Questioning And Complicating Creole Society In The Nineteenth Century Caribbean

In this volume, scholars take the debate on Creolisation and its manifestations beyond the discipline of history and into debates on ethnicity, identity, class, the economics and politics of slavery and freedom, language, music, cookery and religion.

First published in 1990. This collection of essays examines the position of immigrants and minorities in Caribbean creóle society which, as M.G. Smith and Edward Brathwaite have pointed out, originated from the interaction between Europeans and Africans in the New World context during the period of slavery.

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.

Crossing the Line examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived by their metropolitan contemporaries as far removed—geographically and morally—from Britain and "true" Britons. Routinely portrayed as single-minded in their pursuit of money and irredeemably corrupted by their investment in slavery, white creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labor. The emancipation-era novels that anchor this study of Britain's Caribbean colonies question categories of genre, historiography, politics, class, race, and identity. Revealing the contradictions embedded in the texts’ constructions of the Caribbean "realities" they seek to dramatize, Candace Ward shows how these white creole authors gave birth to characters and enlivened settings and situations in ways that shed light on the many sociopolitical fictions that shaped life in the anglophone Atlantic.

Creole Noise is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. By emphasizing multiracial origins, transnational influences, and musical performance alongside often violent historical events of the nineteenth century - slavery, Emancipation, the Morant Bay Rebellion, the era of blackface minstrelsy, indentureship and immigration - it revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern, twentieth-century phenomenon, associated with regional anti-colonial or black-affirming nationalist projects. It explores both the lives and the literary texts of a number of early progenitors, among these a number of pro-slavery white creoles as well as the first black author of literary dialect in the English-speaking Caribbean. Creole Noise features a number of fascinating historical characters, among these Henry Garland Murray, a black Jamaican journalist and lecturer; Michael McTurk, the white magistrate from British Guiana who, as 'Quow', authored one of the earliest books of dialect literature; as well as blackface comedian and calypsonian Sam Manning, who along with Marcus Garvey's ex-wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey, wrote a popular dialect play that traveled across the United States. In so doing it reconstructs an earlier period of dialect literature, usually isolated or dismissed from the cultural narrative as racist mimicry or merely political, not part of a continuum of artistic production in the Caribbean.

The title of Volume IV of the General History of the Caribbean, the Long Nineteenth Century, indicates its range, from the last years of the eighteenth to the first two decades of the twentieth. The volume begins during the hegemony of the European nations and the social and economic dominance of the slave masters. It ends with the hegemony of the United States of America and the economic dominance of American and European agricultural and mercantile corporations. The chapters provide thematic accounts of societies emerging from slavery at different times during the century and also of the circumstances that affected the extent to which these societies were autochthonous within their various territories. The book's survey of this span of 150 years begins with the Haitian Revolution and its repercussions both within the region and outside. It then examines in turn the variety of ways in which the emancipated, their ex-masters and the colonial powers related to each other in the economy, polity and society of various territories; the economy of sugar in decline; the hostility of local landed elites to the welfare of the emancipated, to the ways landless labourers adapted to survive, and to interregional migrations; the social and cultural transformations of new populations from Africa, India and China; the technical innovations in the sugar industry towards the end of the century that differentiate the interests of field owner from factory owner; the decline of white pre-eminence, yet their resistance to claims for autonomy and an end to colonial tutelage

This book explores the articulation of white creole identity in Barbados during the age of abolitionism.

John Jacob Thomas (1841-1889) was one of the leading members of a newly emergent intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Trinidad--a group that could be identified as both "Victorian" and "Pan-Africanist"--who not only challenged British imperialist accounts of Trinidad but also tried to show the interconnections, bloodlines, and origins of "Caribbean" and "English" identities usually perceived as separate and distinct. As a member of that emerging black lower middle class, Thomas was well known for his 1869 study of Trinidad's Creole language, as well as for Froudacity (1889), his pointed and witty response to the travel narrative of the Victorian James Anthony Froude, an early example of "writing back to empire." Responding to Trinidad's transformation by significant migrations from the eastern Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, he sought to "tame" the working-class energies that radicalized his work and to bring them in line with "modern" conceptions of the nation. As a defender of francophone cultural production in a British colony, though a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, and as a pan-Africanist whose commitments were simultaneously diasporic and local, Thomas complicates current discussions of colonial and postcolonial intellectuals, Black Atlantic paradigms, and Victorian intellectual life. In Creole Recitations, the first full-length study of Thomas, Faith Smith puts his texts in dialogue with other narratives by local and international Pan-Africanists, Victorian intellectuals, and local and regional blacks, coloreds, and whites. Shedding light on the intellectual terrain of the late nineteenth century, she provides an important context for better-known figures of twentieth-century Caribbean literature such as C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid.