White Skin, Black Kin: a Postcolonial Exposé of (white) Female Creole Identity

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“In the Caribbean we are all performers … we all try to act out the roles that our skin reads out to us” (Benítez-Rojo 236). As Antonio Benítez-Rojo observes in The Repeating Island (1992), because of the colonial plantation system’s resettlement and reculturization of racially diverse populations through institutionalized transatlantic slavery, the postcolonial Caribbean is a site of multi-layered discourses where white guilt / contrition and black retribution plague racial identity’s conceptualization. (more…)