Tesis sobre el tema "Caribbean Creoles"

Research in the Caribbean often links global phenomena (e.g. increased tourism) to changes in lifestyles and mindsets taking place in this part of the world (Curtis, 2009). I examine the direction, intensity, and motivations of language changes among adolescents in three communities in Bequia (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) considering the socio-economic transformations affecting the island. Data for this study was obtained using a combination of sociolinguistic interviews and conversations between Bequia adolescents and their grandparents recorded in the course of several fieldwork trips. Three villages in Bequia were considered, Hamilton, Paget Farm and Mount Pleasant, characterised by different patterns of settlement and socioeconomic development. I investigate variation between: (i) creole verb stems vs. Standard English verb inflections (e.g. I go yesterday vs. I went yesterday), and (ii) verb stems and verb inflections vs. creole preverbal markers (e.g. I bin play yesterday). A variety of grammatical, discoursespecific, functional, and cognitive constraints are tested to determine which factors condition the variable patterns across different communities and age groups, and how linguistically similar/different these communities are. Results of the quantitative multivariate analysis of variation between bare verbs and inflected verbs show dialect levelling (Kerswill, 2003) among adolescents in Hamilton and Paget Farm and a transmission of the system (Labov, 2007) from the older generation to the younger in Mount Pleasant. In addition, adolescents in Paget Farm have recycled (Dubois and Horvath, 1999) a stigmatised creole form, preverbal bin, and are using it significantly more than any other group on the island. The study points to several important conclusions. Firstly, it emphasises the necessity for a multidisciplinary perspective in accounting for the factors which condition language change, especially in such a diverse and fast developing setting as the present-day Caribbean. Secondly, it supports the research on language and globalisation emphasising the relationship between the local and the global (e.g. Meyerhoff and Niedzielski, 2003). Finally, the study attempts to determine the nature of variation in creole languages as e.g. a creole continuum or co-existing systems, and establish replicable methods for measuring linguistic similarities/differences between communities.

Des études portant sur le français des 17e et 18e siècles se dégage généralement une vision unitariste d'un français classique qui correspond à la langue écrite des grands auteurs. Or, de plus en plus, l'attention des chercheurs s'est tournée vers des sources documentaires susceptibles de révéler toute l'étendue des phénomènes variationnels qui caractérisent l'histoire de la langue. Une source non-littéraire a récemment fait l'objet d'un regain d'intérêt de la part des linguistes : le fonds français des Prize Papers, constitué de documents saisis par les corsaires anglais sur les bateaux français qu'ils avaient capturés, pour servir de preuve lors du procès déterminant si le navire vaincu était de bonne prise, c'est-à-dire capturé légalement. Comme ces navires transportaient le courrier échangé entre les Français installés aux Antilles et leur cercle familial et social demeuré en métropole, ces documents, conservés aux National Archives de Londres, sont en grande partie de nature épistolaire. La plupart furent rédigés par des scripteurs peu-lettrés, laissant apparaître diverses variantes d'ordre diatopique, diachronique ou diastratique, dont les attestations permettent de mieux connaître l'état du français tel qu'il était réellement pratiqué aux 17e et 18e siècles. Si les scripteurs sont bien soumis à la pression de la norme, comme en atteste le caractère souvent formulaire des lettres échangées, du moins la maîtrisent-ils imparfaitement. En particulier, l'étude de ce fonds participe à la reconstruction de ce que devait être le français colonial qui fut la base (l'input des créolistes) du français actuellement parlé aux Antilles et des créoles antillais à base française
Studies on 17th‑ and 18th‑century French generally give rise to an unitarist vision of a classical French based on the written language of a few great authors. However, researchers are more and more turning their attention to documentary sources that can reveal the full extent of the variational phenomena that characterize the history of the language. A non-literary source has recently attracted renewed interest from linguists: the French Prize Papers fund, i.e. documents seized by the English privateers on captured French ships, to be used as evidence during the trial determining whether they were taken legally or not. As these ships carried the mail exchanged between the French people settled in the West Indies and their Metropolitan relatives and connexions back home in Metropolitan France, these documents, held by the National Archives in London, are mainly letters. Most of them were written by writers with low literacy, revealing a variety of diatopic, diachronic and diastratic variants of phonetic, morphosyntactic or lexical nature. Although writers are indeed subject to the pressure of standards, as can be seen from the formulaic nature of the letters, at least they have an imperfect command of them; these attestations therefore provide a better understanding of the state of French as it was actually practised at the time. Furthermore, the study of the Prize Papers contributes to the reconstruction of what must have been colonial French, which was the origin of the French currently spoken in the West Indies, and was the input of French-based Antillean creoles

