Creolization as Lived Experience: New IRIS Working Paper by Robin Cohen

We are delighted to launch a new IRIS Working Paper by Robin Cohen: Creolization: an autobiographical journey around a concept. In this rich and reflective piece, Cohen traces the concept of creolization through the arc of his own intellectual and personal journey. The result is both a contribution to migration studies and a compelling intellectual memoir.

The paper follows a series of encounters—sometimes accidental, sometimes formative—that shaped Cohen’s understanding of creolization over decades. From apartheid South Africa and early exposure to creole linguistics, to encounters with Creole communities in Sierra Leone, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, the concept emerges not as a fixed theory but as a way of making sense of lived complexity.

A key strength of the paper lies in how it bridges biography and theory. Cohen revisits major debates — from Caribbean decolonial thought to Scandinavian anthropology — while insisting that creolization cannot be reduced to cultural mixture alone. It is always structured by inequality, power, and historical hierarchies. In this sense, the paper resonates strongly with contemporary concerns about how difference is lived, governed, and narrated.

Importantly, the working paper also makes a broader intellectual intervention. Cohen argues for taking creolization seriously as a global concept — one grounded in historical processes and everyday practices, and one that travels from the Global South rather than being imposed from the Global North. In doing so, he challenges the dominance of competing vocabularies such as “hybridity”, which he sees as less attentive to lived realities and power relations.

The paper closes on a deeply personal note, returning to the author’s early life under apartheid. Creolization, in this reading, is not only an analytical tool but also a quiet, persistent counterpoint to racial separation—“the opposite of apartheid” .

This working paper will be of interest to scholars of migration, diaspora, and cultural theory, but also to anyone interested in how concepts travel, evolve, and become meaningful through lived experience.