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Reviewed by:
  • Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire
  • K. David Jackson
Havik, Philip J. and Malyn Newitt. Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire. Lusophone Studies 6. Bristol: Seagull/Faoileán, 2007. 276 pp.

The sixth number of Lusophone Studies of the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, & Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol (“a critical series dedicated to themes relating to the histories, literatures, and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world”) contains the proceedings of a conference at King’s College (London) in 2004 dedicated to Professor Charles R. Boxer, the celebrated historian of the Portuguese empire who died in 2000 at age 96. It consists of a general introduction by the editors and twelve articles on societies, languages, peoples, and relationships that came into being as a result of Portuguese overseas contacts.

Creole Societies revalidates creolization under an inclusive definition referring to all populations, cultures, and languages that came into existence as a result of European contacts with non-European peoples, whether in Africa, Asia, or the Americas. The twelve essays present data from Brazil to the Indian subcontinent on topics from migration and miscegenation to change in [End Page 202] language, gender, and cultural identities. There is the question of the presence of Crypto-Jews throughout the Portuguese colonial world, treated by Tobias Green in the cases of Guinea and Angola; the case of Luso-Africans who considered themselves as “Portuguese” because of cultural characteristics in Beatriz Heintze’s article on West Central Africa; the curious case presented by José Lingna Nafafe of the lançados or tangomãos, Portuguese traders who went native, sharing cultural and religious practices on the West African coast; or Philip Havik’s study of the social mobility of free black and mulatto women who acted as heads of household, became rich, and in some cases even managed large estates in São Tomé and Angola. A.J.R. Russell Wood’s study of Africans and Creoles in late colonial Brazil gives crucial documentation to distinctions between Brazilian- and African-born that details the long process of assimilation. Teotónio de Souza and Glen Ames discuss the social and religious composition of the Portuguese territories of Goa and the “Northern Provinces” in India. Myths of pure origin continued to be persistent, as Gerhard Seibert reviews in the case of the Angolares of São Tomé: “Castaways, Autochthons, or Maroons”?, while in Mumbai in the 1670s, as Glen Ames notes, there lived “Englishmen, Portugueze, Topazes, Genues, Moors, Coolie Christians, mostly Fishermen . . . all ‘confusedly’ within the town” . . . (257). Here, Creoles include castiços, mestiços, mulattoes and even casados under the rubric of miscegenation.

By reviving and broadening the use of the term Creole to study the social history of colonial and post-colonial societies, the authors take a risk, since the term has widely varying definitions and has been used pejoratively. Study of “Creole” languages in the Portuguese world began in the 1880s with Adolfo Coelho’s work on Cape Verdean Creole and Hugo Schuchardt’s study of world Portuguese “dialects,” and Creolistics has been the only scientific area to embrace the term. Sociologists and anthropologists have preferred “mixed-race” or “miscegenated” to refer to cross populations and hybrid societies,1 whereas “Creole” has not been widely understood to mean or used to refer to whole societies, or segments of societies, that resulted not only from intercultural contacts but were themselves new entities occupying a space between Europe and Africa, Asia, or America. Celebrated compendiums of ethnographic documentation from the Portuguese colonial world, such as A. Lopes Mendes’s tomes on Portuguese India,2 inevitably gave evidence of singular cultural identities, neither totally Portuguese nor local, resulting from centuries of hybridity. Contemporary sociologist Michael Roberts used the phrase “people in-between” to refer to Portuguese Burghers of Sri Lanka,3 while in Brazil essayist Silviano Santiago had proposed a theory of Brazilian culture as a “space in between,” formed by hybrid multifaceted syntheses of mobile populations, neither European, African, or indigenous.4

Creole Societies, as the historical study of cultural and social mixtures, has a major role to play in colonial and post-colonial studies. Miscegenation, migration, fluidity in social status, identity...

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