Caribbean World-Makers and Word-Breakers : Rhizomatic Poetics and the Politics of Transcultural Imagination

This essay adopts a Deleuzian perspective to discuss how cultural transna-tionalism, as a methodology for cultural studies, may take up the challenge of analysing the complex, multifaceted and liquid dynamics in which indi-viduals and culture are mutually involved, while at the same time imagining difference on a global scale. A reading of the work of contemporary Carib-bean thinkers writing about transcultural imagination provides some insight on how Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome may serve as a geograph-ical metaphor for reading the Caribbean literary and cultural space in light of its problematic entanglement in a global history marked by colonization, slavery and exploitation. Also, the essay deals with how Caribbean theorists mobilize and resematicise the ideas of difference and otherness in order to embrace a pragmatics of identity which is dialogical and dialecti-cal. The emphasis on the processes of world-making and word-breaking which structures this text signals that Caribbean transcultural imagination is rooted in a transgression that takes place, first and foremost, in language.