This dissertation identifies three previously unexplained typological asymmetries between creoles, other types of language contact, and `normal' sound change. (1) The merger gap deals with phoneme loss. French /y/ merges with /i/ in all creoles worldwide, whereas merger with /u/ is also well-attested in other forms of language contact. The rarity of /u/ reflexes in French creoles is unexplained, especially because they are well attested in French varieties spoken in West Africa. (2) The assimilation gap focuses on stress-conditioned vowel assimilation. In creoles the quality of the stressed vowel often spreads to unstressed vowels, e.g. English potato > Krio /&rgr;ϵ&rgr;&tgr;ϵ&tgr;ϵ/. Strikingly, we do not find the opposite in creoles, but it is well attested among non-creoles, e.g. German umlaut and Romance metaphony. (3) The epenthesis gap is about repairs of word-final consonants.These are often preserved in language contact by means of vowel insertion (epenthesis), e.g. English big > Sranan bigi, but in normal language transmission this sound change is said not to occur in word-final position.

These case studies make it possible to test various theories of sound change on new data, by relating language contact outcomes to the phonetics of non-native perception and L2 speech production. I also explore the implications of social interactions and historical developments unique to creolisation, with comparisons to other language contact situations.

Based on the typological gaps identified here, I propose that sociohistorical context, e.g. age of learner or nature of input, is critical in determining linguistic outcomes. Like phonetic variation, it can be biased in ways which produce asymmetries in sound change. Specifically, in language contact dominated by adult second language acquisition, we find transmission biases towards phonological rather than perceptual matching, overcompensation for perceptual weakness, and overgeneralisation of phrase-final prominence.

This dissertation will demonstrate that a variety of Dominican Spanish in contact with St. Thomas English Creole (STTEC) revealed many features which are consistent with Dominican Spanish in other contact environments and some new features which are emerging as the result of uniquely STTEC influences. The most notable feature is the appearance of the vowel [ϵ] in Dominican Spanish, which in STTEC is highly indexical to St. Thomian identity. In the present sociolinguistic analysis, it was found that the variability of [ϵ] was significantly influenced by the following phonological segment, syllable stress, the language of the token, and the speaker's’ social network ties and self-ascribed identity. This dissertation also includes a socio-historical background of St Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, a description of St Thomas English Creole, and a history of immigration patterns of people from the Dominican Republic to St Thomas, U.S.V.I.

Cette étude porte sur l’exploration du processus et du phénomène par lesquels l’identité nationale et culturelle des Caraïbes a été construite. Dans la poursuite de cet objectif, deux poèmes majeurs et une pièce de théâtre dramatique de Derek Walcott seront examinés. La première s’agit de son poème épique créole, Omeros, qui se concentre sur les enjeux de l’identité créole et le concept de l’héros national.Étant donnée que la poésie de Walcott est fortement influencée par sa vie personnelle et en conséquence,par la vie dans son pays natal, l'île de Sainte-Lucie, il paraît indispensable à examiner son poème autobiographique, Another Life, qui est un compte rétrospectif de Walcott et son parcours artistiquejusqu’à l’âge de 33 ans. En outre, puisque Omeros met en parallèle la poésie homérique, cette étude bénéficie également d’une exploration de son autre réécriture de la poésie homérique, The Odyssey : aPlay. Cette étude tente à monter que ces deux réécritures se sont complémentaires : le poème épique antillais est la quête d’identité du point de vue du sujet colonial, tandis que la pièce de théâtre dramatique antillaise est la quête d’identité de la perspective du colonisateur. L’étude de la poésie et des pièces de théâtre dramatiques de Walcott nous aident à percevoir les façons dont le poète antillais tente à déconstruire l’importance de la tradition littéraire occidentale à travers la réécriture de la poésie homérique. Cette tradition perpétue l’opposition binaire de supériorité/infériorité qui joue un rôle déterminant dans la construction de l’identité d’un individu. En déplaçant les personnages et la littérature de Saint Lucie de leur emplacement dans les marges vers le centre, Walcott décentre la poésie homérique, et la littérature occidentale. Créolisation, Colonialisme, Postcolonialisme,Déconstruction, Poésie homérique, Histoire, Mémoire, Réécriture
This thesis seeks to explore the process and phenomenon through which Caribbean national and cultural identity has been constructed. In order to achieve this goal, two of Derek Walcott’s major poems and one of his dramas have been chosen. The first is his Creole epic poem, Omeros, which concentrates on the issues of Creole identity and the concept of national hero. Since Walcott’s poetry is highly influenced by his personal life and consequently life in his homeland, the island of Saint Lucia, it seems indispensable to study his autobiographical poem, Another Life, which is Walcott’s retrospective review of his artistic journey until the age of 33. Moreover, since Omeros draws parallelswith Homeric epics, it seems highly beneficial to this study to include his other rewriting of Homericepics, The Odyssey : a Play. This study makes an effort to show that these two rewritings are complementary to each other: the West Indian epic poem is the quest for identity seen from the point of view of the colonized subject, whereas the West Indian stage drama is the quest for identity from the colonizer’s perspective. Studying Walcott’s poetry and dramas helps one perceive the ways in which the West Indian poet makes an effort to deconstruct the importance of the Western literary tradition through rewriting the Homeric epics. This tradition perpetuates the binary opposition of superiority/inferiority which plays a seminal role in the construction of individual identity. By displacing the Saint Lucian characters and literature from their place in the margins to the center, Walcott decenters the Homeric epics, and Western literature. Creolisation, Colonialism, Postcolonialism,Deconstruction, , History, Memory, Rewriting

