Creolization in the Americas.

Edited by David Buisseret and Steven G. Reinhardt. Introduction by David Buisseret. The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, No. 32. (College Station: Published by Texas A&M University Press for the University of Texas at Arlington, 2000. Pp. [xii], 145. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 1-58544-101-5; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-89096-949-3.)

Five diverse and particularistic lectures, originally presented in 1997 at the University of Texas at Arlington, are collected here and introduced by David Buisseret. The first, by Buisseret, addresses creolization in seventeenth-century Jamaica, lightly surveying developments under such rubrics as food, dress, architecture, and politics, and concluding quite reasonably that "we are fully justified in speaking of the emergence of many elements of a creole society in seventeenth-century Jamaica" (p. 32). In a theoretically sophisticated essay on the Lower Mississippi Valley, Daniel H. Usner Jr. demonstrates the ways that "plantation society physically enveloped and ideologically marginalized the everyday strategies of rural folk" (p. 37), tracing in interesting detail the cultural encounters among American Indians, European settlers, and African slaves from the early eighteenth century and the ways that outsiders, serving their own economic (and even quasi-scholarly) interests, undervalued the creolization of agriculture and the people who continued to develop and use it. Mary L. Galvin documents the development of a broadly shared "creole medicine chest" in colonial South Carolina, focusing on the interactions of Indians, Africans, and Europeans in finding treatments for a variety of diseases.

In a provocative, ambitious essay Richard Cullen Rath uses music in eighteenth-century South Carolina and Georgia to explore the relationship between language, culture, and creolization. In my view, his characterizations of Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture (Boston, 1992)--with which many of the essays in this book are in direct dialogue--are nearly as faulty and confusing as those he attributes to the Africanist historian Paul E. Lovejoy (pp. 125-26 n. 9); for example, Rath's claim that the Mintz and Price model is based on structural, not generative, linguistic principles (pp. 103-5); but clearly, this brief review is not the appropriate place to respond. In the loosely organized final chapter of the book, J. L. Dillard, a veteran of the "black English" wars, ruminates on evidence for creolization in early American English, roaming over the frequent misuse of WPA ex-slave narratives, the selective non-citation of various champions of widespread creolization (such as Ian F. Hancock), and much else.

Buisseret's introduction, which frames the book, seems out-of-date in several respects: from his conclusion, after reviewing the literature, that "we therefore propose that the concept of `creolization' might usefully replace the older notions of `acculturation' and `assimilation"' (p. 5), a move that was made by many other scholars twenty-five years ago (as Rath makes clear in his chapter); to his proposal of a model that periodizes the process of creolization (where he cites a 1992 example as "the most recent attempt" [p. 14]), ignoring the many more sophisticated and recent formulations that culminate, perhaps, in Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone [Cambridge, Mass., 1998]); to his assertion that "our model of creolization seems to be more inclusive than some past models" (p. 15), when his "model" is represented here by an embarrassingly simple diagram (p. 6). It is almost as if Buisseret is stuck in a 1970s/1980s conceptual mold, unprepared to recognize the increasingly complex theoretical debates that continue to rage on the phenomenon of creolization (and which are apparent in some of this book's chapters). For just a couple of more recent attempts to engage this burgeoning literature, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context," Plantation Society in the Americas, 5 (Spring 1998), 8-28, and Richard Price, "The Miracle of Creolization: A Retrospective," New West Indian Guide, 75 (nos. 1 and 2, 2001), 37-67.

Despite several interesting chapters, Creolization in the Americas--thanks in part to Buisseret's introduction--leaves an aftertaste that recalls an earlier epoch.

RICHARD PRICE
College of William and Mary
and Anse Chaudiere, Martinique