Comparative Creoles: Race, Identity, and Difference Between Louisiana and its Caribbean Counterparts

This essay places Louisiana Creole culture and identity into comparative perspective with the evolution of Creole identity and créolité in Haiti and the French Antilles. While Haitian and Antillean intellectuals wrestled at the crossroads of French and African culture over the course of the twentieth century, the leading intellectuals of Louisiana’s Creole society were more likely to embrace French language and culture than to work self-consciously to integrate African influences into their understanding of themselves. A similar kind of cultural reckoning did not occur among Louisiana Creole writers and intellectuals until late in the twentieth century. The essay uses a comparative approach to examine the factors that have led to Louisiana taking such a different approach to Creole identity and cultural expression and considers how the community may evolve in the years to come. Cet essai situe la culture et l’identité créoles louisianaises dans une perspective comparée avec l’évolution de l’identité créole et de la créolité en Haïti et aux Antilles françaises. Lorsque des intellectuels haïtiens et antillais travaillaient au carrefour des cultures française et africaine au parcours du vingtième siècle, les intellectuels du chef de file de la société créole de la Louisiane tendaient plus à engager la langue et la culture françaises que de chercher à intégrer consciemment les influences africaines dans leur conception identitaire. Ce n’est que plus tard dans le vingtième siècle que nous témoignons d’une reconnaissance culturelle similaire chez les écrivains et les intellectuels de la Louisiane créole. Cet essai aborde de manière comparée les éléments qui contribuaient à une approche si différente à l’identité et l’expression culturelle créoles en Louisiane et considère comment la communauté pourraient évoluer à l’avenir.

Bob Wilber, the Westchester Kid: White Privilege and Perspectives on Jazz Belonging

In Bob Wilber’s Music Was Not Enough, the multi-instrumentalist and bandleader offers a detailed account of his experience in New York during the mid-1940s as a student and protégé of the renowned New Orleans musician Sidney Bechet and the effect of that experience on his life and career. While Wilber’s description of his jazz education with Bechet and his subsequent professional career reveals his rich immersion in New Orleans and East Coast traditional and swing jazz communities, the colorblind lens through which he filters these experiences serves to deemphasize, or even negate, the significance of race in them. This chapter contrasts Wilber’s privilege and apparent distance from New Orleans’ jazz culture with Bechet’s insistence on the significance of his Creole identity to the shaping of his musical and cultural persona.

Les éléments naturels et leur interaction dans l'œuvre de Maryse Condé

The work of the Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé is indicative of a highly animist Creole identity. Thus, the belief in a vital force that animates the natural elements is exacerbated through her writing. Nature embodies this refuge with which the Creole man needs to revitalise himself. Modernism is seen as an environmental and identity threat, responsible for having broken the harmony that Antilleans maintained with nature. Natural disasters are perceived by the Condean characters as manifestations of the wrath of the elements, divine entities that they can’t control anymore after losing ancestral knowledge. However, the disasters inherent in the brutality of the Tropics give men the opportunity to rebuild everything on a new basis, their will to survive being always stronger than the feeling of despair. At the same time, they invite the reader to think about the global ecological crisis that we are experiencing. L’œuvre de Maryse Condé, romancière guadeloupéenne, est révélatrice d’une identité créole à caractère hautement animiste. Ainsi, la croyance en une force vitale qui anime les éléments naturels est exacerbée à travers son écriture. La nature incarne ce refuge dont l’homme créole a besoin pour se ressourcer. Le modernisme est perçu comme une menace environnementale et identitaire, ayant rompu l'harmonie qu'entretenaient les Antillais avec le milieu insulaire. Les catastrophes naturelles sont perçues par les personnages condéens comme des manifestations de la colère des éléments, entités divines qu'ils n'arrivent plus à dompter suite à la perte des savoirs ancestraux. Toutefois, les désastres propres à la brutalité des Tropiques donnent l'opportunité aux hommes de tout reconstruire sur de nouvelles bases, leur volonté de survie triomphant toujours sur le sentiment de désespoir. Par la même occasion, ils invitent le lecteur à réfléchir sur la crise écologique mondiale que nous vivons.

Sonidos Negros

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, between 1492—when Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola—and 1933—when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his “Theory and Play of the Duende”—the vanquished Moor became Black; and how the imagined Gitano (“Gypsy,” or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity was paradoxically enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of Spanish and American representations of Blackness. Flamenco’s imagined Gypsy, teetering between ostentatious ignorance and the humility of epiphany, references an earlier trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ—or remain in darkness. Spain’s symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of abjection scripts the evangelical narrative which defeated the Moors and enslaved the Americas. The bobo’s confusion, appealingly comic but holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision—heaven or hell, safety or extermination—bares a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco’s Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful ruckus cloaking danced resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by slavery and colonization.

Identity, Place and Non-belonging in Jean Rhys’s Fiction

Place is considered as a distinguishable factor among Jean Rhys’s novels, most concretely represented by three countries: Dominica, England and France. In locating her outsider and outcast heroines in these places of interconnectedness, Rhys’s fiction responds to a time of crisis in the history of Empire. With a much stigmatized white West Indian creole identity, her heroines are unacceptably white in Dominica, and unacceptably “black” in Europe. In Voyage in the Dark, Anna is stranded in a modernist London that was at once racially heterogeneous, cosmopolitan and xenophobic. Her transgressive and mobile identities (racial, sexual, national), are forever making her stranger in the metropole. In Quartet and Good Morning, Midnight, both Marya and Sasha occupy the temporary and liminal spaces of the metropolis of Paris and try to buy themselves an illusion of a respectable identity. Rejected, unhoused, wandering in a state of limbo, their existence becomes mechanical and ghostly. It is this sense of having no identity and no place of belonging resulted from a very specific and traumatic colonial experience that best explains the pervasive tone of loss, melancholy, and paralysis of spirit underlying all of Rhys’s fiction.