Creating The Creole Island

Download or read book Creating the Creole Island written by Megan Vaughan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-02 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Belle Créole written by Maryse Condé and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné’s desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné’s fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end. Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare’s Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama’s uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

Download or read book CREOLIZATION written by Charles Stewart and published by Left Coast Press. This book was released on 2007-03-31 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned scholars give the term "creolization" historical and theoretical specificity by examining the very different domains and circumstances in which the process takes place.

Download or read book Voices of Play written by Amanda Minks and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While indigenous languages have become prominent in global political and educational discourses, limited attention has been given to indigenous children’s everyday communication. Voices of Play is a study of multilingual play and performance among Miskitu children growing up on Corn Island, part of a multi-ethnic autonomous region on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Corn Island is historically home to Afro-Caribbean Creole people, but increasing numbers of Miskitu people began moving there from the mainland during the Contra War, and many Spanish-speaking mestizos from western Nicaragua have also settled there. Miskitu kids on Corn Island often gain some competence speaking Miskitu, Spanish, and Kriol English. As the children of migrants and the first generation of their families to grow up with television, they develop creative forms of expression that combine languages and genres, shaping intercultural senses of belonging. Voices of Play is the first ethnography to focus on the interaction between music and language in children’s discourse. Minks skillfully weaves together Latin American, North American, and European theories of culture and communication, creating a transdisciplinary dialogue that moves across intellectual geographies. Her analysis shows how music and language involve a wide range of communicative resources that create new forms of belonging and enable dialogue across differences. Miskitu children’s voices reveal the intertwining of speech and song, the emergence of “self” and “other,” and the centrality of aesthetics to social struggle.

Download or read book When Creole and Spanish Collide written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Creoles and Spanish Collide: Language and Culture in the Caribbean presents a contemporary look on how Creole English communities in Central America grapple with evolving Creole identity and representation, language contact with Spanish, language endangerment, discrimination, and linguistic creativity.

Download or read book Creole Indigeneity written by Shona N. Jackson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the colonial period in Guyana, the countryOCOs coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In "Creole Indigeneity," Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as GuyanaOCOs new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies. Looking particularly at the nationOCOs politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for CreolesOCO new identities. Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneityOCoa contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms OC Creole indigeneity.OCO In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.

Download or read book Many Thousands Gone written by Ira Berlin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.