Creolization

11 Key excerpts on "Creolization"

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  Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia

  • Jacqueline Knörr(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  Old boundaries are dissolved in the process of Creolization because they cease to make sense in an existentially new social and local context. However, in the process of recontextualizing culture and identity new boundaries are created that do make sense within this new environment. Creolization is thus a process that ultimately subjects identity to (varying degrees of ) essentialization. 24 The confusion as to what creole is stems above all from the fact that the social and historical context of the concept’s genesis – which involves more than etymology – is ignored when used in an undifferentiated manner to denote everything mixed and somehow intermediate and in-between. The fact that Creolization is often used in a somewhat arbitrary fashion to de-scribe all sorts of contemporary processes of interaction and mixture has resulted in resistance to the utilization of the concept outside the historical context of the slave exile. As Sydney Mintz remarks: ‘But the term “Creolization” … had been historically and geographically specific. It stood for centuries of culture-building, rather than culture mixing or culture blending, by those who became Carib-bean people. They were not becoming transnational; they were creating forms by which to live, even while they were being cruelly tested physically and mentally’ (Mintz 1998: 119). It is clear that equating Creolization with transnationalization is a mistake. 25 Nevertheless, the conceptual arbitrariness that is justifiably criticized here is not a (good enough) reason for discarding the heuristic potential that the conceptual field creole has for describing and analysing contemporary processes of social and cultural interaction. Taking into account the social and historical context of the genesis of the concept does not exclude the use and development of the concept’s heuristic potential for phenomena of the present.

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  Creolizing Europe : Legacies and Transformations

  • Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Shirley Anne Tate(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Liverpool University Press

    (Publisher)

  It is clear that, at this point in his career, Brathwaite saw Creolization as a kind of continuum: a process involving, at diferent historical moments, diferent groups, always in combination, in a society which is the product of their entanglement. Te argument is about their mutual implication in a process of ‘indigenization’. Writers like Édouard Glissant use the term ‘Creole’ in a broader sense, to describe the entanglement – or what he calls the ‘relation’ – between diferent cultures forced into cohabitation in the colonial context. Creolization in this context refers to the processes of ‘cultural and linguistic mixing’ which arise from the entanglement of diferent cultures in the same indigenous space or location, primarily in the context of slavery, colonization and the plantation societies characteristic of the Caribbean and parts of Spanish America and Southeast Asia. In Glissant’s terms, slavery, the plantation and the tensions and struggles associated with them were necessary conditions for the emergence of Creole. Tis process of cultural ‘transculturation’ occurs in such a way as to produce, as it were, a ‘third space’ – a ‘native’ or indigenous vernacular space, marked by the fusion of cultural elements drawn from all originating cultures, but resulting in a confguration in which these elements, though never equal, can no longer be disaggregated or restored to their originary forms, since they no longer exist in a ‘pure’ state but have been permanently ‘translated’. Mary Louise Pratt calls such sites of entanglement ‘contact zones’ – ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other ofen in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordi-nation’ (Pratt, 1992, 4). Tis qualifcation is critical. Contrary to simpler versions of the colonizer/colonized paradigm in its truncated binary form, this ‘grappling’ process is always a two-way struggle as well as always reciprocal, and mutually constituting.

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  Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination

  Notes on Fleeing the Plantation

  • Patricia Marie Northover, Michaeline Crichlow(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  In brief, Caribbean Creolization’s local manifestations relate to, or are articulated with, other Creole manifestations elsewhere so that ‘‘its’’ Creole practices are constantly refreshed and transformed by various cultural transactions produced under varying conditions within the wider world. This book’s chapters, however, move beyond the issues of origin of African American culture writ large, which more often than not obscure productive insights into the contemporary substantive and contextual transformations within which processes of Creolization are created and altered within the current palate of social choices. Creolization GENERALIZED: BEYOND THE PL ANTATION ENCL AVE OF Creolization STUDIES This section is animated by the current attempt to universalize the concept of Creolization, extending its application well beyond Caribbean and former plantation societies, and the responses to that attempt. We argue that creoli-zation can indeed be read into the world, but its imbrication should be treated as ‘‘stitches on time,’’ to borrow a valuable phrase from Dube, ∏∂ intricated through global—that is, here and elsewhere—spaces. This marks what we have called a ‘‘Creolization-in-the-world’’ process, which is en-tangled in the ‘‘mapping of the present’’ and has been articulated within diasporic traditions but has gone beyond them as well. ‘‘The unity is sub-marine,’’ ∏∑ indeed, but we may wish to add here that the process is also deeply entangled, if not extraordinarily convoluted. Thus, as emphasized in early Creolization studies, the outcome of e√orts L O C AT I N G T H E G L O B A L I N Creolization 29 to adapt, resist, and accommodate the slave regime and to forge cultural communities and selves constituted a set of practices that sheltered slaves from the generally oppressive conditions of slavery and created the condi-tions for the existence of even thriving alternatives in many short-lived communities.

