Creolizing the Metropole

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.

H. Adlai Murdoch is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel and the editor (with Anne Donadey) of Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies.