaica: 17701820 (1971), he argues that

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the people, mainly from Britain and West Africa, who set-tled, lived, worked and were born in Jamaica, contributedto the formation of a society which developed, . . . its owndistinctive character or culture which, in so far as it wasneither purely British nor West African, was creole (Brath-waite 1971:xiii). This canonic text of creolization barely men-tions East Indians. Because the East Indian population isless significant in Jamaica than, say, Guyana or Trinidad,one might justify such a position. Yet the elevation of Brath-waites theory to canon empowers his particular Jamaica tometonymize the West Indies, in general. The dedication ofa double issue of the journal Caribbean Quarterly in 1998to a collection of essays in honor of Brathwaite, entitledKonversations in Kreole, attests to the continued signif-icance and vitality of the creole-society thesis in the region,and, as the guest editors of the issue assert, Today, approx-imately twenty-six years after its public launching, KamauBrathwaites creole-society model is generally accepted asthe leading interpretation of Caribbean society (Shepherdand Richards 1998:vii). In this sense, the absence of East In-dians from the creole-society thesis is significant.

That Brathwaite identifies the period between 1770 and1820 as the formative period of creolization precludes hisconsideration of East Indians, for the systematic entry ofEast Indians to the Caribbean did not begin until 1845. Thelate entry of East Indians to the Caribbean has in part con-tributed to their marginalization in theories of creolization.Even in their canonic methodological treatise on creoliza-tion, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-AmericanPast: A Caribbean Perspective (1976), Mintz and RichardPrice barely factor in East Indians. For Mintz and Price, thebaseline that informs, to this day, the cultural practicesand institutional forms of Afro-American experience wasfirst formulated during the initial period of capture, enslave-ment, and transport (the Middle Passage). Thus, many arguethat creolization was well underway by the time East Indiansarrived in the Caribbean. Although East Indians are under-stood to have introduced a novel element to Creole societies,they are not usually perceived as an integral part of thesesocieties.

The late entry argument is both intuitively and logi-cally compelling. Therefore, the foundational assumptionsof creolization that exclude the East Indian from a late en-try perspective are rarely questioned. For example, creoliza-tion as a theory is not necessarily limited to a specific histor-ical period. The critical insights of creolization regarding theworkings of culturesprocesses of interculturation, multi-plicity, culture creation, and so onare not circumscribed by(an empirically specific) time or space. Although it is impor-tant to factor in the significance of foundational momentsof culture creation for any analysis of particular cultural andsocial formations, it does not necessarily follow that founda-tional actors have exclusive rights to the creolization processitself. Thus, acknowledging the tremendous work of culture

creation that took place among the various African groupsand their European masters in their efforts to establish com-municative mediums and other novel symbolic and materialworlds during the initial years of enslavement does not meanthat the imaginative work and behaviors of later groups can-not be illuminated through the analytics of creolization aswell.23 That some scholars, such as Brathwaite, continue toinsist that the true inheritors of creolization are the founda-tional actors of the creolization drama buttresses my largerargument regarding the peculiar ontology of this theory asa curious mix of ideology (because it remains embedded inthe empirical) and theoretical abstraction.

In a later work, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diver-sity and Integration in the Caribbean (1974), Brathwaite doessituate East Indians vis-a`-vis creolization, but, significantly,the entry of East Indians after emancipation, in his view,changes the trajectory of Creole society into a plural one.24

Plural societies, by definition, were those that were charac-terized by an absence of shared norms among the diverseancestral groups constituting Creole societies (Smith 1965)and that were believed to be held together by the powerexerted by a privileged minoritywhites. As a critical re-sponse to the plural-society thesis, the creolization modelargued that a common colonial and creole experience isshared among the various divisions, even if that experienceis variously interpreted (Brathwaite 1974:25) by the groupsexpressing diverse orientationsEuropean, Euro-creole,Afro-creole (or folk), and creo-creole or West Indian. ThatBrathwaite, a staunch proponent of the creolization modelshould associate the advent of plural society with the arrivalof East Indians is revealing. If creolization was a productof the nondeliberate processes of interculturation that tookplace between Africans and Europeans within hierarchicalstructures that put a premium on the conscious adoptionof European norms and practices, why should the center ofgravity have shifted from creolization to fragmentation withthe entry of East Indians?