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  Creolization

  History, Ethnography, Theory

  • Charles Stewart(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This means that the ambiguous grey zones, which can be located in the space between categories and boundaries under pressure, are privileged sites for studying the interplay between culture and identity. This is not because all boundaries eventually disappear, but because they are made visible through their negotiation and renegotiation, transcendence, transformation, and reframing. A world without social boundaries (a neoliberalist’s dream?) is sociologically unthinkable.

  THE TERM “Creolization”

  One of the more popular concepts used to deal with the increased complexity of the empirical fields now studied by anthropologists, is Creolization (Drummond 1980; Hannerz 1992, 1996). Creolization is often used merely as a synonym for mixing or hybridity, but from the discussion below, it will become apparent that both the historical origins of the term and its contemporary usage in societies containing self-designating creoles suggest that a more restricted use of the term might be both necessary and analytically helpful.

  “Creolization,” as the term is used by some anthropologists, is an analogy taken from linguistics. This discipline in turn took the term from a particular aspect of colonialism, namely the uprooting and displacement of large numbers of people in colonial plantation economies. Both in the Caribbean basin and in the Indian Ocean, certain (or all) groups who contributed to this economy during slavery were described as creoles. Originally, a criollo meant a Spaniard born in the New World (as opposed to peninsulares); today, a similar usage is current in La Réunion, where everybody born in the island, regardless of skin color, is seen as créole, as opposed to the zoréoles

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  From the Margins

  Historical Anthropology and Its Futures

  • Brian Keith Axel(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  3 Marginal Contexts Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context Michel-Rolph Trouillot Le lieu est incontournable. —Edouard Glissant Creolization is a miracle begging for analysis. Because it first occurred against all odds, between the jaws of brute and absolute power, no explanation seems to do justice to the very wonder that it happened at all. Understandably, the study of Creole cultures and languages has always left room for the analyst’s astonishment. Theories of Creolization or of Creole societies, assessments of what it means to speak—or to be—Creole are, in turn, still very much affected by the ideological and political sensibilities of the observers (Bolland 1992; Calvet 1997; Chaudenson 1993; Le Brun 1996; Price 2001; Price and Price 1997). It may not be possible or even meritorious to get rid of these sensibilities. Still, the knowledge of Creolization can benefit from a more ethnographic ap-proach that takes into account the concrete contexts within which new cultural ideals, practices, and patterns—none of which can be reduced to the other— developed in the Americas. The plantation society, the plural society, and the Creole society models—even Nigel Bolland’s ‘‘dialectical’’ approach (Bolland 1992)—all seize on Creolization as a totality, thus one level removed from the concrete circumstances faced by the individuals engaged in the process. All these models invoke history; some even use it at times. Yet the historical condi-tions of cultural production rarely become a fundamental and necessary part of the descriptions or analyses that these models generate. Calls for a more refined look at historical particulars (see, for example, Mintz 1971; Mintz and Price 1992) remain largely unheeded. Worse, current apologists of créolité (see, for example, Bernabé et al. 1989; Confiant in Watts 1998) pay even less attention to the historical record than did their predecessors in cultural nationalism, per-

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  Transatlantic Parallaxes

  Toward Reciprocal Anthropology

  • Anne Raulin, Susan Carol Rogers(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  3 Creolization, Racial Imagination, and the Music Market in French Louisiana Sara Le Menestrel Creolization was established as a cultural process by a literary and politi-cal creoleness 1 movement in the 1980s. Today it is used as an analytical concept by anthropologists and historians and as the basis for claims to identity in societies considering themselves Creole. Consequently, the term is as ideological as it is descriptive. For many North American and European scholars of Creolization, the concept, like all metaphors con-nected with cultural mixing (such as hybridity and métissage ), includes the myths of origins and “racial” purity and cannot avoid strategies of exclu-sion. 2 Charles Stewart emphasizes this racist heritage, which he believes too many researchers pass over too quickly. He reminds us that the term Creole is rooted in an imperial history associating birth in the New World with “deculturation” (1999: 44). For his part, John Tomlinson invites anthropologists to adapt themselves to the ambiguities and aporias of such concepts by ceaselessly questioning them and using them as ever-provisional tools for dialogue (2005: 572). By focusing on ethnographic fieldwork and everyday practices, as Aisha Khan prompts us to do, we can distance ourselves from these concepts and reveal the many issues at stake in situations of cultural mixing and attendant processes of hierarchization (2005: 569). The Creolization question is especially visible in the category of world music. Since the 1990s the rhetoric of world music has raised the status of the concept of hybridity in the field of music studies, while too often overlooking the racial imaginary in its formulations. “The transnational mix has not erased race from music, but rather it has recontextualized it,” assert Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, who decry what they consider to be a denial of the racial dimension in music studies and plead for an ap-proach aiming to take its measure (2000: 37).

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  Theorizing Global Studies

  • Darren J O'Byrne, Alexander Hensby(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  The diversity in question involves a mostly rather recent confluence of separate and quite different tradi-tions ... The interconnectedness typically takes the shape of a relatively continuous spectrum of interacting meanings and meaningful forms ... The cultural processes of Creolization are not merely a matter of constant pres-sure from the center toward the periphery, but a more active interplay. (Hannerz 1996: 67–8) Tomlinson defines creole culture in a similar fashion: [T]he increasing traffic between cultures that the globalization process brings suggests that the dissolution of the link between culture and place is Biography Box 14: Stuart Hall Stuart Hall (1932–) was born in Jamaica but has been based mostly in the United Kingdom since 1951. He took over from Richard Hoggart as the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1968 and under his guidance it produced some of the most ground-breaking cultural com-mentaries of the 1970s, including the co-authored Policing the Crisis (1978). In 1979 he took up the post of Professor of Sociology at the Open University, and is now Emeritus Professor at that institution. A highly regarded public intellectual in the United Kingdom, he has written extensively on social theory generally and on the theory of modernity specifically, as well as on racism, youth culture, criminality, the changing face of the political Left and the politics of Thatcherism. 136 THEORIZING GLOBAL STUDIES accompanied by an intermingling of these disembedded cultural practices producing new complex hybrid forms of culture. (Tomlinson 1999: 141) Both of the above quotations can be seen as implying a dynamic role for the actor-as-consumer who is capable of actively constructing new cultural mean-ings out of a wide range of commodities from across the globe.

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  The Making and Unmaking of Differences

  Anthropological, Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives

  • Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada, Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, Shingo Shimada(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  With respect to my country of origin, this was pretty serious Creolization. Like so many people, nowadays, I am a dual national. This is a small, personal story but the same factors are negotiated in many places and so many ways today. The question of “how different”? - How greatly, and in what ways, can someone who was once one of us, become dif-ferent from us? - admits worthwhile ethnographic exploration inspired by the history of Creolization in the early colonial period. In order to pursue such re-search, one must be prepared to consider situations as involving Creolization even when the people concerned do not use the terms creole and Creolization. “Creolization” becomes a theoretical rather than just an ethnographic concept. A history (of early colonization) has thus potentially suggested a research agenda entailing the study of what people in “homelands” say about their compatriots who live abroad, and what people in diaspora say and feel about 9 Ann Stoler (1992) studies these issues of Creolization and allegiance in Dutch Indonesia, where it was recommended that children of Dutch colonials be sent back to Holland for schooling to counteract Creolization. 10 Anderson recognized the relevance of colonial Creolization as a heuristic for thinking about contemporary transnationalism in his 1994 article, “Exodus”. C HARLES S TEWART 116 returning to the homeland and getting along with their co-nationals after long periods away. Postcolonial British residents of Africa and India find it hard to contem-plate re-locating to Britain for a whole list of reasons (space, climate, lack of “help”). West Indians who have spent thirty and forty years working in the UK return to the Caribbean, but stand out on account of their accents, clothes, attitudes and the sorts of houses they build - particularly their metal balconies (Horst 2004). In Grenada they call them JCBs—Just Come Backs. The locals vandalise their property and ridicule them (Davies 1999).

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  A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology

  • Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, Robin Conley Riner(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In the second phase, the resulting emergent cre- ole becomes the variety that subsequent waves of workers would learn and develop (see Siegel 2003, 2008). All these models emphasize the interaction of substrate and super- strate languages. 36 CHRISTINE JOURDAN Finally, the last important debate concerns the typological status of creoles. Do they con- stitute languages that are different typologically from the other languages of the world, a difference that would warrant that we keep calling them by specialized labels such as pidgins and creoles, as Bakker (2014) and McWhorter (1998) insist we should? Or is there no typo- logical linguistic profile specific to creoles, the only difference being the historical condi- tions of their emergence, as Mufwene (2020) and DeGraff (2005) assert? These debates reveal that the more we know about creoles and their social histories, the less we can expect that one single theory will explain how all of them developed. Creolization AS A PARTICULAR FORM OF CULTURAL CONTACT Creolization does not take place in each and every type of cultural or linguistic contact, but in hegemonical social contexts where three contributing factors exist: multilingualism, absence of a language that could be used as a lingua franca, and sustained but unequal power relationships between people in contact. Most typically, Creolization is found in association with large and forced movements and displacements of populations (such as indentured labor or slave trades during the European colonial period) that took people of different ethnic origins speaking different languages from one part of the world and relo- cated them elsewhere. Cultural and linguistic rupture and geographical dislocation are part of the story of creoles. One expects that the workers/slaves remained isolated linguistically for some time after their arrival (unless someone of the same ethnic group was present).

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  General History of the Carribean UNESCO Vol.3

  The Slave Societies of the Caribbean

  • NA NA(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The prolonged, continuous process of Creolization, pluralization and cultural modification that took place in the Caribbean produced a population that saw itself and its world a bit differently. While a great part of the reality of the Caribbean world was rigidly constrained by geography, politics, economics and the accidents of time, much of that world was the creative construct of generations of people who incessantly tried to carve out a com- fortable niche within the misery of their coerced daily lives. The abolition of slavery released even more creative energies among the masses, and the process has never ceased. NOTES 1 Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. xv-xvi, 306-11. It is important to bear in mind that Brathwaite's focus is on Jamaica, and therefore his conclusions are valid for that case. The development of Jamaican colonial society reflected very few influences from the indigenous or Spanish settlers. 2 For the complex development of the Creole tradition of Louisiana, see Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition. Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 12-16, 93-132. 283 General History of the Caribbean 3 Nonnan B. Schwartz, Forest Society: A Social History of Peten, Guatemala (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 4 See Edmund T. Gordon, 'History, Identity, Consciousness and Revolution: Mro- Nicaraguans and the Nicaraguan Revolution', in CIDCAIDevelopment Study Unit (ed.), Ethnic Groups and the Nation State, The Case of the Atlantic Coast in Nicaragua (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1987), pp. 135-68. 5 See Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. xiv-xv. 6 See for example, Ivan van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1976).

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  Creolization and Language Change

  • Dany Adone, Ingo Plag, Dany Adone, Ingo Plag(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Ingo Plag Creolization and language change: a comparison 1. Introduction The last two decades have seen an increasing interest by linguists in the languages commonly called Creoles, and in the processes through which these languages emerge. One of the reasons for this trend is the assumed significance of the study of Creole languages for various sub-fields of linguistics and for general linguistic theory. 1 The present article is concerned with what historical linguistics may learn from the study of Creolization and vice versa. The formation of a Creole language has conveniently been labelled 'Creolization 1 , but the mechanisms of this process are still a matter of controversy. One widely held view of Creolization is that it denotes the lexical and grammatical expansion of a rudimentary pidgin into a full-fledged language. There is, however, no consensus about the mechanisms involved in this process. Relexification, the transmission of substrate features, the transmission of superstratum features, processes of first language acquisition, and processes of second language acquisition have all been advocated as being central to Creolization. The only point on which all researchers agree is that drastic changes occur when pidgins become Creoles. The nature of these changes is, however, not very clear. The relationship between Creolization and language change has been in the focus of creole studies since Schuchardt cited Creole languages as evidence against neo-grammarian doctrine. In his debate with Meillet (cf. e.g. Meillet 1914, Schuchardt 1917), Schuchardt argued that the mixed nature of creole languages invalidates the genetic model, whereas his opponent regarded Creoles as direct descendants of their lexifier language. According to Schuchardt, Creoles cannot be classified in language family trees, because they have no direct genetic link to their lexifier and substratum languages.

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