The Creole Synthesis in the New World

Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith

This chapter examines the musical, cultural, and sociological elements of blackface minstrelsy's “creole synthesis” throughout the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America. It argues that the conditions for the creole synthesis were present virtually from the first encounters of Anglo-Europeans and Africans in the New World. The chapter discusses the riverine, maritime, and frontier social contexts that shaped the music of blackface's African American sources and their Anglo-Celtic imitators. In particular, it considers creole synthesis in the Caribbean and in frontiers such as New Orleans and the Ohio. It also looks at a preliminary example of iconographic analysis that reflects the riverine and maritime creole synthesis: James Henry Beard's 1846 painting Western Raftsmen. The chapter contends that blackface minstrelsy was pioneered by George Washington Dixon and Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s and codified by Joel Walker Sweeney and Daniel Decatur Emmett (and the blackface troupes they founded) in the early 1840s, and thus represents the earliest comparatively accurate and extensive observation, description, and imitation of African American performance in the New World.

2007 ◽  
Vol 73 (21) ◽  
pp. 7114-7117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobain Duffy ◽  
Edward C. Holmes

ABSTRACT A phylogenetic analysis of three genomic regions revealed that Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) from western North America is distinct from TYLCV isolated in eastern North America and the Caribbean. This analysis supports a second introduction of this Old World begomovirus into the New World, most likely from Asia.


Author(s):  
David W. Kling

Conversionary efforts in the New World mirrored attitudes and practices in the Old. Christendom remained as much a project in the New as in the Old, and thus religious differences remained as problematic in the Americas as they did in Europe. Images of military conflict—combat, battle, and victory—language familiar on the Continent—infused the outlook of early modern Catholic missionaries, whereas Spanish and French missionaries in the New World often had the arm of the state to protect them and, all too often, to coerce the natives. This chapter selectively examines initial missionary efforts in a variety of locations—Spanish missionary outreach in the Caribbean, Peru, and Alta California and French missions in North America. The depth of Native American conversions was as varied as the methods used to produce them. On a superficial level, conversion meant a transfer of loyalty or allegiance, often without a full knowledge of what that transfer entailed. Or, with defeat, conversion might represent a conscious acknowledgment of the more powerful Christian God over weaker traditional deities.


1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 28-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna McDaniel

[First paragraph]The theme of human aerial flight permeates the mythology of Black America. Examples of the metaphor are found in major musical genres, myths and poetry in Black cultures that span the Caribbean and southern North America, embracing generations to testify to the depth of the cosmological and conscious projection of systems of flight escape and homeland return. While the theme of human flight does not occur in any significant proportion in West African mythology related themes of transformation and pursuit do appear. However, in African thought, witches and spirits possess the power of flight; a flight that can be blocked by the use of salt. The belief in spirit flight, ubiquitous in the Black diaspor of the New World, parallels that in African thought, but in the New World it is enlarged to include humans as possessors of the capability of flight.


Author(s):  
Sally McKee

This chapter argues that no family embodies the anomalous history of New Orleans better than the Dede family. Of all the towns and cities in North America with populations of free African Americans, the chapter goes on to argue, New Orleans was the city most likely to have produced a black man like Edmond Dede—possessed of enough talent, ambition, and training to launch himself up to a high level of accomplishment. Only in New Orleans could African American families trace their family's history back beyond 1864, the year the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Contrary to later reports that Edmond Dede was the son of West Indian refugees, he in fact belonged instead to a long-established family with roots in North America.


2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TERRY

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.


