Creolizing Kurosawa: Malcochon, Japonisme, and the Relational Aesthetics of Global Modernism

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Authors
Herbertson, Gavin
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Date
2025-11-06
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Modernist Cultures
Issue
2-3
Volume
20
Pages
Pages
169-188
DOI
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2041-1022
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https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/mod.2025.0455
Access date
2025-11-06
Abstract PL
Abstract EN
This article reframes global modernism through Édouard Glissant’s relational poetics, using Derek Walcott’s play Malcochon (1959) as a case study in transmedial and transcultural exchange. Written as a deliberate imitation of Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), Malcochon draws on the conventions of Japanese cinema, Noh and Kabuki theatre, Euro-American modernist poetics, and Caribbean folk performance. In tracing the diverse influences that animate the play, the article expands on Shu-mei Shih’s argument that East–West modernist exchange was often mediated through Japan, repositioning her triangular model within a broader, multidirectional, transhistorical web of relations rooted in Glissant’s concept of totalité-monde. This remodelling involves demonstrating how a seemingly unrelated cultural geography – the Caribbean – serves as the fourth of many further nodes in a global, recursive network. Walcott’s play ultimately emerges as an emblem of relationality, a concept reconceived for global modernism not only as a spatial or diagnostic heuristic, but as a generative compositional force.
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Keywords PL
Keywords EN
Derek Walcott
Édouard Glissant
Rashomon
totalité-monde
Caribbean drama
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https://share.swps.edu.pl/handle/swps/1998
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cc-by-nc-nd
Except as otherwise noted, this item is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence | Permitted use of copyrighted works
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