Creating the Creole Island

Creating the Creole Island PDF Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333999
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency. Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Creating the Creole Island

Creating the Creole Island PDF Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333999
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency. Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Creole Renegades

Creole Renegades PDF Author: Bénédicte Boisseron
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Caribbean Philosophical Association Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award Caribbean Studies Association Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, Honorable Mention  In Creole Renegades, Bénédicte Boisseron looks at exiled Caribbean authors—Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferriére, and more—whose works have been well received in their adopted North American countries but who are often viewed by their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors. These expatriate and second-generation authors refuse to be simple bearers of Caribbean culture, often dramatically distancing themselves from the postcolonial archipelago. Their writing is frequently infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, but their deviance is not defiant. Underscoring the typically ignored contentious relationship between modern diaspora authors and the Caribbean, Boisseron ultimately argues that displacement and creative autonomy are often manifest in guilt and betrayal, central themes that emerge again and again in the work of these writers.  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change

Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change PDF Author: Celina Jeffery
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648894348
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"Ephemeral Coast - Visualizing Coastal Climate Change" considers the ways that art can offer a means through which to discover, analyze, re-imagine and re-frame emotive discourses about the ecological and cultural transformations of the coastline. This edited anthology takes ephemerality as its central conceptual and methodological framework and presents a series of essays that create interconnections between environmental and social considerations of the coast, a succession of embodied creative practices, and shifting regional geographic identities. The book presents a series of specific case studies of artistic practices and strategies that seek to capture the rewriting of cartographic maps that are being reshaped by rising seas, coastal flooding and catastrophic weather. The essays in this edited volume engender creative strategies for understanding new and uncertain coastal ecologies and the loss, expulsion or destruction of their associated cultures, habitats, species and ecosystems. The anthology also looks at the historical, mnemonic and contemporary transitional conditions of ‘conflicted’ coastal spaces in which empire, modernity and globalization press on coastal erosion and incursions, proliferate it with trivial plastics, pollution and disposable attitudes, and bring vulnerable communities into uncertain futures."

Creole Clay

Creole Clay PDF Author: Patricia J. Fay
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052939
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
"Artfully combines personal narrative, ethnographic insight, and an artisan’s treatise on material culture and production techniques to bring quotidian Caribbean ceramic wares to life as material expressions of cultural adaptation and markers of the region’s socio-economic history."--Michael R. McDonald, author of Food Culture in Central America "Weaves a complex history that links the Caribbean with Africa, Europe, the Americas, and India and draws together threads from indigenous cultures to the impact of the slave trade, indentured workers, colonial rulers, postcolonial politics, and global tourism."--Moira Vincentelli, author of Women Potters: Transforming Traditions "In the field of indigenous ceramics, cross-regional research is becoming increasingly important for potters, students, and scholars alike. Fay establishes a solid base for both further regional research and global comparative work."--Elizabeth Perrill, author of Zulu Pottery "Provides a historical and social context for the heritage of traditional ceramics in the contemporary Caribbean and at the same time grounds it in the everyday practice of potters."--Mark W. Hauser, author of An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica Beautifully illustrated with richly detailed photographs, this volume traces the living heritage of locally made pottery in the English-speaking Caribbean. Patricia Fay combines her own expertise in making ceramics with two decades of interviews, visits, and participant-observation in the region, providing a perspective that is technically informed and anthropologically rigorous. Through the analysis of ceramic methods, Fay reveals that the traditional skills of local potters in the Caribbean are inherited from diverse points of origin in Africa, Europe, India, and the Americas. At the heart of the book is an in-depth discussion of the women potters of Choiseul, Saint Lucia, whose self-sufficient Creole lifestyle emerged in the nineteenth century following the emancipation of plantation slaves. Using methods inherited from Africa, today’s potters adapt heritage practice for new contexts. In Nevis, Antigua, and Jamaica, related pottery traditions reveal skill sets derived from multiple West and Central African influences, and in the case of Jamaica, launched ceramics as a contemporary art form. In Barbados, colonial wheel and kiln technologies imported from England are evident in the many productive clay studios on the island. In Trinidad, Hindu ritual vessels are a key feature of a ceramic tradition that arrived with indentured labor from India, and in Guyana potters in both village and urban settings preserve indigenous Amerindian culture. Fay emphasizes the integral role relationships between mothers and daughters play in the transmission of skills from generation to generation. Since most pottery produced is intended for domestic use as cooking pots, serving vessels, and for water storage, women have been key to sustaining these traditions. But Fay’s work also shows that these pots have value beyond their everyday usefulness. In the process of forming and firing, the diverse cultural heritage of the Caribbean becomes manifest, exemplifying the continuing encounter between old and new, local and global, and traditional and contemporary. A volume in the series Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Creole Archipelago

The Creole Archipelago PDF Author: Tessa Murphy
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812253388
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
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.

Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail

Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail PDF Author: Douglas Hamilton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019884722X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This volume examines the various ways in which islands (and groups of islands) contributed to the establishment, extension, and maintenance of the British Empire in the age of sail.