Brathwaite sees acculturation and interculturation asstructuring principles for creolization: the former refer-ring, to the process of absorption of one culture by an-other; the latter to a more reciprocal activity, a process ofintermixture and enrichment, each to each (1974:11). In-terculturation is also less deliberate, a process that is largelyunplanned and unstructured, one might say organic(Brathwaite 1974:6), in which black influences white as muchas white influences black. The dual processes of accultur-ation and interculturation are constitutive of the creativeambivalence characterizing the behavior of Caribbean peo-ples. Creative ambivalence is also an inescapable fact of cre-olization, which involves both imitation or mimicry (accul-turation) and native creation (indigenization). Brathwaitesays, Our real/apparent imitation involves at the same timea significant element of creativity, while our creativity in turninvolves a significant element of imitation (1974:160). Thus,

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acculturation, or mimicry, and interculturation, or indige-nization, are not discrete processes but, rather, each processnecessarily calls on the other. Such dialectics, in turn, struc-ture the creative genius of Caribbean peoples.

Yet Brathwaites astute remarks on creolization takeon a different veneer in his discussion of East Indians.During the colonial period, he argues, both subordinatedgroups, Afro-Caribbean and East Indian, aspired to greattraditionsbut the East Indian looked to India whereasthe Afro-Caribbean looked to Europe, thereby becoming anAfro-Saxon. These different orientations, in turn, shapedsubsequent cultural developments of the respective groups.The Afro-Saxon imitates, not modernizes, because, un-like the Indian, he has no core culture to adapt from. Yetthe Indians modernization . . . is taking place largely in anendogamous and exclusive manner; in- rather than inter-culturation, so that despite his apparent disadvantages, itis the Caribbean black who has been most innovative andradical (Brathwaite 1974:54).

In short, East Indians orientation toward India onlyreinscribes their exclusiveness; even when they modern-ize, they selectively appropriate modern strains that merelysupplement their core culture. The degree of consciousvolition imputed to East Indian selections of modern traitsmilitates against the recognition of the unstructured, or-ganic flows earlier associated with interculturation. In-deed, according to Brathwaite, East Indians are not a part ofthe processes of interculturation. Although they may adapt,they adapt within their discrete realm and, therefore, remainexclusive; in contrast, it is the Afro-Saxon who epitomizesinterculturation and emerges as the cultural innovator parexcellence. If the dialectic between acculturation and inter-culturation is what produces the cultural ambivalence thatattests to the creative capacity to indigenize, then Brath-waites refusal to encompass East Indians within the inter-culturation process not only strips this group of its potentialfor creative generation of indigenous forms but also posi-tions it outside creolization proper.

The idea that East Indians possessed a core culture thatAfricans lacked is rooted in colonial caricatures of the twosubordinated ancestral groups. In a suggestive article on thesemantics of race categories in colonial Trinidad, Daniel Se-gal (1993) argued that East Indian exclusion from Creole ornative status was partly premised on the image of East Indi-ans as unmixables. This image, in turn, was a precipitate ofthe different principles of subordination to which Africansand East Indians were subjected. According to Segal, theseprinciples propagated

(1) an image of Africans as persons lacking an ances-tral civilization, who, through mixing . . . acquiredrespectability [and] could become partially whiteand inchoately West Indian; and (2) an image of AsianIndians as persons so possessed of an inferior, ances-

tral civilization that they necessarily remained East(and not West) Indians, regardless of their social entan-glements in Trinidad. [1989:76]25

Although plenty of sources attest to East Indians mixingwith other ancestral groups, this mixing was denied sym-bolic recognition either in terms of lexical markers account-ing for different portions of East Indian mixture with othergroups or of East Indian inclusion in the color spectrumprivileges that were extended to Africans and Europeans. Ifmixing defined Creole, and if Creole, in turn, defined nativestatus in the Caribbean (Segal 1993; see also Allen 1998:3742), the denial of symbolic recognition of East Indian mixingeffectively defined East Indians not only as outsiders to theNew World but also as peripheral to the creolization process.In fact, Segal argues that the terms East Indian and Creoledeveloped as mutually exclusive categories of identificationin Trinidad.

