HOW DID THE CARIBBEAN RE-ENCHANT THE WORLD?

Mesa “Mulheres Transatlânticas”, realizada no primeiro dia da Flup 2024, com participação de Audrey Pulvar, Josephine Apraku e Afua Hirsch. Foto: Hildemar Terceiro.

By Isabella Rodrigues

Brazil and the Caribbean share deep historical roots: both were shaped by the Black diaspora, marked by colonial exploitation, and permeated by a legacy that gave rise to ideas capable of re-enchanting the world.

From the transatlantic slave trade to the struggles for independence and cultural affirmation, these territories transformed the legacy of violence into a creative force. This power is revealed in literature, music, and popular knowledge that continue to reconfigure the Eurocentric perspective on what constitutes center and what constitutes periphery.

For centuries, the Caribbean was treated as a stage for colonial exploitation. The Spanish, French, English, and Dutch fought over these islands, reducing them to mere lucrative trading posts. But the story told from above almost always ignores what actually emerged from these waters.

Contrary to the narrative written by the colonizers, Caribbean literature—in Creole and in the languages imposed by the metropolises—established itself as a language of reinvention. A writing that, besides denouncing the colonial past, transformed ruin into a voice and pain into its own grammar.

This re-enchantment takes on new meaning in 2025 with Flup's Brazil-France Season. After touring the Festival Étonnants Voyageurs in Saint-Malo with a delegation that brought a "roots," peripheral, yet vibrant Brazil to France, the next crossing is Guadeloupe.

This year, Flup will also be present at the Monde en Vues Festival, held at the ACTe Memorial, a space that cultivates the living memory of the Black presence and struggle in the Americas.

In November, it's France's turn to arrive in Rio. Delegations from both festivals will arrive in the city to expand the dialogue between Brazil and the French-speaking Caribbean, with colloquia, meetings, and performances dedicated to the legacies of Césaire, Fanon, and Glissant.

Because Caribbean re-enchantment isn't about rescuing a lost origin. It's about charting new paths. About bodies that dance despite wounds; about languages born from friction.

Identity, language and insubordination

In the 20th century, three figures born in Martinique helped reinvent the Caribbean's place in the world: Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant , and Frantz Fanon . With their works, they not only envisioned liberation, but shaped it, word by word.

Césaire, a poet and politician, coined the concept of negritude as a "lucid recognition of being black." In *Notebook of a Return to the Native Country * (1939), he proposed a poetic reconnection with ancestral Africa as a form of rupture with colonialism and an affirmation of black and Caribbean identity—an influence that reverberates to this day in poetry, theory, and pan-Africanist and decolonial movements.

Glissant expanded the critique of colonialism by considering creolization as a creative force. For him, the encounter between cultures is not fusion or assimilation, but friction—and it is from this clash that new, unpredictable, and plural forms emerge. With his " poetics of relation ," Glissant proposes a rhizomatic philosophy, where identities connect without hierarchy, and where difference is what sustains, not threatens, the common.

Fanon, a psychiatrist and revolutionary, investigated the psychological trauma that colonialism inflicts on the bodies and minds of the colonized. In works such as Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he uncovered the crisis of identity and the often futile search for cultural assimilation. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon not only denounced the devastating psychological impact of racial oppression but also asserted that anti-colonial violence—although tragic—can be a therapeutic and disalienating act.

For the psychiatrist, it's not about glorifying confrontation, but about recognizing that, in the face of systematic dehumanization, resistance is a necessary path to autonomy and collective healing. His ideas, which propose a total decolonization (political, cultural, and psychological), maintain universal relevance in studies of oppression and freedom.

Together, Césaire, Glissant, and Fanon transformed the Caribbean into a philosophical, aesthetic, and political laboratory. A place where the world is not only interpreted—it is recreated; re-enchanted. And these reflections live on, being discussed by heirs of their works at Flup in November.

Caribbean culture in motion

On the geopolitical stage, the Caribbean not only inspired but also played a leading role in revolutions of global impact. The most emblematic was the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the only uprising of enslaved people in the New World that resulted in the independence of a sovereign state.

Led by figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the movement overthrew French rule in the colony of Saint-Domingue and gave rise to Haiti — the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery and be governed by former slaves.

The uprising began on August 22, 1791, and mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, leaving around 200,000 dead over more than a decade of conflict. More than a military victory, the Haitian Revolution became a symbol of radical freedom and the fight against colonialism, inspiring abolitionist movements across the continent.

In music, the Caribbean revolution also left deep-rooted marks. Reggae, born in Jamaica, became a symbol of global resistance. In addition to Bob Marley, artists like Peter Tosh and Burning Spear amplified the message of Black dignity and social justice.

The sound system culture, which began to take hold on the streets of Kingston in the early 1950s, was fundamental to the spread of reggae and dancehall, transforming street parties into veritable stages of musical innovation and social engagement. These powerful sound systems, with their DJs and selectors, created a vibrant platform for music and the voice of the people, engaging with Pan-Africanism and the quest for freedom—universal themes that inspire generations.

In cinema, names like Raoul Peck and Euzhan Palcy have put the Caribbean back at the center of the debate on race, identity, and narrative. Their films emerge from the urgency to retell what the world has tried to erase.

Haitian Raoul Peck delves into colonialism and structural racism. Works like I Am Not Your Negro (2016), based on James Baldwin, and Lumumba (2000), about the Congolese leader, expose the persistence of oppression.

Martinique's Euzhan Palcy broke barriers. She was the first Black director to win a César Award for Rue Cases-Nègres (1983), a sensitive portrait of post-slavery life in the Antilles. In Hollywood, she directed A Dry White Season (1989), about apartheid, becoming the first Black woman to do so for a major studio.

The Caribbean taught us to create beauty amidst the rubble. And it reminds us, with the strength of the winds blowing from the sea, that the world can indeed be re-enchanted, if we are willing to listen.

That's why, in its 15th edition, Flup turns its attention to the Caribbean – an archipelago where blackness dances with language, ginga becomes thought, and the beats of body and words re-enchant the world.