A Creole Nation

Despite high degrees of cultural and ethnic diversity as well as prevailing political instability, Guinea-Bissau’s population has developed a strong sense of national belonging. By examining both contemporary and historical perspectives, A Creole Nation explores how creole identity, culture, and political leaders have influenced postcolonial nation-building processes in Guinea-Bissau, and the ways in which the phenomenon of cultural creolization results in the emergence of new identities.

French-Creoles: A Shattered Nation traces the origin, evolution and development of Louisiana Creole culture from the great Mali Empire of ancient Ghana to its current existence in New Orleans today. It details the sequence of connections between Africa, Europe, the French West Indies, and America. America's past and present confrontations with French Creoles in Haiti and in Louisiana are described in detail.

"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"--

"More than with Lima, this book deals with a specific social formation, the criollos or Creoles, particularly the beneméritos or descendants of conquistadors, whose study has almost always framed them as belonging to a colonial past that was supposedly erased and surpassed during the Republic. This study demonstrates that the Creoles who emerged from this situation developed strategies of survival and negotiation and many mental habits that are still present in Peru today. The first generations of Creoles created an ethnic identity that can be understood as 'national' only in the archaic and pre-Enlightenment sense of the word, without necessarily looking for independence from Spain, but with local patriotic aspirations. Thus, although this study speaks mostly about the past, it aims to explain the present and the flaws of a supposedly democratic, modern national state, still obedient to the interests of internal colonialism and the traditional Europoid ethnic prevalence in Peru. Among other merits, this book contributes to decolonial theory through the historical and cultural analysis of a dominant group"--

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.

Passe Pour Blanc depicts the lives and problems of two fictitious Creole families, as members of a multiracial monocultural invisible nation. It is the first book ever written about Creole family problems caused by American racism.

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.