Abstract

This essay adopts a Deleuzian perspective to discuss how cultural transnationalism, as a methodology for cultural studies, may take up the challenge of analysing the complex, multifaceted and liquid dynamics in which individuals and culture are mutually involved, while at the same time imagining difference on a global scale. A reading of the work of contemporary Caribbean thinkers writing about transcultural imagination provides some insight on how Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhizome may serve as a geographical metaphor for reading the Caribbean literary and cultural space in the light of its problematic entanglement in a global history marked by colonisation, slavery and exploitation. Also, the essay deals with how Caribbean theorists mobilise and resematicise the ideas of difference and otherness in order to embrace a pragmatics of identity which is dialogical and dialectical. The emphasis on the processes of world-making and word-breaking which structures this text signals that Caribbean transcultural imagination is rooted in a transgression that takes place, first and foremost, in language.