Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact. An extraordinary number of cultures from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the southern United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone are discussed in these essays. Drawing from the disciplines of folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, history, and material culture studies, essayists address theoretical dimensions of creolization and present in-depth field studies. Topics include adaptations of the Gombe drum over the course of its migration from Jamaica to West Africa; uses of “ritual piracy” involved in the appropriation of Catholic symbols by Puerto Rican brujos; the subversion of official culture and authority through playful and combative use of “creole talk” in Argentine literature and verbal arts; the mislabeling and trivialization (“toy blindness”) of objects appropriated by African Americans in the American South; the strategic use of creole techniques among storytellers within the islands of the Indian Ocean; and the creolized character of New Orleans and its music. In the introductory essay the editors address both local and universal dimensions of creolization and argue for the centrality of its expressive manifestations for creolization scholarship.

The term 'creolization' has now migrated from its prior use in linguistics and colonial settings. Increasingly 'creolization' is used to analyze 'cultural complexity', 'diversity', 'hybridity', 'syncretism', and 'mixture', prominent and growing characteristics of the global age. The Creolization Reader captures all these meanings and illuminates old creole societies, emerging cultures and identities in many parts of the world. Areas covered include Latin America, the South Atlantic/Indian oceans, the Caribbean, West and East Africa, the Pacific and the US. The book is truly inter-disciplinary and provides a timely, reader-friendly and informative overview of creolization.

Creolizing Europe critically interrogates creolization as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the cultural and social transformations set in motion through trans/national dislocations. Exploring the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization for thinking post/coloniality, raciality and othering not only as historical legacies but as immanent to and constitutive of European societies, this volume develops an interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities. It juxtaposes US-UK debates on 'hybridity', 'mixed-race' and the 'Black Atlantic' with Caribbean and Latin American theorizations of cultural mixing in order to engage with Europe as a permanent scene of Édouard Glissant's creolization. Further, through a comparative methodological angle, the focus on Europe is broadened in order to understand the role of Europe's colonial past in the shaping of its post/migrant and diasporic present. 'Europe' thus becomes an expanded and contested term, unthinkable without reference to its historical legacies and possible futures. While not all the contributions in this volume explicitly address Edouard Glissant's approach to creolization, they all engage with aspects of his thinking. All of the chapters explore the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization to the European context. As such, this edited collection offers a significant contribution and intervention in the fields of European Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies on two levels. First, by emphasizing that race and cultural mixing are central to any thinking about and theorization on/of Europe, and second, by applying Glissant's perspective to a variety of empirical work on diasporic spaces, conviviality, citizenship, aesthetics, race, racism, sexuality, gender, cultural representation and memory.

In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization—the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based process, dramatized by French Caribbean women’s plays and enacted through their international production and reception histories. The author contends that the syncretism of the plays is not a static, fixed creole aesthetics but rather a dynamic process of creolization in motion, informed by history and based in the African-derived principle that performance is a space of creativity and transformation that connects past, present, and future.

Creolization in the French Americas aims to uncover and explore the roots, development, and cultural dynamism of Creole society and culture in the colonial and post-colonial francophone world. The essays and creative works gathered here draw from distinct but related literatures emerging in the Francophone, Anglophone, African, and Caribbean scholarship on creolization, including such divergent fields as early modern European colonial history, dance choreography, psychoanalysis, linguistics, literary study of new world travel narratives, American Studies, museum studies, French literature, philosophy, art history, and African and African Diaspora studies. The collection embodies the conviction that complex phenomena like the emergence and evolution of Creole identity require perspectives that only a diversity of disciplines and points of view can offer, and that those disciplines and perspectives can come together and progress toward knowledge and understanding.

This bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities advocates the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical methodology attentive to the legacies of colonialism.

As a young anthropologist, Sidney Mintz undertook fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Fifty years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences to meditate on the societies and on the island people who befriended him. These reflections illuminate continuities and differences between these cultures, but even more they exemplify the power of people to reveal their own history. Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico—a dynamic past born of a confluence of peoples of a sort that has happened only a few times in human history—with the ways that he heard people speak about themselves and their lives. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be. This book is both a summation of Mintz’s groundbreaking work in the region and a reminder of how anthropology allows people to explore the deep truths that history may leave unexamined.