Creoles, Revisited

Language Contact, Language Change, and Postcolonial Linguistics

Nicholas G. Faraclas, Sally J. Delgado, Nicholas G. Faraclas, Sally J. Delgado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000386332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This innovative book contributes to a paradigm shift in the study of creole languages, forging new empirical frameworks for understanding language and culture in sociohistorical contact. The authors bring together archival sources to challenge dominant linguistic theory and practice and engage issues of power, positioning marginalized indigenous peoples as the center of, and vital agents in, these languages' formation and development. Students in language contact, pidgins and creoles, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies courses—and scholars across many disciplines—will benefit from this book and be convinced of the importance of understanding creoles and creolization.

1 Introduction

Post-Colonial Linguistics and Post-Creole Creolistics

Nicholas G. Faraclas and Sally J. Delgado

Key Themes, Terms and Concepts of the Volume

In addition to a discussion of key themes and terms that are used throughout the volume, this introductory chapter provides a preliminary framework for envisioning post-colonial linguistics and post-creole creolistics. It does so first in relation to current debates concerning colonial/neo-colonial/post-colonial paradigms of science in general and linguistics in particular, and then in light of a critical problematization of concepts such as ‘language’, ‘creole’ and ‘creolistics’. At the end of this introduction, each of the other contributions to the volume is briefly summarized with a focus on how it helps move us toward a critical mass of informed post-colonial linguistic and post-creole creolistic praxis.

The chapters found in this work represent a preliminary attempt to modify the ways in which ‘language’ in general, and ‘creole languages’ in particular, have generally been viewed in the past, specifically by contributing in some manner to a shift from the exclusive set of colonial lenses that have predominated in Western linguistics and creolistics over the last few centuries to an inclusive array of post-colonial and post-creole lenses. We do not wish in any way, however, to give the impression that we claim to have made a complete break with the colonial paradigms of the past (Kuhn, 1962) or that we have arrived at a definitive understanding of what might eventually take shape as post-colonial linguistic frameworks, approaches, methodologies, etc. Instead, we see post-colonial linguistics and post-creole creolistics as works in progress, emerging from the praxis of all who have not allowed the discipline of modern linguistics to extinguish their sense of astonishment and fascination with what Foucault (1972, 1980:231) calls the ‘awesome materiality’ of physically and socially embodied human language practices, and from the praxis of all who have resisted the Saussurean (1916)/Chomskian (1966) trivialization, erasure and/or domestication of the dialectal/heteroglossic variability, the dialogical/interactive performativity and the dialectical/intentional agency of those practices (Bakhtin, 1935; LePage & Tabouret-Keller, 1985).

The Colonial Era Afro-Atlantic and the Linguistic Repertoires/Varieties That Emerged There

One of the most devastating impacts of colonialism lies in what it acknowledges, valorizes and/or centers versus what it erases, trivializes and/or marginalizes in the dominant historical and scientific narratives that it has bequeathed to us. We see this volume as contributing to a process of undoing the systematic erasure by historians, linguists, creolists and the rest of Western academia of the historical and cultural agency of marginalized peoples (including women, peoples of non-European-descent and non-propertied peoples of European descent) in shaping the linguistic repertoires that emerged in the circum-Atlantic from the 1400s onward due to contact among African-, European-, and Indigenous-descended peoples (Faraclas, 2012). Our focus is therefore on what we call the Afro-Atlantic in its widest sense, which includes the Atlantic coasts of West, Central and Southern Africa, the islands and mainland coasts of the Caribbean Basin, the Atlantic coasts of South America from the Guianas in the north to the Rio de la Plata in the south, many areas along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America, and some of the coastal areas of Western Europe. We have adopted the term Afro-Atlantic for several reasons, including the following: (1) to help reverse the trivialization and de-centering of people of African descent in the emergence of the Atlantic World; (2) to acknowledge the fact that, between 1400 and 1800, the period with which most of the contributions in this book concern themselves, the overwhelming majority of the people, as well as the majority of the linguistic, cultural and identificational repertoires involved in colonial contact on both sides of the Atlantic were of recent African origin; and (3) to highlight the rhizomatic African ties that bind the peoples of the entire region together, thus beginning a process of challenging and healing the artificial divisions that have balkanized its peoples into colonial enclaves, such as the ‘English Caribbean’, the ‘French Caribbean’, the ‘Spanish Caribbean’, the ‘Dutch Caribbean’, ‘French West/Central Africa’, ‘Portuguese West/Central Africa’, and so on (Benítez-Rojo, 1992; Glissant, 1997).

