{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03626666666666667, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0064, 'mean_word_length': 5.211920529801325, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Hybridity, Identity and Cultural Commerce in Claude McKay's Banana Bottom

Near the beginning of Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, Robert J.C. Young notes that until recently the study of culture has paid "comparatively little attention ... to the mechanics of the intricate processes of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and disjunction" that characterize the development of culture wherever different social systems intermix (5). While "heterogeneity, cultural interchange and diversity have now become the self-conscious identity of modern society," he writes, "it is striking ... how few models have been developed to analyze it" (4).1 What the study of culture needs, he insists, are more ways to "develop accounts of the commerce between cultures that map and shadow the complexities of its generative and destructive processes" (5, my emphasis).2 Paul Gilroy makes a similar point at the outset of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) when he complains that "modern black political culture has always been more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes" (19). Gilroy's focus on "routes" rather than "roots" turns out to denote the kind of focus on "commerce" Young has in mind, for one of Gilroy's central purposes is to foreground the role of commercial institutions like the slave trade and the plantation in the project of modernity, and to stress the extent to which those institutions facilitated a relatively uncontrollable commerce between cultures as well as economies.3 Tracing identities through "roots," in Gilroy's view, leads to a narrow (and often unhistorical) kind of ethnic absolutism that attention to the "routes" out of which identities and cultures