Review: Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination (Crichlow)

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2006

In the past two decades, analogies drawn from supposedly Caribbean processes of creolization have begun to command increasing interest in anthropology. Examining historical as well as contemporary social uses of this terminology in its region of origin, as well as linguistic, sociocultural, and archaeological extrapolations from such usages, this review argues that although, as an analytical metaphor, “creolization” may appear to remedy certain deficits in long-standing anthropological agendas, the current unreflexive use of it is neither defensible on empirical grounds nor theoretically well advised. Yet while this review argues against further uncritical extensions of such metaphorics, it analyzes their current proliferation as a social phenomenon worthy of anthropological analysis in its own right.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

Annual Review of Linguistics, 2018

We provide a selective overview of the state of pidgin and creole language studies, with a focus on the different ways in which the question of creole genesis—especially of European-lexifier creoles—is approached: from the perspective of the demographics and periodization of the (early) life of the colonies and from the perspective of the role of typological concepts such as analyticity/syntheticity and simplicity/complexity in the mechanisms of creolization and their linguistic outcomes. We conclude that substrate speakers are most likely to have an impact on the grammar of a creole language if they are among the first to shift to the incipient contact variety, and we find that processes of early second language acquisition and of functional transfer in creolization favor free rather than bound expression of grammatical categories.

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2017

Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages, 2001

ISBN 90 272 5244 0 (Hb; Eur.) I 1 5881 I 039 7 (Hb; US) © 2000 -John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any fonn, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means, without written pennission from the publisher. 1) In one of her seminal papers, reminds us of an ambiguity in the usage of prototype, which has been ignored in the cognitive sciences. Aside from the best-exemplar notion, there is an interpretation of prototype as first specimen, which, in cases of inventions, may lack several of the features associated with a best-exemplar notion that one develops

Extract from : Gallgher, David (ed.), Creoles, Diasporas and Cosmopolitanisms. The Creolization of nations, cultural migrations, global languages and literatures, Bethesda, Dublin, Palo Alto : Academica Press, 2012, pp. 96-112

2008

Creolization" has often been terminologically equated with "hybridization", "syncretization" and other terms referring to processes of mixture. As well, what and who was labeled (a) »creole« has largely been determined by ideological preferences and emic labeling rather than by scientific reasoning. I argue for a more concise understanding and use of the "C-Word" 3. Examining the social and historical context of creolization and tracing the etymology of "creole" and its meanings through times shows that creolization may have meant "lots of different things at different times" (Stewart 2007: 5) but has nevertheless been distinct in that it involved indigenization and-to varying degrees-ethnicization of a more or less diverse and, in large parts, foreign population. Thus, historical creolization has not been a process aimed at overcoming ethnic identities and boundaries in favor of local varieties of cultural mixture and identification but one aimed at their (re-)construction under new-and often awkward-conditions. Taking into account creolization'sand creole terminology's-historical semantics helps unfold the latter's heuristic potentials for a more systematic and comparative analysis, conceptualization and differentiation of contemporary processes of interaction and mixture. By connecting the historical semantics with socio-linguistic approaches to distinguish between creole and pidgin variants of language, historical creolization's major contemporary "outcome"-pidginization of culture and identity-comes to light, a process prevalent particularly in postcolonial societies. 1 I would like to thank Friederike Fleischer, Günther Schlee, Robin Cohen and Wilson Trajano Filho for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 Jacqueline Knörr, Associate Professor and head of the research group "Integration and Conflict in the Upper Guinea Coast",

Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas. In honor of John V. Singler. [Creole Language Library 53.], 2017

This paper will take as its starting point Singler’s views on the role of children in creole genesis, which include the idea that children are regularizers rather than innovators, that they may have contributed lexifier properties, and that their potential as contributors to creole genesis is greatest at the time of a colony’s transition to sugar monoculture. I will consider the relevance of these ideas for an account of the development of Berbice Dutch, a creole lexified by Dutch and Eastern Ịjọ, now extinct. I will argue that children were mainly responsible for its development, that the early introduction of sugar assisted their role, and that children may have innovated mixed structures partially modelled on both the lexifier and the substrate.