Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation

Engaging with the thought of Michel Foucault, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Achille Mbembe, Henri Lefebvre, Margaret Archer, Saskia Sassen, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Crichlow argues for understanding creolization as a continual creative remaking of past and present moments to shape the future. She draws on sociology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies to illustrate how national histories are lived personally and how transnational experiences reshape individual lives and collective spaces. Critically extending Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, she describes how contemporary Caribbean subjects remake themselves in and beyond the Caribbean region, challenging, appropriating, and subverting older, localized forms of creolization. In this book, Crichlow offers a nuanced understanding of how Creole citizens of the Caribbean have negotiated modern economies of power.

Michaeline A. Crichlow, an historical sociologist, is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development and a co-editor of Informalization: Process and Structure. Patricia Northover is a Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.