Ambiguation, Disjuncture, Commitment: A Social Analysis of Caribbean Cultural Creativity

Sociological reassessments of the Caribbean during the last decade provide the basis for this analysis of cultural creativity in Kingston, Jamaica. The intersection of different social networks and formations - for example, lateral transmigrant patterns and vertical state institutions - creates the groundwork for a simultaneous co-working of three characteristic modes of Creole cultural expression - commitment, ambiguation, disjuncture. These modes are not necessarily dialectically integrated because the social formations to which they are allied typically have not been effectively synthesized in teleological or functional terms. I focus especially on a street rhetoric of ambiguation and displacement which I see as falling within the interplay/intermixture mode lying between disjuncture and commitment.