Indigenization and Post-Independence Caribbean Literature

Abstract

Abstract Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean literary encounters highlight in Caribbean literature a collective turn towards Creole Indigenization after much of the Caribbean region celebrated their independence from a colonial power. Indigenization is often obscured by the dominant studies of creolization, syncretism, and hybridity. Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite defines Indigenization as a form of cultural and aesthetic autonomy that takes after the example of the creative resistance of Afro-Caribbean peasantry to the plantation system (‘Timehri’ 44). Indigenization characterizes a complex interplay between literary self-authorship, the legacies of colonial genocide and plantation slavery, and the ethnological and nationalist politics surrounding the ancestral past. This chapter examines this entanglement through changing representations of the concept from the beginnings of formal decolonization in 1962 to the end of the twentieth century as it passes from pursuit into entanglement, rupture, disavowal, and finally ironic repetition. It refers to works by Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Wynter, and Erna Brodber. The chapter also demonstrates that these writers define Indigenisation against the example of Indigenous peoples in Oceania, joining what Quito Swan calls a ‘global black freedom tradition of struggle, power, and self-determination’ (Pauulu’s Diaspora 6).