Caribbean Modernities

Cultural Mixing, Baroque and Creolism

Abstract

Starting from colonial independence, the Caribbean Islands begin a path that will lead to the liberation of national literatures from the Eurocentric paradigm that has influenced official culture for centuries. From the insertion of the autochthonous element, from the delineation of the Neo-Baroque as an art of counter-conquest, to the affirmation of the diatopic variants of the colonizers' languages, modernism in the Caribbean archipelago acquires peculiar characteristics which will lead, to use Silvia Albertazzi's paradigm, to the anthropophagic phase of culture: the European model is in fact copied, rejected and finally adopted by Caribbean cultures through what Ortiz has defined as transculturación. The contribution aims to highlight the peculiar characteristics of Caribbean modernism and postmodernism, in particular in relation to the affirmation of neo-baroque aesthetics in Spanish- and French-speaking literature.