Creole Subjects In The Colonial Americas

Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as "creoles" who moved from the Old World to the New World, this collection of eighteen original essays investigates the creolization of literary forms and genres in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas facilitates a cross-disciplinary, intrahemispheric, and Atlantic comparison of early settlers' colonialism and creole elites' relation to both indigenous peoples and imperial regimes. Contributors explore literatures written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English to identify creole responses to such concepts as communal identity, local patriotism, nationalism, and literary expression. The essays take the reader from the first debates about cultural differences that underpinned European ideologies of conquest to the transposition of European literary tastes into New World cultural contexts, and from the natural science discourse concerning creolization to the literary manifestations of creole patriotism. The volume includes an addendum of etymological terms and critical bibliographic commentary. Contributors: Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland Raquel Chang-Rodriguez, City University of New York Lucia Helena Costigan, Ohio State University Jim Egan, Brown University Sandra M. Gustafson, University of Notre Dame Carlos Jauregui, Vanderbilt University Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, University of Pennsylvania Jose Antonio Mazzotti, Tufts University Stephanie Merrim, Brown University Susan Scott Parrish, University of Michigan Luis Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Jeffrey H. Richards, Old Dominion University Kathleen Ross, New York University David S. Shields, University of South Carolina Teresa A. Toulouse, Tulane University Lisa Voigt, University of Chicago Jerry M. Williams, West Chester University

The word Creole evokes a richness rivaled only by the term's widespread misunderstanding. Now both aspects of this unique people and culture are given thorough, illuminating scrutiny in Creole, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary history of Louisiana's Creole population. Written by scholars, many of Creole descent, the volume wrangles with the stuff of legend and conjecture while fostering an appreciation for the Creole contribution to the American mosaic. The collection opens with a historically relevant perspective found in Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson's 1916 piece "People of Color of Louisiana" and continues with contemporary writings: Joan M. Martin on the history of quadroon balls; Michel Fabre and Creole expatriates in France; Barbara Rosendale Duggal with a debiased view of Marie Laveau; Fehintola Mosadomi and the downtrodden roots of Creole grammar; Anthony G. Barthelemy on skin color and racism as an American legacy; Caroline Senter on Reconstruction poets of political vision; and much more. Violet Harrington Bryan, Lester Sullivan, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sybil Kein, Mary Gehman, Arthi A. Anthony, and Mary L. Morton offer excellent commentary on topics that range from the lifestyles of free women of color in the nineteenth century to the Afro-Caribbean links to Creole cooking. By exploring the vibrant yet marginalized culture of the Creole people across time, Creole goes far in diminishing past and present stereotypes of this exuberant segment of our society. A study that necessarily embraces issues of gender, race and color, class, and nationalism, it speaks to the tensions of an increasingly ethnically mixed mainstream America.

In American Creoles, leading authorities examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics, and culture in various forms and consider figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Edouard Glissant, William Faulkner, and Lafcadio Hearn. Exploring the ideas of Creole culture and creolization—terms rooted in the history of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas—the essays provide productive ways to conceive of the larger Caribbean as a single cultural and historical entity.

By approaching the colonial Caribbean as an interconnected region, Tessa Murphy recasts small islands as the site of broader contests over Indigenous dominion, racial belonging, economic development, and colonial subjecthood.

*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading "Little by little, the bird makes its nest." - Old Haitian Creole Proverb Vibrant, up-tempo vocals and exquisitely soulful harmonies paired with an accordion-heavy and drum-tastic blend of folksy and bluesy instrumentals that one cannot help but tap one's foot to. Rich and creamy, ultra-seasoned bisques. Flavorful, aromatic gumbos packed with tomatoes, smoked sausages, chicken, and shellfish. A heavenly concoction of stewed rice and an assortment of meats and seafood, enlivened with tomatoes, celery, onions, and peppers, otherwise known as "red jambalaya." Striking paintings featuring bright pops of color and featureless silhouettes of men, women, and children with varying shades of brown skin. These are often the first sounds, scents, tastes, and visuals evoked when the word "Creole" is brought up in a conversation. Contrary to popular belief, the term "Creole" is not restricted to the Louisiana Creole, nor the Creoles of color, which collectively refers to the overall ethnic group and different local Creole cultures that blossomed across the Spanish and French colonies in Louisiana, Mississippi, and northwestern Florida. Today, the term is much more complex and may be applied to any of the various Creole cultures around the globe. The word may also be used to describe any language that has spawned from a mixture of languages, or specifically the associated, but distinct tongues developed within Creole communities, as well as the speakers of these languages themselves. Generally speaking, however, the word "Creole" refers to the cultures birthed from the colonial-era racial and cultural mixing between Europeans (mostly of French, Spanish, or Portuguese descent) and Africans, as well as Native Americans, and other local or indigenous peoples in French, Spanish, and Portuguese territories. The merging of the above-mentioned heritages is a process now known as "creolization." Indeed, the image of a caramel-skinned individual with a combination of Afrocentric, Native American, and Caucasian physical features falls within the extensive realm of "Creole culture," but it is important to remember that the Creole peoples come in all complexions, shapes, and sizes, ranging from darker skin coupled with predominantly "African" traits and virtually no visible signs of European ancestry, to sets of blue or green eyes set amongst other ambiguously "Caucasian" characteristics. Beige-skinned individuals sculpted with an assortment of Spanish and Southeast Asian features, as seen in many of the Filipino Creole, also belong to the same category. The Creoles: The History and Legacy of Some of the Americas' Most Unique Ethnic Groups profiles the people, from their origins to their histories across the Americas. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Creoles like never before.

Creole America reveals how literary culture in the New Republic period is formed not only by expansionist designs on the North American continent, but also a push for commercial empire in the hemisphere via the roots and routes of the West Indian trades. Celebrated and denigrated, West Indian immigrant Alexander Hamilton--chief architect of the United States as an "empire for commerce" as Washington's Secretary of the Treasury--came to embody the great uneasiness that many U.S. Americans expressed about the unpredictable, and potentially disastrous, effects on the nation and national character of extensive relations between the slave colonies of the West Indies and the putatively free and democratic states of the independent mainland. Sean X. Goudie examines such anxiety and ambivalence as characteristic of what he provocatively terms the New Republic's "creole complex." Goudie demonstrates how distinctions between U.S. and West Indian bodies and commodities blur amid ongoing U.S. participation in the treacherous West Indian trades. Creole America thus compels readers to come face-to-face with disturbing affiliations between U.S. and West Indian creole characters and cultures at the turn of the nineteenth century

Eight essays explore the social and historical foundations of mixed-race people in Louisiana and along the US coast of the Gulf of Mexico, specific features of Gulf Creole culture, and ethnic and identity developments during the 20th century. The cultural features include Mardi Gras, zydeco music, and the place of the language in the larger New World French Creole. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book is a ‘must read’ for those who are looking for fresh perspectives on the process of creolization of language. Focusing on peoples whose agency has too often been rendered invisible in colonial and neo-colonial history and on voices which have too often been silenced in linguistic accounts of creole genesis, this volume considers socio-historical and linguistic evidence that attests to the important roles played in the emergence of the Atlantic and Pacific Creoles by marginalized populations, such as women and people of non-European descent. In this work, the authors amass and critically analyze a wealth of compelling data not only from phonology, morpho-syntax, pragmatics, and descriptive, theoretical, and applied linguistics, but also from history, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and critical theory to demonstrate how enterprising women, rebellious slaves, insubordinate sailors, and a host of other renegades and maroons had a major impact on the creolized societies, cultures, and languages of the colonial era Atlantic and Pacific.