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This chapter reiterates the qualitative differences in overall structural complexity between the five languages considered in the book and their sister languages, and states that these differences were caused by incomplete acquisition of a moderate degree in contact situations. However, a problem remains: that there is no clear place for the phenomenon identified in conventional models of language contact. Instead, the reduction in question — where perceived at all — has tended to elicit surmises that the languages are, or were once, pidgins or creoles. But these claims fail to compel, because neither synchrony, diachrony, nor sociohistorical data support classing these languages with Saramaccan, Haitian Creole, Papiamentu, and Tok Pisin.

This chapter explores the presence of the first Dutch West India Company (WIC) in 17th-century Senegambia, particularly in the Petite Côte region. The WIC's activity in this part of Upper Guinea is traditionally marginalised in the literature, but must be reconsidered in light of the compelling linguistic similarities between Papiamentu (the creole language of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) and Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole (a cover term for the sister creole varieties of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau and the Senegalese province of Casamance). The chapter illustrates how the conquest (in 1621) and possession (until 1677) of Gorée guaranteed Dutch commercial dominance in the Senegambia region, a period in which the language transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao must have occurred. It furthermore describes how the Dutch episode in Upper Guinea came to an abrupt end after the loss of Gorée and other Petite Côte factories to the French.

By the 1920s, jazz music was being recorded more or less regularly. And if those who heard the past legendary musicians claim that the records by Fletcher Henderson or King Oliver or Bix Beiderbecke were a shadow of the reality, at least the records were there and in some quantity. A more recent legendary event, the appearance of Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie quintets in the early forties, is now regarded as much a part of jazz tradition as Oliver's Creole Band. Finally, a 1953 concert in Toronto did get recorded and now reappears on Fantasy, “Jazz At Massey Hall.”

This essay traces the role of Catholicism in the shifting racial identity of Creoles of color in New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The implementation of racially segregated Catholic parishes in New Orleans played an important role in changing the way white New Orleanians classified Creoles of color, who were once considered a distinct racial category but came to be described as simply “black.” At the same time, resistance to separate parishes demonstrated both the difficulty of instituting segregation and the creative ways that Creoles preserved a distinct identity even within a society divided along a black-white binary.

Chapter 1 defines the sense of modernism used in the book and outlines the linguistic-literary coordinates of English, Creole, and Indonesian modernisms. It frames the study to come in terms of the parallel historical formations of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Indonesian language during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The second part of the chapter introduces the genealogies of modernism implicit in the work of Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya, as these emerge in autobiographical fragments from each writer's work.

Framed by a comparative study of Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Conrad's The Shadow-Line, Chapter 4 examines the problem of interior space that links Rhys's urban topography, Conrad's sea passages, and the arcades of Benjamin's Arcades Project. This problem of interiority is illuminated by the problematic anteriority of Creole narrative perspective in Rhys's early work. Tracing correspondences between the contrasting male and female experiences of metropolitan modernity in Benjamin and Rhys, the chapter relates these to the problem of white racial identity in the later work of Joseph Conrad. What emerges is the recognition of a non-European Creole identity as the lost cultural and historical perspective of Europe's past.

Chapter 5 compares Rhys's use of the stereotype of the Creole heiress in Wide Sargasso Sea with Pramoedya's use of a similar stereotype in This Earth of Mankind. The chapter situates this stereotype within a comparative linguistic and literary context, considering also the example of Louis Couperus's Dutch novel, The Hidden Force (1900). Examining this stereotype as part of the legacy of changing colonial and postcolonial senses of the word Creole itself, the comparison reveals how the Creole heiress serves as a linguistic and literary point of reference for contested genealogies of modernism and modernity.

This chapter compares and contracts the musical histories of Martinique and Guadeloupe with the Netherlands Antilles and the response to the music they produced in their respective colonial masters Holland and France. The music of Martinique and Guadeloupe caught on in Paris, but their Curacaoan counterparts Not at all in Amsterdam.

This chapter focuses upon Shango as a popular Afro-Creole tradition, considering its social organization, ritual structure, and complex pantheon, as well as its symbolism, material culture, and patterns of performance. It emphasizes the personal flexibility and on-the-ground dynamism of Orisha Worship as a subaltern religious form, probing its overlapping and complex interrelations with Christianity, Spiritual Baptism, Kabba, and Hinduism.

This chapter examines the topography of Indo-Creole Shakti worship in terms of social organization, ritual structure, and material culture, exploring its dynamic heterodox pantheon through the performances and personal experiences of practitioners. Sociosymbolic flexibility and personal contingency are built into the tradition's grassroots structure, as seen with Shango in Chapter Three. By providing an ethnographic overview of ecstatic Shakti Worship in contemporary Trinidad, the chapter establishes the foundation for an explicitly comparative consideration of Orisha Worship and Shakti Puja in Chapter Five.

In November 1841, the U.S. slaver Creole transporting 135 slaves from Richmond to New Orleans was seized by nineteen slave rebels who steered the ship to the British Bahamas, where all secured their liberation. Drawing from this well-known story as a point of departure, this chapter examines the understudied maritime dimensions of British free soil policies in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on how such policies affected the U.S. domestic slave trade and slave revolts at sea. In contrast to the more familiar narrative of south-to-north fugitive slave migration, this chapter sheds light on international south-to-south migration routes from the U.S. South to the circum-Caribbean.

This chapter begins by discussing the designation of “Colored American Day” on August 25, 1893. It then explains that this day was designated in order to combat the exclusionary climate during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, wherein almost all black Americans were excluded in the planning and execution of the fair’s exhibitions. Ida B. Wells and other African-Americans urged blacks to boycott the fair for they feared the event might provide whites with ammunition to mock the race. It discusses that “Colored American Day” was observed in a dignified manner and the appearance and demeanor of the participants brought honor to the race. This chapter adds that the event demonstrated that acculturation was the avenue to greater acceptance into the larger social order. The emergence of ragtime and The Creole Show was a cultural innovation, an important first step toward the development of the black musical comedies.

This chapter looks at case studies of the way the Civil War and its aftermath affected free Creoles of color. Antebellum New Orleans society was divided broadly into three groups, with Creoles of color forming the vital middle ground between bound black slaves and free whites. Because these Creoles both obscured the relationship between race and freedom and served as a model to those slaves who would be free, white governments passed a series of laws increasingly restricting Creoles' freedoms. The war and early fall of New Orleans changed this three-tiered system in dramatic and unexpected ways. The ensuing end of slavery destroyed Creoles' former racial identity and forced them into a more rigid social structure of white and nonwhite. Many families reacted by taking a series of small steps across several generations to assume a white identity in this new bichromatic society—with varying degrees of success.