Creole: the History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color.Edited by Sybil Kein Sybil Kein (a.k.a. Dr. Consuela Provost) is a Louisiana Creole poet, playwright, scholar, and musician. Dr. Provost largely created the field of Creole Studies through her early publications and presentations. . (Baton Rouge Baton Rouge (băt`ən r zh) [Fr.,=red stick], city (1990 pop. 219,531), state capital and seat of East Baton Rouge parish, SE La. : Louisiana State University
Press This article needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of this article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. , 2000. Pp. xxiv, 344. Paper, $24.95, ISBN ISBNabbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-8071-2601-2; cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-8071-2532-6.) Sybil Kein traces the genesis of this multidisciplinary collection of fifteen articles to a 1992 conference on "African-Americans and Europe" held in Paris. Three lively sessions on Creole Louisianians convinced Kein of the need to clarify the identity of the region's renowned gens de couleur Gens de couleur is a French term meaning "people of color." This is often a short form of gens de couleur libres ("free people of color"). In practice, it can refer to creoles of color with Latin blood, and certain other free blacks. . Building upon the spirit of the Parisian conference, Kein introduces the collection with a discussion of the noun "creole," a term generally applied to persons of African or European ancestry born in the Americas. The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Stephan Thernstrom, ed.; Cambridge, Mass., 1980), she concludes, best conveyed its meaning. The encyclopedia explained that "in the [twentieth] century, Creole most often refers to the Louisiana Creoles of color," persons who "constitute a Caribbean phenomenon in the United States" (quoted on p. xiii). French scholar Michel Fabre, folklorist Barbara Rosendale Duggal, and linguist Fehintola Mosadomi reach deep into Louisiana's African, Antillean, and Latin European past to illuminate the historical and cultural legacy of Afro-Creole Louisianians. Contributions from Arthe A. Anthony, Mary L. Morton, and Violet Harrington Bryan attest to the culture's twentieth-century vibrancy. Bryan's study of Marcus B. Christian, a Depression-era poet whose intellectual orbit included literary artists Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker, is particularly insightful. Bryan describes a household in which Christian's father, a rural schoolteacher, taught his children to write poetry from an early age. She quotes Christian's recollection of "being perched upon one knee and my little twin-sister on the other, while he [Christian's father] read French poetry to us amid screams of childish laughter" (p. 43). Bryan's study reveals a Creole identity that valued artistic and scholarly pursuits--an identity that produced the nation's first known African American African American Multiculture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. See Race. short story, Victor Sejour's "Le Mulatre" (1837), and the nation's first anthology of African American poetry, Armand Lanusse's Les Cenelles (1845). That identity is very much in evidence in Creole with its numerous Afro-Creole contributors. Kein's Creole also refutes recent revisionist re·vi·sion·ism n. 1. Advocacy of the revision of an accepted, usually long-standing view, theory, or doctrine, especially a revision of historical events and movements. 2. scholarship that minimizes Louisiana's French/Caribbean heritage and downplays the exceptionalism ex·cep·tion·al·ism n. 1. The condition of being exceptional or unique. 2. The theory or belief that something, especially a nation, does not conform to a pattern or norm. of New Orleans gens de couleur. Caroline Senter, for instance, demonstrates the key role of the city's Afro-Creole leadership in Reconstruction politics. She explains the centrality of revolutionary republicanism (in both its European and Caribbean incarnations) to the Afro-Creole formulation of an "imagined American future" of liberte, egalite, fraternite (p. 278). Seizing upon the postwar era's revolutionary possibilities, the Creole intelligentsia directed its considerable literary talents to winning public support for a reconstructed nation of racial equality and universal male suffrage. Tragically, Senter concludes, Reconstruction's egalitarian promise of a multiracial mul·ti·ra·cial adj. 1. Made up of, involving, or acting on behalf of various races: a multiracial society. 2. Having ancestors of several or various races. "nation imagined" collapsed into a white supremacist "nation enacted" of segregation laws and statutory disfranchisement The removal of the rights and privileges inherent in an association with a group; the taking away of the rights of a free citizen, especially the right to vote. Sometimes called disenfranchisement. (p. 294). Still, Afro-Creole radicals made remarkable Reconstruction gains, including the passage of an 1870 law sanctioning interracial marriages. As Anthony G. Barthelemy and Joan M. Martin show in separate essays, the statute, though short-lived, acknowledged long-standing practices. Despite French and Spanish bans on mixed-race sexual contact, colonial authorities rarely enforced such prohibitions. Interracial in·ter·ra·cial adj. Relating to, involving, or representing different races: interracial fellowship; an interracial neighborhood. unions proliferated even after the Louisiana Purchase Louisiana Purchase, 1803, American acquisition from France of the formerly Spanish region of Louisiana. Reasons for the Purchase The revelation in 1801 of the secret agreement of 1800, whereby Spain retroceded Louisiana to France, aroused and the imposition of an Anglo-American, two-tiered racial order. Authors Michel Fabre, Mary Gehman, and Lester Sullivan shed light on the extent of interracial kinship ties. Louisiana senator Pierre Soule, for instance, furnished numerous letters of recommendation to assist his prominent white allies in advancing the careers of their mixed-race sons. Such a phenomenon was surely unique to the nation's "Creole Capital." Beginning in 1843 with the publication in New Orleans of an interracial literary journal, L'Album Litteraire, Creole Louisianians of African descent have brought an international, multiethnic perspective to race relations. Kein's Creole is another important contribution to that historic tradition. CARYN COSSE BELL University of Massachusetts-Lowell |
|
||||||||||||||||||

zh)
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion