Creolization in the French Americas

Creolization in the French Americas PDF Author: Jean-Marc Masseaut
Publisher: University of Louisiana
ISBN: 9781935754688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Creolization in the French Americas aims to uncover and explore the roots, development, and cultural dynamism of Creole society and culture in the colonial and post-colonial francophone world. The essays and creative works gathered here draw from distinct but related literatures emerging in the Francophone, Anglophone, African, and Caribbean scholarship on creolization, including such divergent fields as early modern European colonial history, dance choreography, psychoanalysis, linguistics, literary study of new world travel narratives, American Studies, museum studies, French literature, philosophy, art history, and African and African Diaspora studies. The collection embodies the conviction that complex phenomena like the emergence and evolution of Creole identity require perspectives that only a diversity of disciplines and points of view can offer, and that those disciplines and perspectives can come together and progress toward knowledge and understanding.

Creolization in the French Americas

Creolization in the French Americas PDF Author: Jean-Marc Masseaut
Publisher: University of Louisiana
ISBN: 9781935754688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Creolization in the French Americas aims to uncover and explore the roots, development, and cultural dynamism of Creole society and culture in the colonial and post-colonial francophone world. The essays and creative works gathered here draw from distinct but related literatures emerging in the Francophone, Anglophone, African, and Caribbean scholarship on creolization, including such divergent fields as early modern European colonial history, dance choreography, psychoanalysis, linguistics, literary study of new world travel narratives, American Studies, museum studies, French literature, philosophy, art history, and African and African Diaspora studies. The collection embodies the conviction that complex phenomena like the emergence and evolution of Creole identity require perspectives that only a diversity of disciplines and points of view can offer, and that those disciplines and perspectives can come together and progress toward knowledge and understanding.

Creolization in the Americas

Creolization in the Americas PDF Author: David Buisseret
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585441013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Creolization, the process of cultural interchange--in this case, between peoples of the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean--is an important aspect of the American experience. Language, literature, food, dress, and social relations are all affected by the interplay of cultures. Only recently, though, have scholars fully begun to understand creolization as a mutual exchange rather than the acculturation of colonized peoples to a dominant culture. Focusing on diverse settings and different aspects of culture, five scholars here examine the process of creolization: its origins, historical and modern meanings of the term, and the various manifestations of the complex, continuing process of cultural exchange and adaptation that began when Africans, American Indians, and Europeans came into contact with each other. While the authors vary in their approaches and, in some respects, their conclusions, they essentially agree that the notion of cultural syncretism--whether described as acculturation or creolization--is a conceptual tool of crucial importance for analyzing the interchange that occurred between peoples of Europe and the Americas. Contributors to this ground-breaking volume and their respective chapters are David Buisseret, "The Process of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica"; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "`The Facility Offered by the Country': The Creolization of Agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley"; Mary L. Galvin, "Decoctions for Carolinians: The Creation of a Creole Medicine Chest in Colonial South Carolina"; Richard Cullen Rath, "Drums and Power: Ways of Creolizing Music in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia, 1730-1790"; and J. L. Dillard, "The Evidence for Pidgin Creolization in Early American English." Buisseret also contributes an introduction that places the other articles within the context of recent scholarship on creolization

American Creoles

American Creoles PDF Author: Martin Munro
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846317533
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
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.

The Libertine Colony

The Libertine Colony PDF Author: Doris L Garraway
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway’s readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of “the libertine colony.” She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean. Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

The Story of French New Orleans

The Story of French New Orleans PDF Author: Dianne Guenin-Lelle
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496804872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests "French" New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted "original" Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

Staging Creolization

Staging Creolization PDF Author: Emily Sahakian
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940095
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization—the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based process, dramatized by French Caribbean women’s plays and enacted through their international production and reception histories. The author contends that the syncretism of the plays is not a static, fixed creole aesthetics but rather a dynamic process of creolization in motion, informed by history and based in the African-derived principle that performance is a space of creativity and transformation that connects past, present, and future.

Franco-America in the Making

Franco-America in the Making PDF Author: Jonathan K. Gosnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803285272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
"A study of the manifestation and persistence of hybrid Franco-American literary, musical, culinary, and media cultures in North America, particularly New England and southern Louisiana"--

Creole City

Creole City PDF Author: Nathalie Dessens
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In Creole City, Nathalie Dessens opens a window onto antebellum New Orleans during a time of rapid expansion and dizzying change. The story—rooted in the Sainte-Gême Family Papers harbored at The Historic New Orleans Collection—follows the twenty-year correspondence of Jean Boze to Henri de Ste-Gême, both refugees from Saint-Domingue. Exploring parts of the city’s early nineteenth-century history that have previously been neglected, Dessens examines how New Orleans came to symbolize progress, adventure, and culture to so many. Through Boze’s letters, readers witness the convergence of new Americans and old colonial populations that sparked transformations in the economic, social, and political structures, as well as the Creolization of the city. Additionally, the letters depict transatlantic experiences at a time when New Orleans was a key hub of the Atlantic trade and so very distinct from other nineteenth-century American metropolises, such as New York and Philadelphia. Dessens’s portrayal of this seminal period is innovative and crucial to understanding of the city’s rich record and its larger role in American history.

Creolization as Cultural Creativity

Creolization as Cultural Creativity PDF Author: Robert Baron
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617031070
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact. An extraordinary number of cultures from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the southern United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone are discussed in these essays. Drawing from the disciplines of folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, history, and material culture studies, essayists address theoretical dimensions of creolization and present in-depth field studies. Topics include adaptations of the Gombe drum over the course of its migration from Jamaica to West Africa; uses of “ritual piracy” involved in the appropriation of Catholic symbols by Puerto Rican brujos; the subversion of official culture and authority through playful and combative use of “creole talk” in Argentine literature and verbal arts; the mislabeling and trivialization (“toy blindness”) of objects appropriated by African Americans in the American South; the strategic use of creole techniques among storytellers within the islands of the Indian Ocean; and the creolized character of New Orleans and its music. In the introductory essay the editors address both local and universal dimensions of creolization and argue for the centrality of its expressive manifestations for creolization scholarship.

The Creolization of American Culture

The Creolization of American Culture PDF Author: Christopher J Smith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095049
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The Creolization of American Culture examines the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, and biography of the painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) as a lens through which to see the multiethnic antebellum world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy. As a young man living in the multiethnic working-class community of New York's Lower East Side, Mount took part in the black-white musical interchange his paintings depict. An avid musician and tune collector as well as an artist, he was the among the first to depict vernacular fiddlers, banjo players, and dancers precisely and sympathetically. His close observations and meticulous renderings provide rich evidence of performance techniques and class-inflected paths of musical apprenticeship that connected white and black practitioners. Looking closely at the bodies and instruments Mount depicts in his paintings as well as other ephemera, Christopher J. Smith traces the performance practices of African American and Anglo-European music-and-dance traditions while recovering the sounds of that world. Further, Smith uses Mount's depictions of black and white music-making to open up fresh perspectives on cross-ethnic cultural transference in Northern and urban contexts, showing how rivers, waterfronts, and other sites of interracial interaction shaped musical practices by transporting musical culture from the South to the North and back. The "Africanization" of Anglo-Celtic tunes created minstrelsy's musical "creole synthesis," a body of melodic and rhythmic vocabularies, repertoires, tunes, and musical techniques that became the foundation of American popular music. Reading Mount's renderings of black and white musicians against a background of historical sites and practices of cross-racial interaction, Smith offers a sophisticated interrogation and reinterpretation of minstrelsy, significantly broadening historical views of black-white musical exchange.