I, too, might appear to the reader to have conflated levelsof analysisthat is, the process of creolization as theoreticalmodel with an empirical definition of who is considered Cre-ole. My apparent slip, however, is a deliberate strategy to un-earth the empirical premises, or the ontology, of creolizationto illustrate that the very ontology of the creolization modelis ultimately premised on who can be considered Creole.

Indeed, disentangling the concept as noun from theconcept as theory is impossible because the concept existsin this particular ethnographic context in a state of episte-mological collapse (Munasinghe in press). This epistemo-logical collapse is a consequence of the term creole operat-ing in three discursive modesthe lay, the academic, andthe politicaland these modes collapsing in on each otherat different historical moments. In the ethnographic sec-tion above, I attempted to track how the term has circu-lated within Trinidads symbolic economy to demonstratethe resonance of meaning at these various discursive levelsof Trinidads racial doxa. This doxa imprinted the African asindigenous to the New World landscape just as it expelledthe Indian from it.

Creole culture as national culture

Creole, unlike a strictly theoretical formulation like habi-tus, is a concept that is familiar and has circulated widelyand for many centuries in the New World among manydiscursive levelsthe lay, political, and, more recently, theacademic. But this circulation at different discursive regis-ters does not necessarily imply epistemological equivalenceamong these registers. In this ethnographic context, theoryhas collapsed into the empirical and thereby compromisedits own explanatory power. It is precisely an inquiry into thecircumstancesthat is, an analysis of the broader discur-sive political economythat produced such a collapse thatI briefly pursue here.

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To evidence the entanglement of lay, political, and aca-demic meanings of creole, one need only historicize andcontextualize the creolization model. As Mimi Sheller notes,Caribbean intellectuals such as Brathwaite (creolization),Ortiz (transculturation), and Glissant (transversality), in-vented theoretical terms to craft powerful tools for intel-lectual critique of Western colonialism and imperialism,tools appropriate to a specific context and grounded inCaribbean realities (2003:188). Specifically, with respect tothe British Caribbean, the works of Brathwaite and othercreolization theorists were efforts by members of the WestIndian middle-class intelligentsia to provide models of theirsocieties that dovetailed with the larger political struggle ofnation-building.26 Although I cannot go into this aspect atlength here, the explicit political agenda of these theoristsneeds to be acknowledged. To counter the idea that cul-tural identity was somehow problematic for Caribbean peo-ples, West Indian scholars, such as Brathwaite, put forwardthe Creole society thesis. According to Nigel Bolland, thismodel enhanced the

emerging Caribbean nationalism of the third quarter ofthe twentieth century. More specifically, the cultural andpopulist aspects of the creole society viewpoint, with itsemphasis upon the origins of a distinctive common cul-ture as a basis for national unity, constitutes the ideologyof a particular social segment, namely a middle-classintelligentsia that seeks a leading role in an integrated,newly independent society. The creole society thesis,then, is a significant ideological moment in the decolo-nization process of the Caribbean. [1992:53]

The formulation of a theoretical model to forward thecause of independence in the post-1960s British Caribbeanmeant that the model itself was substantially influenced bythe larger political project. In Trinidad, decolonization wenthand in hand with the positive reevaluation of formerly de-spised Afro-Creole lower-class cultural forms, such as steelband and carnival (Stuempfle 1995; van Koningsbruggen1997). Given this reevaluation, the task for theorists of cre-olization was to recenter formerly marginalized populationsin their critique of colonialism along the lines already an-ticipated by Mendes and his cohort in an earlier periodthrough inclusion of lower-class Afro-Creole cultural forms.The politics informing the creolization model, then, func-tioned to highlight the role of those with African ances-try (Bolland 1992; Braithwaite 1954; Munasinghe 2001; Safa1987). The reserved attitude of many East Indians towardindependence and their leaders increasing dependence onIndia (after the 1940s) for cultural inspiration only servedto alienate them from all those forces collaborating towardbuilding an explicitly anticolonialist nationalist project. Thetheory of creolization, which emerged during this highly ide-ologically charged historical moment, was indelibly markedby the struggles of the period. The empirical context that

informed its very formulation remains formidable, in thatcreolization as theory seems to factor in only those who areconsidered Creole in the New World, specifically, those Cre-oles who are ascribed the status of culture creators parexcellencelower-class Afro-Creoles.27

