Abstract
This paper is part of a larger project that re-conceptualizes the politics and aesthetics of a constellation of lyrical, musical, and dance forms known as “baila” in Sri Lanka. Baila and its sister-forms, spanning the Indian Ocean world from the Mascarenes to the Malay Archipelago, come together to form a “bailasphere,” that aesthetically bears witness to histories of European colonization, slavery, and creolization, in ways markedly different to neighboring mainland spaces in Asia and Africa. The focus of this paper is the archive of Indo-Portuguese creole verse, used by scholars to historically authenticate and genealogize baila, tracing its origins back to the Portuguese who colonized and settled in Sri Lanka in the 16th-17th centuries, and the African slaves they brought to the island. I argue that much of this scholarship, being haunted by pseudo-scientific, Eurocentric, and colonialist ideas about human progress, racial difference, and linguistic evolution, repeats tropes of “creole exceptionalism.” Through such tropes, baila is presented as a fossilized artform; a corruption of “purer” forms found on the European, African, and Asian mainlands; and an ethno-racially limited form of expression. To reject this framing, I critically engage with the aesthetics and politics of créolité, a discourse stemming from the Francophone Caribbean context. If créolité allows for a reconceptualization of baila and Indo-Portuguese verse that rejects tropes of derivativeness and lack, baila in turn complements the aspirations of créolité to establish modes of relationality beyond national and cultural mandates, through which an aesthetic space for the human can be forged.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Oceanic Journeys: Multicultural Approaches in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Creole; Indian Ocean Studies; Caribbean; Indo-Portuguese; Baila; Race; Coloniality
