Creolization in the Americas (review)

This is an important little book. It deals with a very complex, difficult topic which is broad in scope and needs to be approached through interdisciplinary perspectives. Its chapters are all important, original contributions to our understanding of various aspects of the process of interaction among peoples from the Americas, Africa, and Europe and of the implications of the interchanges that took place among them. Although the book is much narrower in geographic scope than its ambitious title promises, it nevertheless makes an important contribution to the comparatively narrow area of the Americas it does discuss.

Editor David Buisseret contributes an informed introduction and a fine chapter about seventeenth-century Jamaica. Daniel H. Usner Jr. treats us to a well-researched, well-conceptualized discussion of the creolization of agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Mary L. Galvin contributes an informed discussion of the exchange of medicines and herbal remedies across ethnic lines in South Carolina. J. L. Dillard discusses conflicting interpretations of black English or Ebonics in South Carolina.

The most thoughtful and original contribution is Richard Cullen Rath's chapter, "Drums and Power: Ways of Creolizing Music in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia, 1730–90." The title of this chapter does not do it justice. It opens with a long, impressive discussion of the basic issues involved in interpreting creolization. Its first seven pages discuss the evolution of interpretations of the process of creolization and include criticisms of the sometimes inappropriate parallels made by scholars between creolization of language and culture. His alternate approach is worth citing in full:

Students of cultural creolization have treated it as analogous to linguistic creolization. This analogy is mistaken. Culture is not like language. It is integral to language, and language to it. Both are ways in which individuals make sense of their worlds. They are both ways of getting meaning to and from expressible forms. They also make the human landscape comprehensible. Language and culture are two different ways of doing this, each dependent on the other.

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The balance of this chapter looks at musical instruments and styles as a way of conveying meanings that were understood by African slaves but not by their masters, pushing the boundaries between language and musicology. Although the research, conceptualization, and interpretation are impressive, the chapter could be strengthened by better knowledge of interchange of musical instruments, especially the guitar and other string instruments, and of musical and dance styles from across the Sahara Desert, in Islamic Spain and Portugal, coupled with the demographic impact of slaves brought directly from Senegal to South Carolina and Georgia.

As valuable as these contributions are, they illustrate the need for placing Anglo-America and the United States within a broader context of time and place. African impact on Spain and Portugal dated from the Moorish occupation during the eleventh century. Iberian colonies preceded significant British, French, and Dutch settlements in the Americas by two centuries. There were more African "immigrants" to Spanish colonies than Spaniards. There was far more—and earlier—interaction among peoples from Africa, Europe, and the Americas than scholars usually assume. These points notwithstanding, this slim, but important, book is worth buying and reading with care.