Spanish
Ph.D.
This dissertation will demonstrate that a variety of Dominican Spanish in contact with St. Thomas English Creole (STTEC) revealed many features which are consistent with Dominican Spanish in other contact environments and some new features which are emerging as the result of uniquely STTEC influences. The most notable feature is the appearance of the vowel [ɛ] in Dominican Spanish, which in STTEC is highly indexical to St. Thomian identity. In the present sociolinguistic analysis, it was found that the variability of [ɛ] was significantly influenced by the following phonological segment, syllable stress, the language of the token, and the speakers’ social network ties and self-ascribed identity. This dissertation also includes a socio-historical background of St Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, a description of St Thomas English Creole, and a history of immigration patterns of people from the Dominican Republic to St Thomas, U.S.V.I.
Temple University--Theses

The novel shows how a young Indo-Guyanese immigrant to the UK is racialized; aspiring to leave behind the "messiness" and confusion of the poverty-stricken immigrant lives he sees around him, he goes to Cambridge. The story is narrated by this character long after, in ways that reveal how this aspiration was assimilative and colonizing, encouraging him to abandon his friends and his roots. His life story makes it clear how different systems of racial categorization work in Guyana and in the UK to violently separate those who might be friends, lovers, and allies.

British expansion to the West Indies in the eighteenth-century resulted in vast economic growth for the British Empire and a rise in literature set in the region. Examining the literature allows for an in-depth exploration of how the Caribbean has become associated as a place of relaxation and escape though its early history of colonialism is fraught with violence. My study builds on the understanding of the Caribbean region in the eighteenth-century and utilizes hospitality theory to articulate the role that cultural exchange and physical setting play in the texts and in the formation of national identity, both in the West Indies and in England. Using hospitality theory to explore how power shifts between the guest/host/witness, I explore the influence of literature on eighteenth-century perceptions of this region through an examination of the patterns that develop through prose fiction, drama, and poetry. Section one includes Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1696), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and William Pittis’ The Jamaica Lady (1720). I argue that Behn’s work establishes narrative patterns that uncover what eighteenth-century travelers imagined in the West Indies—the host welcomes the outsider, the land serves as witness, and the arrival of the guest initiates a realignment of the British subjectivity—and show how these patterns reappear in the later works of Defoe and Pittis. In the section two, I show that the theatre creates a shift in these categories as a direct result of space, performance, and shared experience through my readings of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1696), Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771), and John Gay’s Polly (1728). The final section focuses on the poetry of James Grainger, Nathaniel Weekes, and Francis Williams, revealing the tropes that emerged and demonstrating how the Caribbean land is visualized as a welcoming space. I argue that these genres work together to generate images of the tropics in the eighteenth-century British mindset and provide a foundation for the way we have come to imagine this region today.

