The French Caribbean authors of In Praise of Creoleness (Eloge de la Créolité) exclaim, "Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves to be Creoles." Creoleness, therefore, becomes a metaphor for humanity in all its diversity. Unique among the many images useful for discussing diversity, Creoleness is formed within a history of injustice, oppression, and empire. Creolization offers a way of envisioning a future through the interplay between cultural diversity, injustice and oppression, and intersectionality. People of faith must embrace such metaphors and practices to be relevant and effective for ministry in the 21st century. Using biblical exposition in conversation with present day Creole metaphors and cultural research, Becoming Like Creoles seeks to awaken and prepare followers of Jesus to live and minister in a world where injustice is real and cultural diversity is rapidly increasing. This book will equip ministry readers to embrace a Creole process, becoming culturally competent and social justice focused, whether they are emerging from a history of injustice or they are heirs of privilege.

Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.’s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans’ Creole community forward, documenting the process of “becoming American” through Creoles’ encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans’s voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony. Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. “Becoming American” entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of “Creolization” and “Americanization,” social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.

New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps. Despite its image as a place apart, the city played a key role in nineteenth-century America as a site for immigration and pluralism, the quest for equality, and the centrality of self-making. In both the literary imagination and the law, creoles of color navigated life on a shifting color line. As they passed among various racial categories and through different social spaces, they filtered for a national audience the meaning of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and de jure segregation. Shirley Thompson offers a moving study of a world defined by racial and cultural double consciousness. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, she illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.

If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That, by Thomas Klingler, is an in-depth study of the Creole language spoken in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, a community situated on the west bank of the Mississippi River above Baton Rouge that dates back to the early eighteenth century. The first comprehensive grammatical description of this particular variety of Louisiana Creole, Klingler's work is timely indeed, since most Creole speakers in the Pointe Coupee area are over sixty-five and the language is not being passed on to younger generations. It preserves and explains an important yet little understood part of America's cultural heritage that is rapidly disappearing. The heart of the book is a detailed morphosyntactic description based on some 150 hours of interviews with Pointe Coupee Creole speakers. Each grammatical feature is amply illustrated with contextual examples, and Klingler's descriptive framework will facilitate comparative research. The author also provides historical and sociolinguistic background information on the region, examining economic, demographic, and social conditions that contributed to the formation and spread of Creole in Louisiana. Pointe Coupee Creole is unusual, and in some cases unique, because of such factors as the parish's early exposure to English, its rapid development of a plantation economy, and its relative insulation from Cajun French. The volume concludes with transcriptions and English translations of Creole folk tales and of Klingler's conversations with Pointe Coupee's residents, a treasure trove of cultural and linguistic raw data. This kind of rarely printed material will be essential in preserving Creole in the future. Encylopedic in its approach and featuring a comprehensive bibliography, If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That is a rich resource for those interested in the development of Louisiana Creole and in Francophony.

In a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Through prodigious archival research, Landers alters our vision of the breadth and extent of the Age of Revolution, and our understanding of its actors.

The first serious historical examination of a distinctive multiracial society of Louisiana

Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.’s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans’ Creole community forward, documenting the process of “becoming American” through Creoles’ encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans’s voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony. Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. “Becoming American” entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of “Creolization” and “Americanization,” social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.