The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia

The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia PDF Author: Ulbe Bosma
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107435307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around 1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world. In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation that tied local peasant production to industrial manufacturing. A century later, India adopted the Java model in combination with farmers' cooperatives rather than employing coercive measures. Cooperatives did not prevent industrial sugar production from exploiting small farmers and cane cutters, however, and Bosma finds that much of modern sugar production in Asia resembles the abuses of labor by the old plantation systems of the Caribbean.

Madeleine's Children

Madeleine's Children PDF Author: Sue Peabody
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190233885
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In 1759 a baby girl was born to an impoverished family on the Indian subcontinent. Her parents pawned her into bondage as a way to survive famine. A Portuguese slaver sold the girl to a pious French spinster in Bengal, where she was baptized as Madeleine. Eventually she was taken to France byway of Ile de France (Mauritius), and from there to Ile Bourbon (Reunion), where she worked on the plantation of the Routier family and gave birth to three children: Maurice, Constance, and Furcy. Following the master''s death in 1787, Madame Routier registered Madeleine''s manumission, making herfree on paper and thus exempting the Routiers from paying the annual head tax on slaves. However, according to Madeleine''s children, she was never told that she was free. She continued to serve the widow Routier for another nineteen years, through the Revolution, France''s general emancipation of1794 (which the colonists of the Indian Ocean successfully repelled), the Napoleonic restoration of slavery, and British occupation of France''s Indian Ocean colonies. Not until the widow Routier died in 1808 did Madeleine learn of her freedom and that the Routier estate owed her nineteen years ofback wages. Madeleine tried to use the Routiers'' debt to negotiate for her son Furcy''s freedom from Joseph Lory, the Routiers'' son-in-law and heir, but Lory tricked the illiterate Madeleine into signing papers that, in essence, consigned Furcy to Lory as his slave for life.While Lory invested in slave smuggling and helped introduce sugar cultivation to Ile Bourbon, Furcy spent the next quarter century trying to obtain legal recognition of his free status as he moved from French Ile Bourbon to British Mauritius and then to Paris. His legal actions produced hundreds ofpages that permit reconstruction of the lives of Furcy and his family in astonishing detail. The Cour Royale de Paris, France''s highest court of appeal, finally ruled Furcy ne libre (freeborn) in 1843. Eight rare extant letters signed by Furcy over two decades tell in his own words how he understoodhis enslavement and freedom within these multiple legal jurisdictions and societies. France''s general emancipation of 1848 erased the distinction between slavery and freedom for all former slaves but the reaction of 1851 excluded them from citizenship. The struggle for justice, respect, and equalityfor former slaves and their descendants would not be realized within Furcy''s lifetime.The life stories of Madeleine and her three children are especially precious because, unlike scores of slave narratives published in the United States and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no autobiographical narrative of a slave held by French-published or unpublished-exists. Thiswill be one of only a handful of modern biographies of enslaved people within France''s empire, in French or in English, and the only one to explore transformations in slavery and freedom in French colonies of the Indian Ocean. This story is also significant because of the legal arguments advanced inFurcy''s freedom suits between 1817 and 1843. Furcy''s lawyers argued that he was free by race (as the descendent of an Indian rather than an African mother) and also by Free Soil (the legal principle whereby any slave setting foot on French soil thereby became free, since Madeleine resided in Francebefore Furcy was born). Parallel debates surround the American case of Dred Scott, who began his long and unsuccessful bid for freedom in 1846 in the former French colonial city of St. Louis, Missouri, just three years after the French Cour Royale de Paris upheld Furcy''s freedom on the basis of FreeSoil. However, the French ruling that Furcy was free by Free Soil and the rejection of the racial argument offer a historical counterpoint to the infamous Taney opinion of 1857.The gripping story of Madeleine and her children is especially well-suited to exploring the developments of French colonization, plantation slavery, race, sugar cultivation, and abolitionism. A fluid narrative, it should have appeal for readers of the history of slavery, world history, Indian Oceanhistory, and French colonial history.

Fracture Feminism

Fracture Feminism PDF Author: David Sigler
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438484879
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Feminist writers in British Romanticism often developed alternatives to linear time. Viewing time as a system of social control, writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Shelley wrote about current events as if they possessed knowledge from the future. Fracture Feminism explores this tradition with a perspective informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, showing how time can be imagined to contain a hidden fracture—and how that fracture, when claimed as a point of view, could be the basis for an emancipatory politics. Arguing that the period's most radical experiments in undoing time stemmed from the era's discourses of gender and women's rights, Fracture Feminism asks: to what extent could women "belong" to their historical moment, given their political and social marginalization? How would voices from the future interrupt the ordinary procedures of political debate? What if utopia were understood as a time rather than a place, and its time were already inside the present?

Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776

Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 PDF Author: Natalie A. Zacek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 is the first study of the history of the federated colony of the Leeward Islands - Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Kitts - that covers all four islands in the period from their independence from Barbados in 1670 up to the outbreak of the American Revolution, which reshaped the Caribbean. Natalie A. Zacek emphasizes the extent to which the planters of these islands attempted to establish recognizably English societies in tropical islands based on plantation agriculture and African slavery. By examining conflicts relating to ethnicity and religion, controversies regarding sex and social order, and a series of virulent battles over the limits of local and imperial authority, this book depicts these West Indian colonists as skilled improvisers who adapted to an unfamiliar environment, and as individuals as committed as other American colonists to the norms and values of English society, politics, and culture.