J. Michael Dash
The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Pp. 197. $42.50
Reviewed by R.S. Krishnan

J. Michael Dash's The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context is a remarkable achievement of scholarship on French Caribbean literary history. Dash's twin expertise lies in his scholarship on Caribbean literature and literary history and, more particularly, on the writings of Edouard Glissant. In The Other America, Dash once again treads territory made familiar by Gordon K. Lewis (Main Currents in Caribbean Thought,1983) and Gerald Moore (The Chosen Tongue: English Writing in the Tropical World, 1969). But Dash's signal achievement is to approach the issues facing French Caribbean literature and intellectual history through Glissant's theory and philosophy. In the process, Dash carries off his task rather handsomely, exactly meeting the objectives he formulates in his introduction.

Dash convincingly defends Glissant against criticism that his (and Patrick Chamoiseau's) views of the Creolite movement concedes too much to Western culture, by arguing that such an adaptation is indeed essential and necessary to the maintenance of difference within the broad context of postcolonial discourse. Dash awards the laurel to Glissant as "the first Martiniquan writer to explore the possibility of a Caribbean identity in a thoroughgoing way" (11). As he notes, "Glissant wants to locate Martinique in its immediate hemispheric context and to end the nostalgia for prelapsarian origins. In so doing, Glissant is careful not to propose a creole, Caribbean identity as an alternative center. His contestation of a poetics and politics of centering leads him to visualize a Caribbean discourse based on heterogeneity and interrelating" (11-12). Glissant's linguistic formulations regarding Martinican "opacity," Dash suggests, privilege an imaginative poetics of accommodation and diversity. As an example, Dash cites Chamoiseau: "Chamoiseau praises the storyteller Solibo [in Solibo Magnifique] for his ability to use 'the four facets of our diglossia: creole basilect and acrolect, French basilect and acrolect, spreading and rooting in an interlectal space which I thought was the most accurate representation of our sociolinguistic reality.' It is this image of 'interlectal space' that is the key to understanding the créolité movement and also to grasping Glissant's idea of antillanite, a Caribbean opacity [for] creole opacity is neither an acquiescence to the status quo nor a kind of romantic otherness. Rather, it is characterized by an oppositional and inscrutable impulse that remains latent in the Caribbean imagination" (11). Thus, "Glissant uses the idea of cross-culturality to suggest the process of decomposing and recomposing, a new politics as much as a new poetics, born out of a need to demystify notions of power, resistance and freedom. Diversity then becomes a vital characteristic of interlectal space, because it 'is neither chaos nor sterility' but rather 'the human spirit's striving for a cross-cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence'" (14). In a writer such as Chamoiseau, whose inventive use of French and Creole dialect makes his work in the original almost impossible to access, it is precisely his sociolinguistic formulations- interglossia- that allow Chamoiseau and others to retain the "creative discontinuity" characteristic of French Caribbean writing.

Dash brilliantly combines historical survey with critical assessment of the major writers and theorists, including Brathwaite, Carpentier, Césaire, Chauvet, Condé, Durand, Perse, Walcott, and others. His discussion of hybridity, especially the concepts of "negritude" and "negrismo," as a constitutive element of black and mulatto experience in terms of Caribbean culture and identity is quite incisive. Dash's intention is to account for and assess the increasingly sophisticated consciousness of the possibilities of Caribbean identity and intellectual life revealed in the writings from the archipelago. Without favor, but equally objectively, Dash reads all the major theorists in light of Glissant's ideas. Dash's work continues the discussion of the broadly transnational aesthetics of Antillean literature engaged in by writers such as Peter Hulme, Sivio Torres-Saillant, and others. Perhaps Dash's greatest contribution is his reintroduction of Glissant to those unfamiliar with the Martinican poet and theorist.

Dash's book is accessible at all points; it avoids the hobbyhorsical in favor of lucid summaries and judicious observations on issues confronting Caribbean literary studies. Much to his credit, and the reader's pleasure, Dash avoids the impostion of the modern conceptual grid into which he might fit his argument, even as he imbeds his critical discourse within the framework of postcolonial theory. The Other America successfully iterates Caribbean literary history and practice as more than merely deivative extensions of the neocolonial conventions of European culture. In this sense, the reader will emerge from the last page of his book with a coherent sense of the state of Caribbean studies.