Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua

Notes

183 Preface 1. In Nicaragua, the geographical terms Atlantic coast and Caribbean coast have different historical, cultural, and political resonances but for practical purposes can be taken to refer to the same region in eastern Nicaragua. In this book, I occasionally use the term Caribbean coast to highlight historical or cultural discourses of connection to the Caribbean region more broadly. Other times, I follow the dominant convention of using the term Atlantic Coast to refer to the contemporary political territory in which this study is located. 2. Recent estimates put the number of Miskitu speakers at more than 120,000 in Nicaragua and more than 51,000 in Honduras (Salamanca 2007). 3. In this book I use Creole to refer to people who identify as such and Kriol to refer to their language, following recent work in developing a writing system for Nicaraguan Kriol English. There is no reliable documentation of the number of Creoles (or Kriol speakers) in Nicaragua, but the minimum is probably between 25,000 and 30,000 (Koskinen 2010:136–137). 4. John Holm (1978) argued that “Miskito Coast Creole” (Nicaraguan Kriol English ) was one of the oldest Creole English languages, predating Jamaican Creole and Belizean Creole. He also suggested that Belizean Creole was a direct descendant of Miskito Coast Creole, emerging from the relocation of English settlements from the Mosquitia (the Caribbean coast of current-day Nicaragua and Honduras) to Belize in 1787. Chapter 1 1. I use Corn Island to refer to Great Corn Island, as is common in local discourse . Little Corn Island, a third of the size of Great Corn Island and located about Notes 184 · Notes to Pages 1–6 ten miles to the northeast of Great Corn, appears in the book only in passing since it was not a common site of Miskitu settlement. I should also note at the outset that my periodic use of the term “kids” in a book about the discourse of “children” is a stylistic device intended to capture the colloquial flavor of children’s peer culture. In American English, the formal, adultcentric term “child” contrasts with the informal, childcentric term “kid,” a contrast that is paralleled by distinct terms in Miskitu (tuktan and tuba) and Nicaraguan Spanish (niño/niña and chavalo/chavala). 2. All the names of children and other residents of Corn Island are pseudonyms. 3. Amanda Weidman has cautioned that the terms expressive and expression are linked to modern constructions of the interior self and the content that appears to emerge naturally from that self (2006:146). We need to pay attention to the ideological histories that terms of language encode, but I think terms can also be resignified and clarified in new contexts. The term expressive practices and my overall approach point to the fundamental sociality of the self and to communication as a culturally mediated process of representation in which action, form, and meaning are intertwined. 4. As such, I cannot provide a comprehensive intellectual genealogy or exegesis of all the concepts in this book. I hope that informed readers will forgive absences, and that novice readers will use the book as a departure point for their own transdisciplinary explorations. 5. The concept of subjectivity draws attention to the social positioning of the individual embedded in structures of power and also to the spaces of messy incoherence that interact with coherent narratives of self. Some of the background to this conceptualization—shaped by theories and adaptations of Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky , and Jacques Lacan—can be found in a concise form in Emerson (1983:254– 257). I use the term identity as a discourse of selfhood that constructs a more coherent sense of belonging in a social group. As Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall have pointed out, identity, like subjectivity, emerges from interaction and discourse; it is not “a stable structure located primarily in the individual psyche or in fixed social categories” (2005:585). While identity is undoubtedly an overused trope, I do not think we can abandon it as an analytical concept just when it has become politically and socially meaningful for so many people living in the margins of postcolonial states (and elsewhere ). Those who attempt to banish the term identity from analytical language (e.g., Brubaker and Cooper 2000) commit the fallacy of isolating academic discourse from political discourse, when both are explicitly intertwined in many parts of the world and covertly intertwined in the hegemonic intellectual centers of the United States and Western Europe...