I suggest that empirical(ly specific) definitions of Cre-ole have seeped into the theoretical(ly abstract) model ofcreolization and thereby imposed limits on the models ex-planatory power. At least in theory, there is no reason whythe crucial insights developed in the creolization model can-not be applied to East Indian cultural developments in theNew World, as a few scholars have already begun to do. But,for the most part, the ideological move to limit Creole statusto African and European elements has, in effect, hinderedrecognition of East Indian practices as creolized practicesin a strictly theoretical sense (without meaning accultura-tion to Afro-Caribbean patterns). From this perspective, thechoice open to East Indians in the New World is either asretainers of traditional pure culture or as imitators of im-pure Afro-Caribbean culture because creole remains thedominant analytic for interpreting cultural change in theCaribbean.

The ideological dimension of this supreme symbol ofthe Caribbean may have operated to hinder recognition ofEast Indians as creators of novel cultural forms indigenousto the New World. It may partly explain why even academicanalyses of the Indo-Caribbean experience remained for solong mired in analytical debates having to do with culturalretention and acculturation. Only recently has an excitingliterature emerged that emphasizes the creative capacity ofIndo-Caribbean peoples. Creolizations resistance to East In-dians could also be a consequence of its very theoreticalconditions of possibility.28 That is, by founding its own the-oretical premises on a normative condition constituted ofpure types, creolization defines itself as a state of excep-tion. It is the recognition of the state of exception (impurity)at all registers (lay, political, and academic) that enables theEast Indian representing purity to be excluded within thissymbolic economy.

In the ethnographic section above, I attempted to il-lustrate that the epistemological collapse of the empiricalfield (noun = Afro-Trinidadians = Creoles) into the theoret-ical concept (creolization) and the ideological deploymentof this particular articulation of Creole as national ideologyhas functioned not only to define East Indian as outside thenation of Trinidad but also has produced the East Indianfigure in lay, political, and (most) academic discourses asculture bearer or assimilator but rarely as creator. Althoughthe creolization model has provided powerful analytical in-sights into the dynamics of cultural change and synthesisin deeply hierarchical and heterogeneous social polities, thecritical recognition of this theoretical exclusion insists thatthe creolization concept be refined in relation to its localapplications after such recognition has taken place. This is

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because creolization as a theory emerged out of a particularhistory to address historically specific social and culturalformations. The local story makes tenuous and even ironiccreolization theorys claims to global theory. By illustratingthat creolization is hardly redemptive for some Caribbeans(by defining them as not suitable for indigenization becausethey lack the capacity for interculturation and culture cre-ation), the local story undermines a cardinal presumptionon which creolization theory has earned its distinction as aglobal theory of cultureits infinite capacity for inclusivitywithout insisting on closure.

