Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture in Honour of Kamau Brathwaite

by Verene A. Shepherd, Glen L. Richards

In this volume, scholars take the debate on Creolisation and its manifestations beyond the discipline of history and into debates on ethnicity, identity, class, the economics and politics of slavery and freedom, language, music, cookery and religion.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Verene Albertha Shepherd (née Lazarus; born 1951) is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of social history at the University of the West Indies in Mona. She is the director of the university's Institute for Gender and Development Studies, and specialises in Jamaican social history and diaspora studies.

Reviews

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essay collection addresses the phenomena of creolisation in the Caribbean through history, economics, linguistics, religion, music and literature. I found the economics framework most useful in complicating my understanding of what plantation societies were like pre-Emancipation. I was used to thinking of the different classes of Europeans on the plantation but not of the Africans and their descendants. Learning more about the free Black workers--fishermen, blacksmiths, carpenters etc--along with the status drivers had amongst those in the fields, and how enslavers themselves helped to create a set of "elites" for their own advantages; the enslaved plantation labourer's organising; and much more did a lot to expand and ground details I read in novels.

The most shocking work was Smithin Wilmot's essay on Samuel Clarke, a Black Jamaican political organiser the government executed alongside George William Gordon after the Morant Bay Rebellion. Mi never hear bout dis man before inna mi life.

There is a notable inclusion of Indo-Caribbean perspectives, if only from Trinidad and Tobago.

With everything from issues around the etymology and definition of the word "creole" itself to the labour negotiating tactics of African descendants in St. Kitts and Nevis, it's a great read, especially for those who didn't specialise in history beyond high school. If you have access to a university library go nuts but at least some of the articles are available to read for free on the web thanks to pirates. Bless them.