We contend that the praxis of those who speak and/or study the linguistic repertoires and varieties that have conventionally been called ‘creole languages’, particularly the subset of those languages that are often referred to as the ‘Atlantic Creoles’ have played a substantial role in contributing to the critical mass of praxis required to reach enough ‘turning points’ so as to enable the emergence of post-colonial paradigms in linguistics. Each of the chapters in this work not only attests to this paradigm-transforming potential of critical reflection on the repertoires and varieties that have emerged from colonial era contact in the Afro-Atlantic, but also underscores the importance of what up until the present has been called ‘creolistics’ in ongoing efforts to bring about a shift to post-colonial approaches to language in the future.

Post-Colonial Readings of Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism

Our use of the term post-colonial is restricted to its original conceptualization as a lens or a way of reading the world (Ashcroft, 2013) and should in no way be construed as implying that we are living in a post-colonial world. On the contrary, colonialism is still very much alive, and thriving as never before. The formerly divided and competing imperial powers are now united and coordinated under the auspices of the multilateral neo-colonial institutions of corporate globalization, such as the World Bank, other ‘Development’ Banks, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, that have re-colonized the world and achieved unprecedentedly high rates of colonial extraction and domination for the transnational corporations whose interests they serve. If we expand our definition of colonialism to include women, the environment and the other targets for colonial plunder and dumping that have traditionally been erased from both colonial and anti-colonial discourse (Mies et al., 1987), the persistence of colonialism becomes even more evident and catastrophic. In addition to all that has just been said, it remains just as true today as it was during the pre-Independence ‘colonial era’ that whatever the imperial powers inflict on the people of the rest of the world, they also inflict in some shape or form on their own people. Therefore, in a real and non-trivial sense, all of the working classes and other marginalized peoples of the world, including those of the ‘metropoles’, can be said to have been colonized during the colonial era and to be experiencing neo-/re-colonization at present, in the form of ‘austerity’ programs, cuts in social services, lower wages/higher prices, longer workdays/workweeks, unbearable levels of personal debt, contamination of the environment, etc.

For example, ‘globalization’, ‘fast-capitalism’, ‘the information revolution’, and even the writing and publication of this present volume are all crucially dependent on devices such as computers and cell phones. During most of our waking lives, not only do we the peoples of both the ‘former’ colonies as well as of the ‘former’ metropoles addictively use these devices, but we are also extractively used by them and abusively ‘dumped on’ by them. Under the current system of neo-colonial domination, the widespread availability of these devices has been achieved by (1) the plunder of minerals extracted with environmentally apocalyptic consequences in Africa, where enslaved workers labor at gunpoint (Bales, 2016); (2) the extraction of the labor power of virtually enslaved women in factories that have poisoned the air and waters of Asia, where nets are hung from the upper floor windows to prevent ravaged workers from committing suicide (Merchant, 2017); and (3) the dumping of megatons of toxic wastes and discarded computers and cell phones by the former colonial powers on the land of nominally ‘independent’ nation-states in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, in exchange for cash to pay the interest fees on an unending series of usurious loans designed to keep the people of the ‘former’ colonies and their future generations in a perpetual state of debt slavery to the banks of their ‘former’ colonizers.

