Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film

A study of how Caribbean immigrants to France and the UK from 1948–1998 and their descendants portray their metropolitan identities in literature and film.

Creolizing the Metropole is a comparative study of postwar West Indian migration to the former colonial capitals of Paris and London. It studies the effects of this population shift on national and cultural identity and traces the postcolonial Caribbean experience through analyses of the concepts of identity and diaspora. Through close readings of selected literary works and film, H. Adlai Murdoch explores the ways in which these immigrants and their descendants represented their metropolitan identities. Though British immigrants were colonial subjects and, later, residents of British Commonwealth nations, and the French arrivals from the overseas departments were citizens of France by law, both groups became subject to otherness and exclusion stemming from their ethnicities. Murdoch examines this phenomenon and the questions it raises about borders and boundaries, nationality and belonging.

“An outstanding contribution to scholarship. Theoretically grounded and meticulously researched, it examines the complexities inherent in constructing new diaspora identities that are at once ethnic, national, and fluid.” —Renée Larrier, Rutgers University

“In these expansive, fresh, adroit interpretations of Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Zadie Smith-White, and Andrea Levy, the author exposes the stark reality that race, and the prejudices attached to it, is a barrier to unequivocal assimilation. This study affirms that a diasporic duality persists as creolization slowly alters the metropole. Overall, an interesting read.” —Choice

“[This] book provides an extremely valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial studies and European literary and film studies in at least three ways: it theoretically refines the concept of creolization, it contributes to much-needed redefinitions of France and the United Kingdom as multicultural, and it foregrounds the aesthetic qualities of the works under study.” —Research in African Literatures

© 2012 Indiana University Press (Ebook): 9780253001320

Release date

Ebook: June 8, 2012