Becoming Creole

Becoming Creole explores how people become who they are through their relationships with the natural world, and it shows how those relationships are also always embedded in processes of racialization that create blackness, brownness, and whiteness. Taking the reader into the lived experience of Afro-Caribbean people who call the watery lowlands of Belize home, Melissa A. Johnson traces Belizean Creole peoples’ relationships with the plants, animals, water, and soils around them, and analyzes how these relationships intersect with transnational racial assemblages. She provides a sustained analysis of how processes of racialization are always present in the entanglements between people and the non-human worlds in which they live.

Taking the reader into the lived experience of Afro-Caribbean people who call the watery lowlands of Belize home, Melissa A. Johnson traces Belizean Creole peoples' relationships with the plants, animals, water, and soils around them, and analyzes how these relationships intersect with transnational racial assemblages.

The French Caribbean authors of In Praise of Creoleness (�loge de la Cr‚olit‚) exclaim, "Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves to be Creoles." Creoleness, therefore, becomes a metaphor for humanity in all its diversity. Unique among the many images useful for discussing diversity, Creoleness is formed within a history of injustice, oppression, and empire. Creolization offers a way of envisioning a future through the interplay between cultural diversity, injustice and oppression, and intersectionality. People of faith must embrace such metaphors and practices to be relevant and effective for ministry in the 21st century. Using biblical exposition in conversation with present day Creole metaphors and cultural research, Becoming Like Creoles seeks to awaken and prepare followers of Jesus to live and minister in a world where injustice is real and cultural diversity is rapidly increasing. This book will equip ministry readers to embrace a Creole process, becoming culturally competent and social justice focused, whether they are emerging from a history of injustice or they are heirs of privilege.

Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.’s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans’ Creole community forward, documenting the process of “becoming American” through Creoles’ encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans’s voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony. Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. “Becoming American” entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of “Creolization” and “Americanization,” social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.

Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction fared in the face of nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control.

New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps. Despite its image as a place apart, the city played a key role in nineteenth-century America as a site for immigration and pluralism, the quest for equality, and the centrality of self-making. In both the literary imagination and the law, creoles of color navigated life on a shifting color line. As they passed among various racial categories and through different social spaces, they filtered for a national audience the meaning of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and de jure segregation. Shirley Thompson offers a moving study of a world defined by racial and cultural double consciousness. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, she illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.

The stages of antebellum New Orleans did more than entertain. In the city’s early years, French-speaking residents used the theatre to assert their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty in the face of growing Anglo-American dominance. Beyond local stages, the francophone struggle for cultural survival connected people and places in the early United States, across the American hemisphere, and in the Atlantic world. Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. Juliane Braun draws on the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of documents from both sides of the Atlantic, to explore the ways in which theatre and drama shaped debates about ethnic identity and transnational belonging in the city. Francophone identity united citizens of different social and racial backgrounds, and debates about political representation, slavery, and territorial expansion often played out on stage. Recognizing theatres as sites of cultural exchange that could cross oceans and borders, Creole Drama offers not only a detailed history of francophone theatre in New Orleans but also an account of the surprising ways in which multilingualism and early transnational networks helped create the American nation.

This study presents a refined analysis of Surinames-Jewish identifications. The story of the Surinamese Jews is one of a colonial Jewish community that became ever more interwoven with the local environment of Suriname.