Questioning Creole Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean culture

In his seminal work, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, Kamau Brathwaite attempted to expose the essential “Jamaican” nature of the identity that developed at the interstices between the cultures of Europe and Africa. He took the concept of Creole society beyond mere description by articulating s clear and poetically engaging intellectual model of the process of cultural change that defines, and distinguishes, Creole societies – a process which he termed “creolisation”. 

The publication of this path-breaking work has given rise to vigorous polemics among scholars who have expanded the debate beyond the Caribbean. Indeed, the creolisation discourse has been widely incorporated into scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, and resonates in diverse fields of Atlantic World Studies, spreading beyond the confines of the discipline of history.