The Caribbean Oral Tradition

The book uses an innovative prism of interorality that powerfully reevaluates Caribbean orality and innovatively casts light on its overlooked and fundamental epistemological contribution into the formation of Caribbean philosophy. It defines the innovative prism of interorality as the systematic transposition of previously composed storytales into new and distinct tales. The book offers a powerful consideration of the interconnections between Caribbean orality and Caribbean philosophy, especially as this pertains to aesthetics and ethics. This is a new area of thought, a new methodological approach and a new conceptual paradigm and proposition to scholars, students, writers, artists and intellectuals who conceive and examine intellectual and cultural productions in the Black Atlantic world and beyond. 

“Hanétha Vété-Congolo’s The Caribbean Oral Tradition gives a definitive accounting of the evidence of the philosophical force of living oral traditions in the Caribbean. This classic text ingenuously fills a vacuum created by lack of critical materials on the subject of intertextuality, and most of all of interorality, as deployed in the Caribbean.” (Akintunde Akinyemi, Associate Professor of African Languages and Literatures, University of Florida, USA)

“Hanétha Vété-Congolo’s The Caribbean Oral Tradition is a bold effort at articulating a unique paradigm for the understanding of the combined philosophical and aesthetic dynamics of Caribbean cultural production. Vété-Congolo offers a new term, interorality (a la Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality) as a construct that privileges the spoken word—West African spoken word—combined with the oral and written traditions of Europe, as the embodiment of the complex gamut of artistic, ethical, and philosophical performances that the enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean executed to maintain agency in an otherwise hostile and contested space. Considerable work has been done in the field to pinpoint the strong African presence in the cultural currents of the Caribbean. Hanétha Vété-Congolo’s book is a brilliant and timely contribution, especially in giving scholars the term and concept, “interorality”. It’s a superb and much needed construct that finally gives name to the epistemological complexity that is the peculiar iteration of the West African spoken word in the Caribbean, captured in the Creole term, “pawòl.” Orality and literacy have never had it so good together in critical discourse!” (Chiji Akọma, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora literatures, Villanova University, USA)

Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College, Maine, USA. She is affiliated to the Africana Studies Program, the Latin American Studies Program and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Program of her institution. Situated in the Africana Critical Theory field, her scholarship focuses principally on Caribbean and African ideas, philosophy, literature and orality. Her articles are published in refereed journals and anthologies such as The CLR. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas and Ethiopiques. Revue négro-africaine de littérature et de philosophie.