Colonialism, Plunder, Patriarchy and Ethnocentrism

Colonialism has always depended on the inextricably intertwined and mutually co-causal and co-amplifying triad of plunder, patriarchy and ethnocentrism, which we experience today primarily as capitalism, cis-/hetero-/sexism, and racism/xenophobia, respectively. In this volume, we will therefore use the term colonial in its broadest sense, expanding the more conventional understanding centered on the domination of non-Western European peoples living in what are designated as [−metropolitan] spaces by Western European peoples living in what are designated as [+metropolitan] spaces to the other types of artificial and binarily defined discursive domination that cannot be meaningfully separated from it. These include the domination, anywhere in the world (including the ‘metropoles’), of people who are classed as [−rich/propertied] by people who are classed as [+rich/propertied], of people who are gendered as [−male/hetero-/cis-] by people who are gendered as [+male/hetero-/cis-], by people who are raced as [−white] by people who are raced as [+white], of the parts of the living world that are classified as [−human] by the parts of the living world that are classified as [+human], etc.

Colonization, Hegemony, the Symbolic Elites and Western Science

Although plunder, patriarchy and ethnocentrism were initially co-established largely through coercive force in a few aberrant cultures less than 15,000 years ago (Gimbutas, 1991), none are maximally effective until they come to rely instead on discursive force, which is how we define the term hegemony in this volume (Gramsci, 1929–1935/1985; van Dijk, 1998). Hegemonic control has been operationalized by what we will call the predominantly [+rich, +male, +white,] colonizing classes through the establishment of religious, educational, mediatic and other institutions in which they enlist symbolic elites (Bordieu, 1991) such as priests, teachers, linguists and other scientists in the formulation and propagation of economically exploitative, patriarchal and ethnocentric ways of thinking, speaking and acting in the world among the predominantly [−rich, −male, −white,] colonized classes. These dominant discourses, which serve the interests of the colonizing classes rather than the interests of the colonized classes, determine what is generally presented to and imposed on the public as ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ by religious, educational and scientific authorities, including linguists and creolists.

The epistemic, metaphysical, and ontological foundations of Western science were laid down during waves of colonizing globalization that predate the present wave of corporate globalization by thousands of years. Of the many philosophical traditions of Ancient Greece, those of Plato and his disciples were preferred by the colonizing classes, because of their capacity to justify and consolidate the plunder, patriarchy and ethnocentrism that became the modus operandi of Greco-Roman imperial domination. Platonic thinking was instrumental, for example, in the construction of ethnocentric oppositions such as [+Greek/‘civilized’] vs. [−Greek/‘barbarian’], where the binary feature [+Greek] represented a logic that artificially idealized, homogenized and equated language, culture and ethnicity. In a similar way, the disciplines and methodologies of contemporary Western science were established during the modern colonial era as part of the justification and consolidation of plunder, patriarchy and ethnocentrism as the modus operandi of Western European imperial domination (Merchant, 1980; Alvares, 1992; Shiva, 2001; Said, 1978, 1989). This is especially true for linguistics, whose birth as a modern scientific discipline was characterized by:

1. an obsessive quest to reduce the heteroglossic trans- and pluri-linguistic repertoires of real embodied human beings in real communities of practice to idealized monolithic, exclusive ‘languages’ whose essence (Saussure’s langue and Chomsky’s ‘competence’) is Platonically defined as a unitary underlying system beyond our experience, which is simultaneously opposed to and elevated in ‘scientific’ importance above how we actually use and process language in our lives; and
2. an equally obsessive quest to trace words and ‘languages’ to monolithic, exclu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: Post-Colonial Linguistics and Post-Creole Creolistics
• 2 A Subaltern Overview of Early Colonial Contact in the Afro-Atlantic: Renegades, Maroons and the Sugar Story
• 3 Sociohistorical Matrices for the Emergence of Afro-Atlantic ‘Creoles’ and other pre-1800 Colonial Era Contact Repertoires and Varieties
• 4 Renegades, Raiders, Loggers and Traders in the Early Colonial Contact Zones of the Western Caribbean
• 5 ‘Arawak’, ‘Carib’ and ‘Garifuna’: Indigenous Trans-/Pluri-linguality versus Imperial Myth-Making in the Afro-Atlantic
• 6 Jamaican Maroon Spirit Language, Krio and Cryptolect
• 7 Conceptual Construal, Convergence and the Creole Lexicon
• Index