"'All Skin' Teeth Is Not Grin": Performing Caribbean Diasporic Identity in a Postcolonial Metropolitan Frame

Any attempt to come to grips with the limits, implications, and resonances that the term diaspora embodies in and for the Caribbean must begin by confronting the involvement of this term with the varied inscriptions of identity that frame the concept of Caribbeanness. Ineluctably bound up with the complex patterns of regional history, identity functions, in Paul Gilroy's words, as "a junction or hinge concept that can help to maintain the connective tissue that articulates political and cultural concerns". Attempting to account for the Caribbean experience in diasporic terms is a challenging proposition at best; the history of the Caribbean and its people does not conform to traditional diasporic patterns and exigencies of exile, dispersal, and return. Here, Murdoch emphasizes that the ebb and flux of cultures, and indeed their transgressional expansion and overflow beyond borders and boundaries, belies the established binaries of a colonial ideology predicated upon the notion of cultures as distinct and self-contained, the kind of ideology that mediated the spread of hierarchies of inequality and attitudes of appropriation. With the size and scale of the postwar re(turn) to the metropole marking, or masking, the return of the colonial repressed, this demographic phenomenon that signals a (post)colonial corollary of discretely constructed subjectivities and cultures finds itself subverted from within by the migrant dissonances and coincidences of Caribbean cultural plurality. The result engenders a new entity that both parallels and diverges from any assumptions of cultural integrity posited by Britishness or Frenchness, on the one hand, or by Caribbeanness, on the other. Indeed, it has been amply demonstrated elsewhere that these metropolitan, colonial cultures were in fact based on artificial assumptions and constructions of unity and singularity, superficial geopolitical strata that sought to efface the underlying fractures and fissures produced by the waves of European histories of encounter and conquest.