Tessa Murphy. The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean.

Abstract

In her innovative first book, The Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy introduces readers to a little-studied region of the Lesser Antilles in the eastern Caribbean. Noting how in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the islands of Saint Vincent, Dominica, Grenada, and Saint Lucia were part of a Caribbean frontier that developed largely outside official European imperial control, Murphy explores the “interconnected creolized community” that arose in this region, an area that she terms a “Creole Archipelago.” For Murphy, this Creole Archipelago is more than a geographical location; it is also the “hybrid community” that emerged in this space. Exploring how the region’s original Kalinago inhabitants, trafficked captive Africans, and French and English settler colonists “helped shape this borderland world,” Murphy insists on the significance of the “watery geography” that rendered the sea not a barrier but a conduit to connections and an intraregional identity in this part of the Caribbean.