This paper tackles the concept of creolization that lies at the very center of discussions of transculturalism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, diversity and hybridization. The concept focuses on the cultural syncretism, as the source for cross-fertilization between different cultures. When creolization takes place, the individuals select particular elements from incoming or inherited cultures, investing these with meanings, different from those they owned in the original culture and then merge these to create totally new varieties that replace the first forms. The creolized subject is thus a cultural element that stresses new common identity in the place of identification. A diasporic consciousness, by contrast, generally reflects a degree of anxiety with cultural identities in the current location. 'Homeland' is recovered through historical memory and social organization, the past providing a continuing pole of attraction and identification. In order to describe the cultural identity, the paper proposes an articulation of the related issues of doubling, hybridity and metissage. Starting from the premise that creolization means more than just mixture, we note that the cultural transmission under situations of displacement and de-territorialization suggests the recognition of powerful 'others'. We couldn't but notice that creolization is the force that brings human cultures into relation with one another, a process of relation that neither reduces the other to the same, nor resolves itself in a reified, unchanging form. I posit that, in order to understand the self as it functions in the Caribbean, it becomes important to analyze the way in which the process of creolization took place in the interaction between the Caribbean and Europe. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
