Creole Identity Research Articles

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (review)

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (review)

The material and cognitive dimensions of creolization in nineteenth-century Jamaica

Creolization is defined as a special form of ethnogenesis that in plantation contexts was a process through which social and material worlds were defined. Using colonial Jamaica as an example, ethnohistorical sources to suggest how creole identities were emically defined by and negotiated between populations of both European and African descent, and suggests how the process of creolization was manifested in the use of space, foodways, and general health of creole populations of both European and African descent.

Creole is, Creole ain't: Diachronic and synchronic attitudes toward Creole identity in southern Louisiana

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (review)

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (review)

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

Part I. Introductions: 1. Within the shady hold of modernity: a preface to Creolization 2. A glow of after-memory: (beyond) identity politics in postcolonial literature and theory Part II. Irruptions: Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Edouard Glissant, and the Double Time of Modernity: 3. 'The shadow of what one will be': Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's insular relations 4. Resisting memories: Edouard Glissant and the medusa of history Part III. Eruptions: (Rewriting) Caribbean Romanticism: 5. The memory of Hayti: William Faulkner, Victor Hugo, and the Saint-Domingue revolution 6. 1835, or Le troisieme siecle: the Creole afterlives of Cyrille-Charles-Auguste Bissette, Louis de Maynard de Queilhe, and Victor Schoelcher 7. The (un)exploded volcano: Daniel Maximin's Soufrieres and the apocalypse of narrative Part IV. Conclusion: 8. The last frontier: memories of the postcolonial future in Keri Julme's the bone people Notes Bibliography Index.

Have we passed the last post-? Theorizing post/colonial literature

[First paragraph]Aime Cesaire. GREGSON DAVIS. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xvi + 208 pp. (Cloth US$ 59.95)Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. SILVIO TORRES-SAILLANT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiv + 353 pp. (Cloth £45.00)Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. CHRIS BONGIE. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. xi + 543 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.00, Paper US$ 24.95)The three books under review here all make important claims for a Caribbean poetics, but they do so from perspectives that range from practical criticism (Davis), through comparative poetics (Torres-Saillant), to what is sometimes called high theory (Bongie). With the exception of Davis's book, which is a detailed treatment of a single seminal figure, they range widely and seek grounds for broad comparative assessments. The need to establish such grounds for comparison is witnessed by the volume History of Literature in the Caribbean, which Bongie and Torres-Saillant both reference. To find one's way in this potentially dizzying display of critical and theoretical acumen, it will be most helpful to proceed from the general to the particular, from high theory to practical criticism.

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (review)

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (review)

Islands and exiles: the creole identities of post/colonial literature

Islands and exiles: the creole identities of post/colonial literature

Presentations/Selections

Presentations/Selections

The Influence of Slavery in the Formation of Creole Identity

The Influence of Slavery in the Formation of Creole Identity

Trade and the Construction of Bahamian Identity: A Multiscalar Exploration

Using ceramic data, we explore how a multiscalar approach, framed within Giddens' Theory of Structuration, can lead to a more complete understanding of the construction of New World Creole identities. The two scales of analysis serve to inform one another. We draw upon archaeological and historical data from five plantation sites located on three islands of the Bahamas. On the macroscale level, we demonstrate how regional trade networks limited or facilitated access to ceramics and shaped the ways that individual planters used these goods to construct statements about wealth and prestige. A microscale analysis of ceramics recovered from six slave households demonstrates how families with complete market access used ceramics as a means of creating a sense of community identity and mediating tensions within the quarters.

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

Creole Identities in Colonial Space: The Narratives of Mary White Rowlandson and Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan

Creole Identities in Colonial Space: The Narratives of Mary White Rowlandson and Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan

Resisting Memories: The Creole Identities of Lafcadio Hearn and Edouard Glissant

THE APPARENT SWING AWAY FROM AN ESSENTIALIST IDENTITY politics in recent discussions of colonial and postcolonial identity, and toward a vision of cultural hybridity destabilizes any and all such identitarian markers, has resulted in a heightened interest in that process of mutation and adaptation we call creolization, as Paul Gilroy puts it (Small Acts, 209). This is a process the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, following in the footsteps of Cuba's Fernando Ortiz, began theorizing in the early 1970s in his various studies of how, even at the height of slavery, white and black Jamaicans were creating and participating in a common culture. Just as the Creole languages of the Caribbean, spoken by white and black alike, were born out of the mixing of European and African languages, so too did the existence of this creolized culture hold out the possibility for Brathwaite of going beyond what Edward Said has called fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authorized definition (225). Creolization offers a response to the manichean tendencies of colonial discourse-tendencies to which, moreover, Third World theorists eager to dissociate themselves from the sort of existential complicities were an inevitable result of colonial practice, if not of segregationist colonial theory, all too easily fell prey. It has thus taken its place in the postcolonial lexicon, alongside transculturation, hybridity, mongrelization, and the like, all of which anticipate the final collapse of the binary rhetoric of us and them, which is clearly no longer adequate to the complex realities of what Gilroy has called our transnational post-contemporary circumstances (ibid., 193-4). What I propose to do here is look at two opposed but nonetheless genealogically-related visions of the creolization process, one

Belonging to a Place: Turks in Unified Berlin

IN A POST–UNIFICATION CLIMATE of economic anxiety and crisis over the identity and the future direction of Germany, right–wing attacks on foreigners increased, targeting asylum seekers as well as long–term Turkish residents. This has caused many Turks to reevaluate their interaction with German society, either by withdrawing, consolidating forces, or by distancing themselves from the category of foreigner by emphasizing a local identity of place and a transnational Creole identity.