The trickster is one of the most complex and widespread archetypes of Pan-African literatures and cultures, such as those from Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. It is a folk character who invokes a multiplicity of meanings, including transcendence of boundaries between good and bad, morality and immorality, truth and lie, and many other entities. Dwelling on third, sacred, innocuous, and marginalized spaces, the trickster is a universal figure whose location in crossroads or other unusual spaces epitomizes the forced or voluntary alienation of individuals and communities from around the world. Therefore, the trickster is more than the childlike character who enjoys duping other pranksters and being “naughty.” In Pan-African traditions, the trickster is an animal or human character whose situation and movements symbolize the harsh conditions of millions of people of African descent due to brutal historical forces such as slavery, colonialism, and other oppressions. In the Americas, Europe, and other locations where they were brought, enslaved Africans carried knowledge of the trickster persona from their folktales and cultures, and later blended this tradition with lore and customs of Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. Thus, although it was one of the most brutal human experiences, the transatlantic slave trade led to the formation of hybridity, or cultural mixing, embodied in the rich spoken and written Pan-African narratives in which trickster figures deploy various strategies to resist oppression, assert their humanity, and gain freedom. The works mentioned in this study reflect the historical, social, political, and cultural backgrounds out of which trickster icons of selected Pan-African folktales came. Such works reveal the hybridism and survival strategies that enslaved Africans developed in the United States and the Caribbean by mixing their African traditions with Native American, European, and other customs. Understanding such cultural diversity will enable scholars and students of Pan-African folklore to have the open-mindedness that is necessary to study the vast traditions that influenced such customs. To guide readers, this bibliography gives a comprehensive list of major collections of African, African American, and Caribbean folktales, tale-types, motifs, and scholarly studies of such narratives published since the early 20th century. The bibliography shows that enslaved Africans did not come to the New World as blank slates. Instead, these populations had folklore, knowledge, memories, and practices that helped them to resist oppression and affirm their humanity.


Zootaxa ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 1369 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW EDWARD Z. SHORT ◽  
PHILLIP J. TORRES

Species of the New World genera Hemiosus Sharp and Derallus Sharp that occur outside continental South America are reviewed; three and five species are recorded respectively. Hemiosus selva Short, sp. n. is described from Costa Rica. Hemiosus toxillus d’Orchymont is a junior synonym of H. exilis (LeConte). A key to the genera of Berosini and the species of Derallus and Hemiosus occurring outside South America is presented with diagnostic features illustrated. New locality records are provided for all species.


1984 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Galenson

Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies. Indentured servitude reappeared in the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of transporting Asians to the Caribbean sugar islands and South America following the abolition of slavery. Servitude then remained in legal use until its abolition in 1917. This paper provides an economic analysis of the innovation of indentured servitude, describes the economic forces that caused its decline and disappearance from the British colonies, and considers why indentured servitude was revived for migration to the West Indies during the time of the great free migration of Europeans to the Americas.


1964 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Dillard

The English of the West Indies, like the other languages of the area, shows many resemblances to the language patterns of Negroes in other parts of the New World. There have been many controversies over this matter, with many linguists, especially dialect geographers, inclined to deny West African influence upon anything inside continental North America except for Gullah(Georgia and South Carolina sea islands) and the French Creole of Louisiana. Others, like Lorenzo Turner, who conclusively disproved the widely held belief that Gullah was an amalgam of archaic features from the British Isles,have substantiated the thesis of the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits that the culture, including the language, of Negroes from Suriname to Michigan retains many traces of African patterns. And, since the recent death of the Haitian philologist Jules Faine, no one has seriously denied resemblances among the Caribbean dialects.


Author(s):  
Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia

Bernardo de Gálvez arrived to New Orleans at the end of 1776 and took office on January 1 of the following year. With the British colonies in open revolt, Spain needed to prepare for what it seemed to be unavoidable: another chapter in the centuries-old confrontation against Britain in the Americas. The Paris Treaty of 1763, which ended the Seven Years’ War, had transferred Louisiana from France to Spain, but shortly afterwards the former French colonists rebelled against their new rulers, therefore Bernardo de Gálvez’s first priority was to ensure their loyalty in order to prepare the province for war. With a combination of concessions to the rich planters and merchants with the tightening of the Spanish colonial administration control over the province, Gálvez was able to implement several reforms that increased Louisiana’s economy and its military preparedness for war. Following the precedents of the French and British relations with the Indian nations in North America, Gálvez introduced profound changes to the traditional Spanish “Indian policy”.


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