Creolisation across the Connected Oceans: An Archipelagic Key

Abstract

Maman ma trouvé klé-la/ klé-la pou ouvé pot-la/ pot-la si lakarayib ("Kavalyé o Dan’", Kassav’). In the song "Kavalyé o Dam" by Kassav’, which reuses the calls that gather people to dance the quadrille, the key to understanding the Caribbean is the quadrille itself, in creolised form. The creolised quadrille is also a key connecting the Caribbean to other sites in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, where versions of it flourished and are still cherished as heritage. The transoceanic creole quadrille illustrates how creolisation as a process unfolded in vastly different places as responses to European expansionism and different local impulses. The results of creolisation across the connected oceans thus exhibit both variation and constancy, polysemy and structural recognisability. Through an archipelagic approach, I propose a reappraisal of these characteristics of creolised cultural products, that helps us understand their value for history, theory, and sustainable heritage.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA is Professor of English Literature at King's College London and Fellow of the British Academy. Her research spans creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, critical philology, and the relationship between literary texts, embodied cultural expression, and memory work. The author of Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2002), Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) and Partition's Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (2013), she has been awarded India's Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Germany's Humboldt Research Prize. She is writing the book, Alegropolitics: Creolising Connection on the AfroModern Dance Floor, arising from her ERC Advanced Grant-funded project 'Modern Moves' (2013-2018). In 2024, she is Faculty Fellow at the Global Cultures Institute, King's College London, where she is developing her project, 'Fort Creole: Transcolonial Enclaves and Archipelagic Memory across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds'.