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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean by Tessa Murphy Tyson Reeder The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. By tessa murphy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. iii + 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-5338-2. $45.00 (hardcover). With this well-researched book, Murphy brings readers to an underexplored region of the Caribbean: the southeastern islands within the chain traditionally known as the Lesser Antilles. Murphy dubs the islands the Creole Archipelago, which she defines as "a chain of small volcanic islands, each visible from the next, that stretches 280 miles from Guadeloupe in the north to Grenada in the south" (p. 6). More than a physical space, though, the Creole Archipelago featured a diverse, even cosmopolitan, community that adapted, resisted, fled, fought, and integrated within their shared island string. By highlighting the persistent drive for autonomy among the islands' indigenous residents, enslaved peoples, and settler populations, Murphy reveals Europe's unsteady advance toward empire in the region. From time to [End Page 146] time, empires swapped nominal sovereignty over the islands during the approximately 150-year span examined by Murphy. Control remained elusive, however, as many of the inhabitants lived, interacted, and created a creole society beyond the reach of imperial power. Murphy is at her best when analyzing the perseverance of the Kalinagos—the indigenous inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles—in retaining their autonomy and resisting imperial expansion. She examines and dispels earlier myths that explained the disappearance of the Kalinagos from imperial archives during the eighteenth century. As she explains, the Kalinagos did not disappear from the islands; they were erased from the archives. As European officials and settlers tried to control the commerce and politics of the southeastern Caribbean, they sought comfort in fantasies that they no longer contended with an indigenous population. One prominent fiction held that they were "Black Caribs," descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement. By the final half of the eighteenth century, many Europeans considered the Kalinagos as maroon communities rather than autonomous indigenous societies who had resisted imperial domination. While the Kalinagos did mix with people escaped from slavery, they retained their indigenous identity throughout the eighteenth century. The Kalinagos did cede territory to Europeans but never as extensively as imperial officials liked to believe. Settler society gradually pushed marginalized groups such as escaped Africans into Kalinago space and ceased to recognize those regions as the dominion of the indigenous community. Written records may have failed to acknowledge the continued presence of Kalinagos, but that elision hardly made them disappear. Focusing on the Kalinago experience, Murphy expands creolism as an analytical category. She notes that indigenous communities rarely feature in studies of creolism. As she contends, that absence is a remnant of the long process of erasing indigeneity from political, diplomatic, and societal records. She argues that "when Indigenous nations incorporate other peoples, languages, and practices into their communities, colonizers often cast them as no longer Indigenous, thereby denying Indigenous claims to land or sovereignty" (p. 6). For example, by recasting Kalinagos as "Black Caribs," European observers reimagined them as part of the enslaved community. That change depicted the Kalinagos as a subset within the colonial system rather than a sovereign community outside it. The book is unclear, however, about how identifying indigenous communities with creolization would save them from that erasure. Though a notoriously fluid term, creolism was at root a way to define [End Page 147] people according to birthplace invented by the very settler-colonial regimes that sought to erase indigeneity from their lands and records. Murphy argues that the "processes of creolization allowed Kalinagos to remain important, if little-acknowledged, political, military, and economic actors up to the present day" (p. 7). Yet those same processes seem to have allowed European settlers and officials to elide Kalinagos from their collective imagination by casting them as something other than indigenous. At another point, the book mentions "the societies that emerged at the interstices of competing Indigenous, European, and Creole regimes," apparently placing indigeneity and creolism in tension, not unison (p. 231). Murphy clearly wants to link creolization with the persistent presence of Kalinagos, but she leaves that critical...