I suggest that the powerful analytical insights providedby the theoretical model of creolization have tremendouspotential for illuminating not only Indo-Caribbean cul-tural productions but also cultural processes beyond theCaribbean. To realize this potential, however, one first needsto recognize the different registers of creolization, which canafford radical possibilities as well as exclusionary ideologies.If global theorists have found in creole a redemptive an-alytic, it is because they are not cognizant of the local pro-ductive context of the theoretical concept. As Sheller asksso poignantly, What gets left behind (and what gets taken)when Caribbean theoriesand theoriststravel on the highseas of global culture?(2003:195). In the ethnographic partof this article, I argue that East Indians get left behind whencreole becomes canonized both locally and globally, be-cause at both levels creolization theory operates as fetishwhere the economicsocialpolitical context that producedcreole as academic theory gets effaced. In this way, the em-pirical context that seeped into the theoryCreole as nounis rendered opaque. But this is the local blind spot. The chal-lenge for global theorists is not that this locally specific blindspot be evidenced globally but that they be aware of thepeculiar ontology of theoretical concepts such as creoliza-tion that have the potential to work at different registersbecause of their specific historicity. As I have argued else-where for the concept of nation (Munasinghe in press),certain theories, because of their ideological investments,exist in a schizophrenic state, straddling both ideology andtheory; in these cases, the claims to theory veil the biases ofinvestments in ideology. As I have illustrated in Trinidad, atthis hybrid register of ideology-cum-theory, creolization hasthe potential to exclude when it functions as theory.

Indeed, one might blame historicity for those very at-tributes of creolization that seem to militate against a moreinclusive theory about culture change. For example, con-sider two fundamental features of creolization theory thatseem germane to its New World contextcreole as narrativeof indigeneity and the creole continuum. One may need toaddress the question of whether any narrative of indigeniza-tion can be anything but exclusionary. One may also need torethink the continuum, given that this continuum can haveonly two end points. The assumptions of temporality in rela-tion to culture creation animating the late entry argument

also need to be interrogated. I point to these attributes ofcreolization only because they weigh in on the ideology sideof the schizophrenic theory that limits its applicability. In-digeneity, the continuum, inheritors versus latecomers areall suitable preliminary sites for a critical refinement of cre-olization theory on a more abstract register to harness itsmost penetrating analytical insights without reproducing itsblind spots. To do this, however, scholars first need to un-derstand creolization theorys potential to operate at thesedifferent analytical registers.

There is a certain irony in creolization being hailed as aglobal theory of culture because of its disposition for multi-plicities when it has, for the most part, failed to acknowledgeIndo-Caribbean cultures within the frame of intercultura-tion and culture creation. I call for the return to the localnot because creolization belongs only there but to releasecreolization from the local as a global analytic. I end by sug-gesting that a productive site for a refinement of creolizationtheory might lie in a sustained critical engagement with itsvery blind spotIndo-Caribbean peoples and their cul-tural forms.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank the following friendsand colleagues for their valuable contributions to this article: Re-becca Bryant, David Ethridge, Carla Freeman, Adam McKweon, andNatalie Melas. I owe a special thanks to Steven Sangren, who helpedclarify some key theoretical aspects of the argument. I would alsolike to thank Annelise Riles, Sandhya Shukla, Ann Gold, Salah Has-san, and Charles R. Venator Santiago for giving me an opportu-nity to present different versions of this argument at the followingvenues: the CornellSt. Andrews University Knowledge Exchangeconference, the Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University,the South Asia Seminar Series at Syracuse University, the AfricanaColloquium at Cornell University, and the Caribbean Race and Mi-gration Lecture Series at Ithaca College. I benefited tremendouslyfrom the lively engagement with each audience. I would also liketo thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and LindaForman for her superb editorial work. Finally, I am most grateful toVirginia Dominguez for her sharp and deep engagement with mywork and for providing this marvelous opportunity for a spiritedintellectual dialogue.

1. In his 1977 survey of North American anthropological contri-butions to Caribbean studies, Sidney Mintz observes,

It bears note that, for most of our history as a discipline, theCaribbean region was not considered properly anthropo-logical by North American anthropologists. While prepar-ing this report, I asked an assistant to look over the first 42volumes of the American Anthropologist, going up to 1940.. . . In those first 42 volumes, . . . [of what] was until recentlythe only official periodical publication of the Association,there appeared . . . about 15 book reviews of works deal-ing with the Caribbean; 21 articles on the archaeology andphysical anthropology of the region; and six articles thatwere in part or wholly cultural-anthropological in char-acter. [1977:68]

Mintz notes a significant increase in North American anthropo-logical scholarship on the Caribbean after World War II. (See Miyoshi

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and Harootunian 2002 for an analysis of the political landscape thatmotivated area-specific knowledge during this period and Sheller2003 for a specific discussion on the Caribbean as region.) My point isthat, even in 1977, the Caribbean was gaining significance as an ob-ject of knowledge in itself and not necessarily as a site that harboreduniversal lessons for humanists and social scientists, in general.