Este trabalho apresenta ao leitor de língua portuguesa a tradução da obra crioula Antan denfance, de Patrick Chamoiseau. Para melhor compreensão dos aspectos linguísticos e extralinguísticos do livro, desenvolvemos um estudo inicial, dividido em três capítulos, que obedece ao percurso: contexto histórico, autor e obra. O primeiro capítulo contempla a história da Martinica, desde os primeiros habitantes até a colonização francesa, evidenciando as principais consequências do movimento colonizador no que diz respeito ao ser, ao espaço e à língua. No segundo capítulo, traçamos um perfil do autor, apresentando um pouco da sua produção intelectual, sua participação no movimento literário da crioulidade e seu projeto literário, de maneira a ressaltar suas peculiaridades estilísticas. O terceiro capítulo destina-se a refletir sobre as competências necessárias ao tradutor de obras culturalmente marcadas, analisando não somente as nossas principais escolhas tradutológicas, como a característica mais elementar de Antan denfance: o enraizamento na tradição oral.
This paper presents to Portuguese-speaking readers the translation of the Creole work Antan denfance, by Patrick Chamoiseau. For better understanding of linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of this book, we developed an initial study, divided into three chapters, which follows this path: historical context, author and work. The first chapter covers the History of Martinique, from the earliest inhabitants to the French colonization, highlighting the main consequences of the colonization movement to the individuals, the space and the language. In the second chapter, we have compiled a profile of the author, where we introduce some of his intellectual production, his participation in the créolité literary movement and his literary project, in order to emphasize his stylistic peculiarities. The third chapter intends to examine the skills necessary to translate culturally marked works, by analyzing not only our main choices of translation, but also the most elementary aspect of this work: rooting in oral tradition.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008.
Title from file title page. Mary Zeigler, committee chair; Marti Singer, Lynée Gaillet, committee members. Electronic text (113 [i.e. 112] p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 1, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-110).

Tout au long du XIXe siècle, le Costa Rica a construit son identité nationale sur l’idée de « pureté et de blancheur de la race costaricienne ». C’est dans ce paradigme identitaire qu’une population afro-caribéenne provenant majoritairement de la Jamaïque est arrivée sur la côte caribéenne pour travailler à la construction du chemin de fer et dans les plantations bananières à partir des années 1870. Cette population « noire », qui ne parlait pas l’espagnol, mais l’anglais et un créole à base d’anglais, constituait « un obstacle » au projet d’identité nationale. L’année 2015 marque un tournant, car le Costa Rica vient de se redéfinir comme une « République […] multiethnique et pluriculturelle » par un amendement constitutionnel de l’article premier. Cette thèse retrace le processus complexe d’intégration de la population afro-caribéenne au Costa Rica de 1870 à 2015 et défend l’idée qu’une reconfiguration du paradigme de l’identité nationale costaricienne s’est amorcée depuis la zone la plus périphérique du Costa Rica (la province de Limon) et en grande partie par le biais des revendications sociolinguistiques et identitaires de la population caribéenne. En effet, la politique linguistique concernant l’espagnol et les langues indigènes centrées sur la relation du citoyen à la langue officielle est contrariée par la pratique fortement ancrée du créole de Limon dans la Caraïbe costaricienne. L’apport théorique des linguistes Robert Le Page et Andrée Tabouret-Keller qui ont mis en évidence comment les choix langagiers constituent des « actes d’identités » par lesquels les locuteurs exposent discursivement leur identité personnelle, leurs affiliations à certains groupes et leurs aspirations à certains rôles sociaux a retenu notre attention pour montrer que l’utilisation du créole de Limon avec ses concepts et ses symboles propres dans le contexte plurilinguistique et diglossique de la Caraïbe costaricienne révèle des positionnements identitaires favorisant une reconfiguration de l’identité nationale. En 2010, l’UNESCO a classé le créole de Limon dans son Atlas des langues du monde en danger. Existe-t-il une campagne de revitalisation au Costa Rica ? Dans une perspective intersémiotique de l’étude des reconfigurations identitaires, la littérature et les arts de la Caraïbe costaricienne ont été envisagés comme des espaces privilégiés de représentation des identités plurielles et plurilingues et d’expression des revendications sociolinguistiques et identitaires de la population caribéenne
Throughout the 20th century, Costa Rica built its own national identity on the “purity and whiteness” of the Costa Rican race. This is the identity paradigm in which the Jamaican population found itself upon arriving on the Caribbean coast in 1870 in order to work on the construction of railways and the banana plantations. This black, non-Spanish-speaking community was a barrier to the Costa Rican national identity project. However, the year 2015, marked a turning point. In virtue of an amendment to the first article of the Constitution, Costa Rica redefined itself as a “multiethnic, multicultural Republic”. This thesis retraces the complex process of integration undergone by the Costa Rican Afro-Caribbean community from 1870 to 2015. This study claims that the existence of this recent reconfiguration of the Costa Rican identity paradigm was in part fostered by one of the country’s most peripheral areas: Limon. The works of linguists such as Robert Le Page and André Tabouret-Keller have proven that linguistic choices can be considered as “identity claims or acts” by means of which a given speaker demonstrates his identity, his background and his aspirations. The people from Limon, by means of their sociolinguistic and identity claims, have thus helped start the aforementioned process of reconfiguration. The well-established use of Creole English clashes with the government’s official policy regarding the use of the official language of Spanish and the indigenous languages. Even though Creole English is spoken in Limon, in 2010 UNESCO classified it in its Atlas of the World’s Endangered Languages. Is there thus a campaign of revitalization in Costa Rica concerning Creole English? In an attempt to analyze the changing identity paradigm from an intersemiotic perspective, this study has chosen to focus on Caribbean literature and art as they both represent powerful mediums through which the expression of the Caribbean identity is portrayed and claimed

