Framing Difference: Migration and Creolization in the French Caribbean.

Both forced and voluntary migrations have marked the Caribbean region since the 17th Century. The result has been an amalgam of ethnicities and cultures that continually transform each other, and a growing group of Caribbean diasporic communities that differentiate themselves both from their host population, and increasingly from the core Caribbean identity that attaches to their place of origin. Considering the Caribbean and its diaspora together compels us to revise long-held notions of the role and place of "center" and "periphery" in a post/colonial cultural fusion interrogating and displacing rigid assumptions of identity through the prisms of an ever-evolving modernity, and an incessant cycle of migrant movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]