Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.

Louisiana Creoles examines the recent efforts of the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center to document and preserve the distinct ethnic heritage of this unique American population. Dr. Andrew JolivZtte uses sociological inquiry to analyze the factors that influence ethnic and racial identity formation and community construction among Creoles of Color living in and out of the state of Louisiana. By including the voices of contemporary Creole organizations, preservationists, and grassroots organizers, JolivZtte offers a comprehensive and insightful exploration of the ways in which history has impacted the ability of Creoles to self-define their own community in political, social, and legal contexts. This book raises important questions concerning the process of cultural formation and the politics of ethnic categories for multiracial communities in the United States. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the themes found throughout Louisiana Creoles are especially relevant for students of sociology and those interested in identity issues.

Who are the Creoles? The answer is not clear-cut. Of European, African, or Caribbean mixed descent, they are a people of color and Francophone dialect native to south Louisiana; and though their history dates from the late 1600s, they have been sorely neglected in the literature. Creole is a project that both defines and celebrates this ethnic identity. In fifteen essays, writers intimately involved with their subject explore the vibrant yet understudied culture of the Creole people across time—their language, literature, religion, art, food, music, folklore, professions, customs, and social barriers.

In recent years, ethnographers have recognized south Louisiana as home to perhaps the most complex rural society in North America. More than a dozen French-speaking immigrant groups have been identified there, Cajuns and white Creoles being the most famous. In this guide to the amazing social, cultural, and linguistic variation within Louisiana's French-speaking region, Carl A. Brasseaux presents an overview of the origins and evolution of all the Francophone communities. Brasseaux examines the impact of French immigration on Louisiana over the past three centuries. He shows how this once-undesirable outpost of the French empire became colonized by individuals ranging from criminals to entrepreneurs who went on to form a multifaceted society -- one that, unlike other American melting pots, rests upon a French cultural foundation. A prolific author and expert on the region, Brasseaux offers readers an entertaining history of how these diverse peoples created south Louisiana's famous vibrant culture, interacting with African Americans, Spaniards, and Protestant Anglos and encountering influences from southern plantation life and the Caribbean. He explores in detail three still cohesive components in the Francophone melting pot, each one famous for having retained a distinct identity: the Creole communities, both black and white; the Cajun people; and the state's largest concentration of French speakers -- the Houma tribe. A product of thirty years' research, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma provides a reliable and understandable guide to the ethnic roots of a region long popular as an international tourist attraction.

In Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan J. Rabalais examines the impact of Louisiana’s remarkably diverse cultural and ethnic groups on folklore characters and motifs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Establishing connections between Louisiana and France, West Africa, Canada, and the Antilles, Rabalais explores how folk characters, motifs, and morals adapted to their new contexts in Louisiana. By viewing the state’s folklore in the light of its immigration history, he demonstrates how folktales can serve as indicators of sociocultural adaptation as well as contact among cultural communities. In particular, he examines the ways in which collective traumas experienced by Louisiana’s major ethnic groups—slavery, the grand dérangement, linguistic discrimination—resulted in fundamental changes in these folktales in relation to their European and African counterparts. Rabalais points to the development of an altered moral economy in Cajun and Creole folktales. Conventional heroic qualities, such as physical strength, are subverted in Louisiana folklore in favor of wit and cunning. Analyses of Black Creole animal tales like those of Bouki et Lapin and Tortie demonstrate the trickster hero’s ability to overcome both literal and symbolic entrapment through cleverness. Some elements of Louisiana’s folklore tradition, such as the rougarou and cauchemar, remain an integral presence in the state’s cultural landscape, apparent in humor, popular culture, regional branding, and children’s books. Through its adaptive use of folklore, French and Creole Louisiana will continue to retell old stories in innovative ways as well as create new stories for future generations.

With the Federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Afro-Creole leaders in that city, along with their white allies, seized upon the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and images of revolutionary events in the French Caribbean and demanded Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Their republican idealism produced the postwar South's most progressive vision of the future. Caryn Cossé Bell, in her impressive, sweeping study, traces the eighteenth-century origins of this Afro-Creole political and intellectual heritage, its evolution in antebellum New Orleans, and its impact on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Louisiana Creoles examines the recent efforts of the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center to document and preserve the distinct ethnic heritage of this unique American population. Dr. Andrew Joliv tte uses sociological inquiry to analyze the factors that influence ethnic and racial identity formation and community construction among Creoles of Color living in and out of the state of Louisiana. By including the voices of contemporary Creole organizations, preservationists, and grassroots organizers, Joliv tte offers a comprehensive and insightful exploration of the ways in which history has impacted the ability of Creoles to self-define their own community in political, social, and legal contexts. This book raises important questions concerning the process of cultural formation and the politics of ethnic categories for multiracial communities in the United States. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the themes found throughout Louisiana Creoles are especially relevant for students of sociology and those interested in identity issues.