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2007.
Advisor: Candace Ward, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 8, 2007). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 86 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation explores how spatial processes of race shape Afro-Nicaraguan women’s political subjectivity, activist practice, and lived experience by studying their community-based organizing in the Caribbean coastal city of Bluefields, Nicaragua. Specifically, it analyzes the political responses they are developing to address the devastating impacts of neoliberal economic reform, gendered state violence, structural racism and the politics of gender justice that have emerged from their participation in place-based struggles for racial and regional justice. My dissertation research brings together critical race theory, Latin American social movements, African Diasporic feminisms, and the critical interventions of cultural and political geography to study Creole women’s community activism. I suggest that Creole women’s participation in what Harcourt and Escobar (2005) term the “politics of place” reflects the ways in which larger processes of anti-Black racism, gender subordination, and economic inequality have historically been and continue to be articulated through the idiom of place. I demonstrate how the politics of place shapes local, regional, and national histories of race and alterity and informs Creole women’s political practice and vision in ways that differ markedly from the mainstream women’s and feminist movements in Nicaragua. Through their place-based activism and focus on regional struggles that seem to be separate from an explicit feminist politics, Creole women have brought greater attention to the particularly gendered ways in which processes of state violence, structural adjustment, and economic exclusion impact their communities. Their political participation is concentrated around several key areas: urban land conflicts; women’s work in the regional and national economy; and the struggle for racial justice and full citizenship in Nicaragua. Through their participation in these social movements, Afro-Nicaraguan women are gendering and reshaping local and national struggles for racial equality. I argue that this model of community and place-based activism suggests that scholars of Latin American and Caribbean women’s social movements might more fruitfully analyze these movements not by searching for the ideal feminist subject or narrowly defining the terms of feminist politics but rather by understanding how women’s engagement in the politics of place creates space for them to interrogate intersecting processes of racial, gender, and economic subordination.
text

In the final quarter of the 18th century, a planter's dwelling overlooking the Caribbean Sea at Little Bay on the northwest coast of Montserrat in the British Leeward Islands was destroyed by fire and never reoccupied. Archaeological excavations in 2010 and 2011 yielded fragments of personal adornment, dress, household furnishings, and the house containing them providing an intimate portrait of an anonymous white male and his domestic arrangements. We do not know much about the planter class, though its members were central to the structure of 18th-century West Indian society. I use this rich archaeological data alongside archival, pictorial, and comparative analyses to particularize a West Indian planter and investigate the construction of colonial Creole identity. Evidence from archaeological, architectural, and ethnographic sources allow a reconstruction of the plantation house as a single-pile, three-cell plan, wood-frame structure with a raised masonry foundation and front gallery. This form, adapted to the Caribbean environment, altered English understanding and use of private and public spaces. Through archival research, I linked Little Bay to the Piper family, documenting its transfer through generations of unmarried male relatives. At the time of the fire the inhabitant was a Montserratian born, third-generation white male of English descent, meaning a white Creole. Ceramic gaming disks and glass beads identical to examples found in enslaved contexts indicate a household comprised of domestic slaves and planter. The head of household was a wealthy male versed in 18th-century British aesthetics as shown by a fob seal, coat buttons, and flintlock pistol. Punch bowls, glassware, tea and tableware reflect refined British cultural sensibilities, but as first-person travelogues recount, such goods were redeployed in distinctive colonial form with Creole open-door sociability and shared domesticity with household enslaved. Taken together, the finds demonstrate how this colonial Creole used English material goods to craft a distinctive form of white masculine identity within the West Indian planter class. In this world of mixed classes, races, and heritages, such formulations required choices. My research highlights how British objects and local practice combined to create new meanings for plantation society in Montserrat and the West Indies.