2. The term creole was first applied in the Antilles in 1590 by Josede Costa in his Historia Natural to describe those born of Spanishparents in the Indies (Mintz 1996:301).

Evidencing its translocal popularity today, as I write this article,a collection of essays on theory tentatively entitled Creolization ofTheory and edited by a scholar in comparative literature is in prepa-ration. Creolization seems to have attained the heights of metathe-ory. For excellent critical accounts of the global consumptionof Caribbean creolization theory, see Sheller 2003:ch. 6 and Khan2001.

3. Creolization denotes the dynamic processual dimension of thetheoretical formulation of the creole concept. When Creole is usedas a noun to signify a person or an ethnic group (namely, those ofmixed African and European ancestry who visibly display Africanancestry, as the term is commonly used in Trinidad), I capitalize theC. To denote a theoretical formulation (as opposed to an empiricalcategory), as in the creole concept or creolization, I use the lowercase c.

4. Between 1834 and 1917, 426,623 indentured laborers werebrought from India to labor in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean(Look Lai 1993:19). They were essentially brought to compete withthe labor of the newly freed former slave populationthis was es-pecially the case in colonies such as Trinidad and Guyana. Many ofthe indentures did not return to India, as was the initial plan, and insome countries today, such as Trinidad, Guyana, and Surinam, theirdescendants constitute a substantial part of the population.

The 1990 population of Trinidad, broke down according to eth-nicity as follows: African descent, 39.6 percent; Indian descent, 40.3percent; white, 0.6 percent; Chinese, 0.4 percent; mixed, 18.4 per-cent; other, 0.2 percent; and not stated, 0.4 percent (Central Statis-tical Office 1997).

A note on terminology. In most of my other work, I referto people claiming Indian descent in the Caribbean as Indo-Caribbean or, when specifically referring to natives of Trinidad, asIndo-Trinidadians. Here, however, I have opted to use more old-fashioned terminology, which connotes outsider status, for spe-cific reasons. Elsewhere (Munasinghe 1997, 2001), I have analyzedhow the category creole developed during and after the colonialperiod in opposition to the category East Indian (see also Segal1993). Thus, semantically speaking, creole has relational significanceto East Indian in the way I use it here. East Indian also conveys theoutsider status attributed to this group through the symbolic workof the creole category, as I go on to illustrate. The use of academi-cally and politically more current and correct terminology in thisinstance would not only confuse the reader but also compromisethe analysis.

5. By calling attention to a specific limitation of this theoret-ical model, my efforts complement those of other scholars whohave recently called for greater refinement of the creolizationmodel through their critical engagement with it (see Arnold 1998;Bolland 1992; Burton 1997; Khan 2001; Mintz 1996; Mohammed1988; Price 2001; Puri 1999, 2004; Trouillot 1998). In particular, myargument extends lines of analysis anticipated by Gregg 1998; Khan2001; Korom 2003; Mohammed 1988; Reddock 1996, 1998; and Puri1999, 2004, which also interrogate the creolization model with re-spect to its application to East Indians.

6. I find Michel-Rolph Trouillots (1995) conceptualization of his-toricity, as one that straddles the tension between the two irreduciblenodal points of what happened (history) and what is said to have

happened (knowledge), particularly useful here given the biases ofthis article, which stress the historicity of knowledge production.See also Scott 1991 and Price 2001 for a debate on the epistemolog-ical issues at stake in the writing of history in contradistinction todiscourses about the past.

7. The limit points referenced in this article are specific to thecultural (and not the linguistic) creolization model, given that in theAnglophone Caribbean it was the cultural creolization model thatwas elevated to national symbol.

