Lafcadio Hearn's Creole (Pre)Disposition

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) is famous principally for having ‘interpreted’ Japan for the West in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Even if his life and work are recognized as falling into two main periods, the American and the Far Eastern, the latter is usually seen as outshining the former. It is less, however, the work of Hearn's Japanese period than the inscapes of his American/Caribbean writings that hold the key – if not to the overall significance, then certainly to the contemporary resonance of this unusual fin-de-siècle figure and of his work. These writings are clearly founded on what one might call a Creole gravitation. The object of this study is to show how the expression of Hearn's apparently inexorable Creole tropism illustrates a profound post-plantation cultural continuum which links the American Deep South to the Caribbean basin and also points forward to contemporary paradigms of cultural crossing, palimpsest or (as the authors of my epigraph put it, in a performative neologism) ‘diversalité’.

Not only does the idea of cultural continuum have, according to that epigraph, contemporary and universal purchase, but it is originally associated with specifically Creole spaces. The epigraph is a quotation from Lettres créoles, a literary survey of ‘Creole literature’ co-authored by two contemporary Martinican authors, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. Emphasizing the notion of continuum as a denial or cancellation of borders, the two Martinicans claim that it is becoming more and more difficult to ‘confine’ writers of the contemporary age within a single, simple label.