A Multicultural Future (Destin Commun) for New Caledonia?
A Multicultural Future (Destin Commun) for New Caledonia?
From Métissage to Hybridities
Until recently, New Caledonian writers have depicted mixed-race relations and cultural métissage less as a sign of inclusion than as a threat of cultural disintegration. Despite this resilient localism, the array of forms of mixing in these literary texts and their increasing intertextuality and interculturality, calls for a consideration of the ways in which terms such as métissage, syncretism, multiculturalism and hybridity interface and an analysis of the pertinence of the many theoretical formulations (and critiques) of hybridity. These include Bhabha's ‘upfront syncretism to unsettle the inheritances of Europe’, Gilroy's journeys beyond ethnic essentialism, Canclini's ‘mutual transformation’ as well as Rosello's ‘amnesiac creolity’ or reinvention of forms of belonging and Brah and Coombes’ tiempos mistos, the complex articulation of tradition and modernities. The literatures of Kanaky-New Caledonia provide a new location from which to interrogate the subversive potential of hybridity at the same time as they modify and extend this notion to formulate their own singular responses to the proposal of a multicultural future.
Keywords: Destin Commun, Multiculturalism, Syncretism, Métissage, Hybridity theory, Interculturalism, Bhabha, Gilroy, Canclini, Rosello
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