8. East Indians in Trinidad, for the most part, do not desire entryinto Creole status and, in fact, vehemently insist on their differencefrom Creoles. Thus, East Indians, too, are complicit in maintainingthis distinction. My point, however, is not to lay blame on eitherpopulation but, rather, to draw attention to symbolic structuresof identification that make it impossible for East Indians to evenimagine that they may be Creoles. East Indians insistence on theirnon-Creole status provokes an inquiry into the broader productivecontext of creole that makes such imaginings impossible.

9. See Charles Stewarts (1999) fine genealogical analysis of theconcept of syncretism (yet another term that signifies cultural and,more specifically, religious mixture). Stewart finds such genealogiesto be analytically instructive because if this past [even if objection-able] can be understood, then we are in a position to consciouslyreappropriate syncretism and set the ethnographic study of culturalmixture on new tracks (1999:40).

10. At this juncture, I find it appropriate to point the reader to LeeDrummonds (1980) brilliant article in which he uses Derek Bick-ertons linguistic model of the creole continuum to analyze ethnicdynamics in Guyana. This piece is appealing for many reasons, buttwo, in particular, are exemplary: First, unlike most other theorists,who recognized the normalcy and, therefore, the broader rele-vance of the Caribbean for theorizations of culture, in general, afterthey discovered that so-called homogeneous cultures were, in fact,heterogeneous, Drummond, as early as 1980 and on the basis ofhis ethnographic work in Guyana, insisted that all cultures were in-tersystemic (as opposed to constituting discrete systems) and weretherefore creole in their organic makeup. In this way, he critically en-gaged the discourse of Caribbean exceptionalism to question gen-eral academic orthodoxies and privileged the ontology of the periph-ery in its own right. For the next generation of scholars (e.g., WestIndian diasporan scholars such as Paul Gilroy [1993] and Stuart Hall[1990] and theorists of global culture such as Hannerz [1987] andJames Clifford [1997]; see Sheller 2003), at the risk of sounding un-fair, one could make the charge that the Caribbean became valuedonly with the recognition that first the centers (Gilroys Britain) andlater the more conventional peripheries (Hannerzs Nigeria) cameto explicitly resemble the aberrant peripheries. As an aberrant pe-riphery, then, the Caribbean gained significance only in referenceto the value it held for other places. Second, Drummond is one ofthe few scholars of creolization who integrated East Indians into histheorizations of the dynamics governing creole culture prior to the1990s.

11. I am grateful to Natalie Melas for prodding me to think in termsof a contrast between narratives of origin and utopia in consideringhow theorists generally cast the trajectories of Caribbean and non-Caribbean societies, respectively, when the Caribbean is used asmetonym for the world.

12. I am certainly by no means the first to make this observation.See, especially, Khan 2001, Mintz 1996, Sheller 2003, Trouillot 1998,and Yelvington 2001. Puri (1999, 2004), too, makes a similar point,but her critique extends to theories of hybridity that emphasize itspoetics rather than its politics.

13. Although I am aware of the wide range of theoretical inter-pretations of the creole concept across disciplines and regions, ifI have flattened divergences it is through the conviction that, at a

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certain level of generality, one can legitimately identify some defin-ing principles of the concept. These features are symptomatic of ashared epistemology that is ideologically saturated because of theconcepts historicity. For a succinct, regionally specific elucidationof this complex term (which was and continues to be used in con-tradictory ways within various parts of the Caribbean), see Allen1998.

14. Given the diverse meanings conveyed by the terms creole andcreolization in various parts of the Americas, the discussion in thissection of the article is strictly limited to the Anglophone Caribbean,given that my purpose here is to ground the concept historically andcontextually.

