Antillanité is a literary and political movement developed in the 1960s that stresses the creation of a specific West Indian identity out of a multiplicity of ethnic and cultural elements.
"[1] Originally intended as a counter to the doctrine of Négritude, and its stress on an African rather than Caribbean identity, Antillanité was positively received by a number of prominent Martinican intellectuals, in particular the Groupe de Recherches de l'Institut Martiniquais d'Etudes headed by Édouard Glissant, which published the results of its discussions on Caribbean identity in the short-lived journal Acoma (1971–73).
The whole of Glissant's theoretical work may be seen as a sustained polemic, conducted in the name of "le Divers," (the different) against the claims of the universal, to which a succession of derogatory epithets are attached in a more or less routine fashion.
Thus, it could be said that while Négritude looked inwards, to African heritage, for its models and values Antillanité looked both inwards, and outwards, towards the Caribbean and Meso-America as a whole, in its quest for self-invention from which proponents conceived identity as an archipelago of signifiers, none of which enjoys primacy over the others and whose unity lies not in the fact of possessing a single source but, rather, in the complex amalgamation of these myriad forces which hold themselves in relation to each other.
One of the major advances made by Antillanité is that it has, in large measure, shed the regressive, matricentric orientation common to both assimilationism and Négritude.