Book description
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.
"An outstanding contribution to scholarship. Theoretically
grounded and meticulously researched, it examines the complexities
inherent in constructing new diaspora identities that are at once
ethnic, national, and fluid." -Renée Larrier, Rutgers University
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.
