Every identity carries a story. Some are shaped by movement, by memory, and by the spaces in between. In this video, we begin to trace one such story – across oceans, centuries, and cultures.

Welcome to this chapter on the Afro-Atlantic. Together, we’ll explore how African heritage has shaped cultures across the Atlantic – through histories of migration, resistance, and renewal. We’ll follow the traces of language, belief, art, and memory – and look at how identity can stretch between worlds. This is an invitation to see the hyphen not as a division – but as a space of connection.

In the video, Zainabu Jallo uses the terms “Créolisation” and “Méttissage”. Here is a short definition:

Creolisation: Although the term has multiple interpretations, the use of creolisation in this context stems from Édouard Glissant’s expansive view of the word “creole.” He employs it to depict the blending and mingling — or what he calls the “relation” — among various cultures that have been forced to live together under a colonial system. Here, it is important to understand what he refers to as relation:

“Relation is not to be confused with the cultures we are discussing, nor with the economy of their internal relationships, nor even the intangible results of the intricate involvement of all internal relationships with all possible external relationships. Nor is it to be confused with some marvelous accident that might suddenly occur apart from any relationship, the known unknown, in which chance would be the magnet. Relation is all these things at once.” [poetics 170–71].

In this sense, creolization refers to the processes of “cultural and linguistic blending” that arise from the interaction of different cultures within the same native setting, especially concerning slavery, colonization, and the plantation societies that characterize the Caribbean, parts of Spanish America, and Southeast Asia.

The practice of creolization is what Glissant refers to as Métissage. Suggesting a blending of cultural expressions, realised through the simultaneous appreciation of indigenous oral traditions and a critical evaluation of Western concepts, leading to the recovery of overlooked histories.

We will further discuss “creolization” in Step 5.7.

Author: Zainabu Jallo

Reference

Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation. (Translated by Betsy Wing). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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