Créolité is a literary and cultural movement that emerged in the French Caribbean in the late 1980s. Its founding manifesto, Éloge de la Créolité (1989), was written by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant.
Core principles
Créolité celebrates the cultural and linguistic mixing that defines Caribbean identity — the blending of African, European, Asian and indigenous Amerindian heritages into something new and irreducible. It differs from Négritude in refusing to privilege any single ancestral root.
Key authors
Patrick Chamoiseau is the movement’s most celebrated novelist. His novel Texaco (1992) won the Prix Goncourt and is considered the definitive expression of Créolité in fiction.
