Bongie takes Glissant's proposition that the world is creolizing as his point of departure, opening with a passage from Carpentier in which the Americas appear as a place of mixture and identity rests on migratory routes rather than roots.

He then argues against himself. Exclusionary, essentialist thinking cannot simply be got past; assertions of fixed identity are unavoidable, and even the affirmation of a creole identity betrays the endless transformation it claims to name. Demystifying identity is a necessary tactic but not a sufficient one, and the most fervent demystifiers tend to repeat the very gesture they attack.

The readings alternate between colonial and postcolonial writing: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's island pastoral, Hugo's reactionary retelling of the Haitian Revolution and its hostility to people of mixed race, a little-known Martiniquan novel read beside the journalism of Cyrille Bissette, and two novels of 1987 by Glissant and Daniel Maximin.