UC Irvine

This project seeks to define and interrogate the concept of creole modernism through a reading of works by creole-identified writers from the early twentieth century across the Francophone and Anglophone transatlantic. Creole is a term that comes from the history of colonialism and slavery, originally meaning a person born in the Americas. Various definitions of creole provide a racial classification, but these definitions are inconsistent and contradictory, demonstrating that evocations of the creole index racialization without identifying a specific racial identity. By tracing the figure of the creole as a literary representation, from a more traditional regionalism to a modernist ambiguity, I examine how the creole is defined through the overdetermination of racial significations, and thus it is always racialized. I consider examples of creolization in the sites of New Orleans, the French Antilles, Dominica, and Jamaica, as well as the ways in which these spaces extend into the colonial metropoles of Paris and London. My readings of creole modernism include Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction, Drasta Houël’s poetry, Suzanne Lacascade’s novel Claire-Solange, âme africaine, Jean Rhys’ novel Voyage in the Dark and her short fiction, and Claude McKay’s Jamaican poetry, short fiction, and his novel Banana Bottom. In assessing the representational and ideological function of the creole figure across the transatlantic, I employ a methodological “creolization of theory,” engaging in a dialogue between scholars in feminism and queer studies, postcolonial studies, Black studies and critical race theory, and modernist studies. I argue that the creole is not only fundamental to the structure of modernism as a site of rupture, ambiguity, and forced innovation, but also that representations of the creole signify racialized femininity and are rendered categorically queer through the projections of deviant sexuality and feminized excess implied in the creole’s formation. As a figure engendered through the historical hauntings of colonization and slavery, the creole occupies an ambivalent relation to structures of imperial and national power. It is a figure of fluidity and mobility that demonstrates the porosity of categories and transgresses geographical borders. While not always presenting a revolutionary challenge to the imperial system, the creole nevertheless undermines and resists the stability of classificatory logics.