"Spaces of Affect": Versions and Visions of Cajun Cultural History

During the midto late-1980s, things Cajun and Creole became hot, in the conjoined senses of spicy and popular, most notably in cuisine and music, so much so that various companies fought during the decade's final years to employ Cajun and zydeco rhythms and images as background for advertising products as diverse as motor vehicles, fast-food chains, laundry detergent, and potato chips.' That this trend has run its course became evident in the hyper, even surreal, and mercifully short-lived TV series Broken Badges (fall 1990) in which a New Orleans-Cajun detective named Beau Jean (played by Miguel Ferrer, the FBI pathologist Albert in Twin Peaks) was displaced to southern California to add linguistic exoticism and leadership of sorts to an undercover team of occupationally handicapped police officers.' Despite such dilution and distortion of Cajun and Creole identities in the mass media, other movements have developed in Cajun music and cultural studies over the past two decades that quietly and forcefully seek to define Cajun identity through the creation of and reflection about innovations in musical words and forms.

The rise of Creole identity in early colonial Guatemala: Differential patterns in town and countryside

During the past decade, the field of the social history of race relations in colonial Latin America has been dominated by studies based on statistical surveys, compiled from colonial censuses and parish records according to a socio-occupational grid and marriage patterns, placing the different castes within social structures. Looking at these censuses and their statistical analysis, one striking feature constantly comes to light: they reveal to us the evolving variations in racial designations ascribed to individuals and groups by the colonial institutions as well as by society. Consequently, they reflect the ideological motivations and prejudices behind these designations, rather than presenting a valid picture of the racial composition and caste affiliation of society. Correspondingly, the studies themselves have tended somewhat to take the labels and figures indicated in the sources at their face value while not paying enough attention to the beliefs, concepts and prejudices which are the driving force behind them. In her study of the socio-occupational dimensions of race in eighteenth-century Mexico City, for example, Seed has associated the lack of a special niche for the intermediate castes of mestizos (= person of mixed Indian and Spanish descent) and castizos (= a mestizo of a pale skin) in the division of labour portrayed in the censuses of 1753 and I793 with the absence of a specific social category for these castes.1 In a recent article on social stratification in early nineteenth-century Guanajuato, Mexico, Anderson has described how low status Spaniards closely resembled Indians and castes 'because they were Indians and castes [who were] generously provided the label Espafiol [creole, A. M.] by politically sensitive censuses using more flexible criteria than in the past'.2 In his exemplary study on colonial Antequera, Chance has likewise commented that 'a person's racial classification was contingent on what he could get away with', which was evident from the large number of those passed in the censuses as creoles.3 Yet, in another section of his book, he concludes that in comparing the classifications applied in the I 792 census which is his main source

In Praise of Creoleness

Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles. This will be for us an interior attitude-better, a vigilance, or even better, a sort of mental envelope in the middle of which our world will be built in full consciousness of the outer world. These words we are communicating to you do not stem from theory, nor do they stem from any learned principles. They are, rather, akin to testimony. They proceed from a sterile experience which we have known before committing ourselves to reactivate our creative potential, and to set in motion the expression of what we are. They are not merely addressed to writers, but to any person of ideas who conceives our space (the archipelago and its foothills of firm land, the continental immensities), in any discipline whatsoever, who is in the painful quest for a more fertile thought, for a more precise expression, for a truer art. May this positioning serve them as it serves us. Let it take part of the emergence, here and there, of verticalities which would maintain their Creole identity and elucidate it at the same time, opening thus for us the routes of the world and of freedom. Caribbean literature does not yet exist. We are still in a state of preliterature: that of a written production without a home audience, ignorant of the authors/readers interaction which is the primary condition of the development of a literature. This situation is not imputable to the mere political domination, it can also be explained by the fact that our truth found itself behind bars, in the deep bottom of ourselves, unknown to our consciousness and to the artistically free reading of the world in which we live. We are fundamentally stricken with exteriority. This from a long time ago to the present day. We have seen the world through the filter of western values, and our foundation was exoticized by the French vision we had to adopt. It is a terrible condition to perceive one's interior architecture, one's world, the instants of one's days, one's own values, with the eyes of the other. All along overdetermined, in history, in thoughts, in daily life, in ideals (even the ideals of progress), caught in the trick of cultural dependence, of political dependence, of economic dependence, we were deported out of ourselves at every moment of our scriptural history. This determined a writing for the Other, a borrowed writing, steeped in French values, or at least unrelated to this land, and which, in spite of a few positive aspects, did nothing else but maintain in our minds the domination of an elsewhere.... A perfectly noble