UC Irvine

David Murray presents an ethnography of contemporary urban Martinique that casts the problem of Caribbean colonial identity as one of irreducible paradoxes. That ‘problem’ exists for Murray’s interlocutors as well as for anthropological analysis; it is both data and theory. Rather than attempting to subsume Martinican conversations about, and practices of, self-understanding under one theoretical rubric, or attempting to provide analytical closure to the ethnographic project, or grounding ‘identity’ in any one social category such as gender or race, Murray instead borrows the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant’s concepts of ‘density’ and ‘opacity’, allowing him to leave unresolved the paradoxes of Caribbean social worlds. Glissant’s aim was to query the ethnographic impulse to fix and freeze ‘the tangled nature of lived experience’ (Glissant, in Murray, p. 15). Murray carries this forward by arguing that the overdetermined density of social relationships and performances demands a mode of analysis open to an opacity or unclarity that would necessarily lie in the way of ‘a position of transparent analysis’ (p. 15). Leave complexity, contradiction, and paradox where they fall; any attempt to ground analysis in fixed and transparent certitudes is likely to lack verisimilitude.