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This chapter explains that “Monde Créole” is a concept intended to summarize a range of interests from the “small world” of Creole culture in rural French Louisiana to the idea of global society made up of several smaller worlds. It adds that these smaller worlds are in a constant state of creolizing from within and in relation to one another in local, regional, national, and global, degrees of proximity. In the context of French Louisiana, “MCréole” is used by community members in French and French Creole language to define the Creole people, Black Creoles, African French Creoles, and their social and cultural aesthetic values. Additionally, the Creole culture of the Louisiana landscape is a world that affected the global society and culture out of proportion to other social orders of a similar scale.

This chapter argues that creolization was a cultural phenomenon borne out of the need to settle cultural differences while at the same time resisting dominance by assuming a new local voice. It explains that the term “creole” has been understood in a post-colonial context as a strong defining factor of identity in Latin America, Louisiana, Cape Verde, and the islands of the southwest Indian Ocean. It adds that creole culture and its alternative forms such as “creoleness,” “créolite,” and “criollisimo,” are uniquely manifested through local as well as national expressions.

This chapter explores the history of African creolization. Contrary to popular belief, the African creoles did not originate from Africa, but from Jamaican Maroons who were exiled in Sierra Leone in the 1800s. These Jamaicans, however, were actually descendants of the African slaves who were forced to live in the Caribbean in the 1600s. In their return to their ancestral land, they have managed to bring their creole culture with them, in particular, bringing a strange percussion instrument called the gumbe. With the introduction of the instrument into Africa, its use began to spread, giving birth to distinctive musical styles and practices across the continent.

This chapter discusses some of the particularities of Joseph Bédier’s own formation as a “creole”. It examines his personal history—political affiliations, inherited creole culture, and explicit statements of creole identification. Politically, Bédier maintained seemingly incongruous affinities, from the socialist to the reactionary. Bédier’s contradictory political engagements derive from the fissures of creole subjectivity, themselves shaped by the contradictions of medievalism. On the one hand, Réunionnais elites embraced an idealized notion of chivalry that they translated into a mythology of racial purity. On the other, they resisted metropolitan efforts to compare the colony to “primitive” French provinces. The same duality characterizes Bédier’s personal relationship to creole identity. As he engages colonial memory in letters, speeches, and other autobiographical statements, he portrays the island as a source of loss and fulfillment, exile and belonging. Together, these biographical details establish Bédier as a representative “creole” as well as a unique “medievalist”

This chapter presents theoretical and historical sketches of Guyana and Trinidad. Both countries share a similar colonial history and ethnic makeup, with people of Indian descent representing 39.3 percent of the total population in Guyana and 35 percent in Trinidad. The focus on Trinidad and Guyana, then, stems from the social and political significance of the Indian communities in these countries. The problematic coexistence of the dominant African creole culture and Indian culture in the Caribbean is central to explaining the location of Indo-Caribbean populations within their particular socioeconomic, political, and gendered spaces. In addressing the notion of “Indian identity,” both Indo-Trinidadians and Indo-Guyanese ask whether their respective identities reflect the “purity” of their Indian ancestry. In both spaces, the Indian community must determine the extent to which they want to associate their “Indianness” with India, or with the nation-state in which they were born.

The conclusion revisits the main findings of each chapter and each of the themes explored during the analysis of Guadeloupe's ceramic culture. This approach underlines the importance of domestic water management in the past and helps us understand the feasting practices of Guadeloupeans. It also highlights the roles of domestic slaves, in particular of enslaved women, in the creation of the local Creole culture. These women were so much involved and so essential in the daily lives of their masters that they might have derived from their work a form of unacknowledged, but nonetheless real, social power.

In this prologue, Berry describes how the jazz funeral of black musician and composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments. Through this lens, Berry examines how the events surrounding the Toussaint burial pageant magnified the roiling debate over myth, memory, and politics, as well as how the beguiling image of New Orleans grew from a culture of spectacle in tension with a city of laws, an official city the popular culture challenged. Through his descriptions of the Toussaint funeral, his own conversations with Toussaint prior to his death, and an examination of race, history, Mardi Gras, and identity in New Orleans, Berry examines how the city opened into a series of adventures in which its identity kept shifting, becoming a crossroads of humanity that forged a Creole culture rich in foodways, music, tradition, and more.