15. There is a vast literature on linguistic models of creolization,and much of this linguistic theory has informed cultural modelsof creolization, such as that of Hannerz. Given the specific ethno-graphic question I address in this article, how the concept creole istransformed into a nationalist narrative in relation to East Indiansin Trinidad, I focus primarily on the cultural creolization models.Although there are, indeed, dialogues between linguistic and cul-tural models (exemplified best by Drummond 1980 and, more re-cently, Korom 2003 in their attempts to analyze East Indian culturalpractices through the creole analytic), I see these works largely asexceptions to the general argument I present here about the formerBritish Caribbean and how creole as culture has been theorized inthis region. With respect to the cultural model of creolization, thereare two distinct but interrelated genealogies. The Mintz and Pricemodel of 1976 struck a balanced middle ground between the twoextreme positions regarding the state of Afro-American cultureone that stressed acculturation to Euro-American norms and onethat stressed African survivals. See Burton 1997; Mintz and Price1976, 1992; and Price 2001. Brathwaites model, which was formu-lated in his influential The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica:17711820 (1971) and that served as a template for local discoursesaround creolization, can be situated in a different historical con-text that was directly linked to nation-building in the Caribbean,specifically, the West Indies. Although the political and ideologicalembeddedness of both models is evident, I am more interested inthe second genealogy for the purposes of this discussion. Never-theless, recognizing that the historicity of both models privilegesthe place of Africa and Europe but not necessarily that of India isimportant.

16. See also Leah Rosenbergs (2000:256258) fine and nuancedanalysis of this story.

17. My characterization of East Indians as creolized is premisedon the (abstract) theoretical model of creolization as opposed tothe conventional usage that denotes acculturation to Afro-Creoleforms.

18. This observation dovetails with Trouillots remarks on howeasily Caribbean peoples practices embody multiplicity. In his mas-terful survey of anthropological studies on the Caribbean, he says,The systematicity with which people maintain multiplicity is preva-lent enough for observers to phrase it not in terms of movementbetween roles of types but in terms of types or roles that includemovement (Trouillot 1992:33).

19. For an excellent ethnographic analysis of how Guyanese peo-ples behavior can be interpreted through a linguistic model of theCreole continuum that emphasizes the simultaneous enactment ofmultiplicity while drawing on various idealized pure cultures, seeDrummond 1980. See also Miller 1994 for an analysis that empha-sizes East Indian creativity.

20. For a more developed argument on the creolized East Indian,see Munasinghe 2001:ch. 6. My intention in this article is not to putforward an alternative theory of creolization but merely to gesturetoward a more abstract theory, which I begin fleshing out in thatbook.

21. Although Daniel Miller does not explicitly use the concept ofcreolization to analyze East Indian behavior, his characterizationand analysis of East Indian practices, I would argue, are implicitlyframed by this concept as understood in its strictly (abstract) theo-retical sense.

22. In recent years, a rich literature has emerged that emphasizesthe cultural creativity of East Indians (e.g., Manuel 2000; Myers 1998;Vertovec 1992; among others), but these works do not specificallyanalyze East Indian cultural innovation through the creole concept.Thus, the question remains: If creole is the primary analytic tounderstand Afro-Caribbean cultural creation, why is it not equallysignificant for the analysis of Indo-Caribbean forms? The answer isintimately linked to my central question regarding the transforma-tion of interculturation to acculturation when it comes to the EastIndian.

23. I am grateful to a reviewer for pointing out that intercultura-tion was taking place as much among different groups of Africans asbetween Africans and Europeans, especially during the early period.

24. See also Puri 1999, which makes a similar observation.25. See Munasinghe 1997, in which I anchor the image of the

culturally saturated East Indian and the culturally naked Africanin the broader European race and Orientalist discourses of the 19thcentury that constituted the ideological infrastructure for a politicaleconomy driven by the needs of imperialist expansionnamely,different (and differentially raced) forms of servile and controllablelabor.

26. See Bolland 1992 and Munasinghe 2001 for an extensive anal-ysis of the relationship between the creolization model and nation-building in the West Indies and, more specifically, in Trinidad.

27. Despite the symbolic appropriation of lower-class creole cul-tural forms, creole nationalisms in the Anglophone Caribbean werelargely led by and propagated the interests of the middle classes dur-ing the early period of independence (see, e.g., Oxaal 1968; Thomas2004).

28. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing to thistheoretical condition of possibility.

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accepted April 7, 2006final version submitted April 13, 2006

Viranjini MunasingheDepartments of Anthropology and Asian American StudiesCornell University205 McGraw HallIthaca, NY 14853vpm1@cornell.edu

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