Attempts to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as 'physiological things' contextualized in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation,seeks to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects.
Arion explores various issues related to Caribbean culture and what he calls 'Caribbeanness,' a stage which he feels the whole region has not reached yet
This text was first published in French under the title of Tloge de la creolite by Editions Gallimard in 1989. "Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles. This will be for us an interior attitude-better, a vigilance, or even better, a sort of mental envelope in the middle of which our world will be built in full consciousness of the outer world. These words we are communicating to you do not stem from theory, nor do they stem from any learned principles. They are, rather, akin to testimony. They proceed from a sterile experience which we have known before committing ourselves to reactivate our creative potential, and to set in motion the expression of what we are." (the authors)
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
First published in 1961. Original from the University of California., 468 p, Jamaica Talk is a thorough study of the English spoken in Jamaica and, although intended for the general educated reader rather than the linguistic specialist, has a foundation of sound scholarship.
