Creolization of Language and Culture by Robert Chaudenson , Salikoko S. Mufwene , Sheri Pargman , Michelle Aucoin (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.1, 2003 193 users are less than 4 per cent of the world's population are not fully explored in this collection. Timothy Allen Jackson sees an irreconcilable difference between humans as 'analogue' creatures, not seeing things in 'digitaP time (p. 349). Some authors, such as Sherry Turkle and Mark Poster, discuss subjectivity and how fictional this has been proved to be through the plurality of identities assumed on the Internet. This position is bounced offother essays which see the Internet as the place for asserting identity (e.g. gay identity). It has to be said that many of the essayists, and not just the journalists, assume a very personal voice in what they say, and many ofthe essays, Turkle's not excepted, read like so many anecdotes. Many pieces are autobiographical. Perhaps this approach is a sign ofthe uncertainty the topic inspires: what can be said about it? Perhaps it is a sign of anxiety about the disappearance of (gendered) identity. Perhaps, too, it is a sign that less has changed than was thought, or that what has changed is not so threatening to North American subjectivity as was thought. University of Hong Kong Jeremy Tambling Creolization of Language and Culture. By Robert Chaudenson. Revised in collaboration with Salikoko S. Mufwene. Trans. by Sheri Pargman, Salikoko S. Mufwene, and Michelle Aucoin. London and New York: Routledge. 2001. xiii + 34opp. ?60 (pbk ?19.99). ISBN 0-415-14592-9 (pbk 0-415-14593-7). This volume is not merely a translation of Robert Chaudenson's classic Des ties, des hommes,des langues (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992), but a fully revised and updated version reworked by the author in conjunction with Chicago-based creolist Salikoko Mufwene. The accessibility of the text is further enhanced by the clear and lively style of the translation, the addition of an index, and the greatly expanded and up? dated bibliography. The English title highlights the ambitious scope and originality of the book in that it addresses the two themes of linguistic and cultural creolization (Chapters 1-5 and Chapters 6-10, respectively). In practice, somewhat more space is devoted to the former than the latter,not least because more research has been undertaken and progress made in relation to the development of Creole vernaculars than to the genesis of other cultural systems. Drawing upon an impressive range of primary sources (travellers' accounts, journals, census reports) as well as secondary literature, Chaudenson offersan analysis of Atlantic and Indian Ocean French-lexifier Creoles in order to illustrate his own model of creolization. While this model is intended to be generalizable to many of the other Creoles that developed as a consequence of European colonization, the author is at pains to stress that the process of creolization proceeded along differenttrajectories in differentplaces and at differenttimes. Regarding linguistic creolization, Chaudenson argues for a socio-historical pro? cess. He claims that Creole languages cannot be defined on the basis of structural features that might be peculiar to them, but rather with reference to the exceptional socio-historical conditions in which they emerged. He therefore rejects monogenetic hypotheses as well as the classic view that Creoles developed as 'naturalizations' of earlier pidgins. Since, in his view, pidgins are trade languages used for specific and sporadic commercial contacts between people with differentmother tongues, the ex? amination of local conditions in the French colonies invalidates the claim that Creoles arose out of pre-existing pidgins through a process of structural change. Thus, having rejected the 'creole life cycle' model, Chaudenson puts forward his own, which rests on the belief that creolization occurs primarily as a result of socio-economic change. In the firstphase of colonial settlement (the homestead society), the number of slaves was small, contacts with Europeans were relatively close, and their target language was (popular and regional seventeenth- and eighteenth-century) French, giving rise, not 194 Reviews to pidgins, but to approximationsof French. During the second phase (the plantation society), when there was a largeinfluxof slaves, the target language forthe newarrivals was no longer French but approximative varieties thereof. Modern Creoles are thus the result of 'approximations of approximations' and subsequent autonomization. In Chapters 6-10 Chaudenson turns from...