Creolization as Cultural Creativity

Preface

ix Preface Creolization is never-ending. For the editors, an Argentine criolla with Andalusian and Moravian ancestors and a New York Jew with roots in Belarus, Hungary, Lithuania, and Poland, the subject of this volume has deep personal resonance and represents an ongoing intellectual journey . This voyage began when we were graduate students in John Szwed’s visionary seminar on creolization in folklore and literature at the University of Pennsylvania during the mid-1970s. Along the way, we were joined by panel participants and a plenary speaker at annual meetings of the American Folklore Society, by contributors to a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, and by the authors included in this volume. They represent an extraordinary variety of scholarly perspectives and personal backgrounds, yet all of us share a view of creolization as a quintessential embodiment of cultural creativity. This volume includes substantially revised essays from the winter 2003 special issue of the Journal of American Folklore along with new contributions written especially for this book. In the years since we first conceived this volume, creolization studies has expanded exponentially from an area of sociolinguistics that challenged received paradigms to a robust field of scholarship that profoundly influences multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. We were privileged to have been students of the late Dell Hymes, whose groundbreaking “ethnography of communication,” combined with his work on Creole and pidgin languages, his pioneering research and fieldwork on ethnopoetics, and his explicit recognition of the contribution of folklore to sociolinguistic research (Hymes 1971), decisively shaped our work on creolization. Over the years, our interest in creolization intensified, with fragrant overtones, through many conversations with Daniel J. Crowley. This volume was to include an article by Dan on carnivals throughout the world as manifestations of creolization. Unable to complete his writing, he worked on it until just prior to his death in 1998 while attending the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia. This book is dedicated in loving memory of Dan, x Preface a pioneering scholar of creolization for over four decades. He inspired, informed, enlightened, entertained, and delighted all of us interested in creolization, drawing from his extraordinary firsthand experiences and insights about the Creole world. His ongoing work on cultural creolization reached back to the 1950s. As his classic article “Plural and Differential Acculturation in Trinidad” (first published in 1957) attests, Crowley’s work on creolization was decades ahead of its time. His essay envisions creolization as a focal cultural process in the Caribbean and is suggestive of how it is a shaping force in social and cultural theory. It is both a historical document and a programmatic account of creolization in the Caribbean, still fresh after more than half a century, resonating with anyone who knows the Caribbean as ethnographer or resident. A number of other fellow travelers shaped our thinking and contributed to our insights on creolization. These include panelists who joined us at professional meetings over the years and whose presentations and discussions expanded and developed our ideas: Edward Hirsch, Susan Stewart, Michael Aceto, Mary Hope Lee, and Lynda M. Hill. Colleagues who participated in two NEH Summer Seminars conducted by John F. Szwed at the University of Pennsylvania (1980) and at Yale University (1984) also inspired and influenced us. We are especially grateful for the deep understanding of creolization that anthropologist, sociolinguist, and ethnomusicologist Morton Marks and anthropologist, sociolinguist, and James Joyce scholar Karl Reisman brought to the table on those occasions, and for the formative influence of Susan Stewart’s poetic sensibility and literary insights into creolization. In Argentina, we want to acknowledge the brilliant graduate students who shared their ideas with Ana Cara in the seminar on creolization and the Caribbean and, particularly, to thank Dr. María Cristina Dalmagro, who administered the Comparative Literature Program at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. No less enlightening have been the contributions of Oberlin College students, whose inquisitive minds and creativity are always an inspiration. We wish to acknowledge the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, which generously provided a refuge to Ana Cara for research and writing; and, especially, we thank Dr. Teresa R. Stojkov for making this possible. We are grateful to the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research of Harvard University , which enabled Robert Baron to benefit from extraordinary library resources and inspiring collegiality as a non-resident fellow. Many thanks also...