Creolization has become the favoured language for identity in a mixed world, and Bongie both advances the idea and turns it against itself. He reads a scene from Carpentier's El siglo de las luces where a privateers' clerk, alone in a ship's hold, meditates on Caribbean mixture while the other cargo such holds carried, enslaved Africans, goes unmentioned, and uses it to show how theories of transculturation keep hardening a process back into a stable being. The slash in post/colonial marks what he calls epistemic complicity, the entanglement of colonial and postcolonial writing, worked out through Defoe and Coetzee. Later chapters take up Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Glissant, Hugo and Faulkner on the Saint-Domingue revolution, the Martinican quarrel of Bissette, Maynard de Queilhe and Schoelcher, Maximin and Keri Hulme. Demystifying fixed identities, he insists, is never sufficient, since anti-identitarian models repeat the founding gesture they attack.