In my thesis, “Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables,” I ask and answer the ‘Who? What? Where? When? Why?” of Creole Literature using the 19th century production of Aesopian fables as clues to resolve a set of linguistic, historical, literary, and geographical enigmas pertaining the ‘birth-place(s)’ of Creolophone Literatures in the Caribbean Sea, North and South America, as well as the Indian Ocean. Focusing on the fables in Martinique (1846), Reunion Island (1826), and Mauritius (1822), my thesis should read be as an attempt capture the links between these islands through the creation of a particular archive defined as a cartulary-chronicle, a diplomatic codex, or simply a map in which I chart and trace the flight of the founding documents relating to the lives of the individual authors, editors, and printers in order to illustrate the articulation of a formal and informal confederation that enabled the global and local institutional promotion of Creole Literature. While I integrate various genres and multi-polar networks between the authors of this 19th century canon comprised of sacred and secular texts such as proclamations, catechisms, and proverbs, the principle literary genre charted in my thesis are collections of fables inspired by French 17th century French Classical fabulist, Jean de la Fontaine. Often described as the ‘matrix’ of Creolophone Literature, these blues and fables constitute the base of the canon, and are usually described as either ‘translated,’ ‘adapted,’ and even ‘cross-dressed’ into Creole in all of the French Creolophone spaces. My documentation of their transnational sprouting offers proof of an opaque canonical formation of Creole popular literature. By constituting this archive, I emphasize the fact that despite 200 years of critical reception and major developments and discoveries on behalf of Creole language pedagogues, literary scholars, linguists, historians, librarians, archivist, and museum curators, up until now not only have none have curated this literature as a formal canon. I also offer new empirical evidence in order to try and solve the enigma of “How?” the fables materially circulated between the islands, and seek to come to terms with the anonymous nature of the texts, some of which were published under pseudonyms. I argue that part of the confusion on the part of scholars has been the result of being willfully taken by surprise or defrauded by the authors, or ‘bamboozled’ as I put it. The major paradigmatic shift in my thesis is that while I acknowledge La Fontaine as the base of this literary canon, I ultimately bypass him to trace the ancient literary genealogy of fables to the infamous Aesop the Phrygian, whose biography – the first of a slave in the history of the world – and subsequent use of fables reflects a ‘hidden transcript’ of ‘masked political critique’ between ‘master and slave classes’ in the 4th Century B.C.E. Greece.

This archive draws on, connects and critiques the methodologies of several disciplinary fields. I use post-colonial literary studies to map the literary genealogies Aesop; use a comparative historical approach to the abolitions of slavery in both the 19th century Caribbean and the Indian Ocean; and chart the early appearance of folk music in early colonial societies through Musicology and Performance Studies. Through the use of Sociolinguistics and theories of language revival, ecology, and change, I develop an approach of ‘reflexive Creolistics’ that I ultimately hope will offer new educational opportunities to Creole speakers. While it is my desire that this archive serves linguists, book collectors, and historians for further scientific inquiry into the innate international nature of Creole language, I also hope that this innovative material defense and illustration of Creole Literature will transform the consciousness of Creolophones (native and non-native) who too remain ‘bamboozled’ by the archive. My goal is to erase the ‘unthinkability’ of the existence of this ancient maritime creole literary canon from the collective cultural imaginary of readers around the globe.

Dissertation

Racial tensions in UK escalating to violent conflicts from early 50ʼs on, led to series of changes in British legislation. Migration was systematically restricted, and regulations of entry were becoming much more severe. Discrimination of Caribbean and Asian immigrants in labor market, housing and education was extensive. Every attempt to address racial discrimination on the level of legislation was inefficient and hardly enforceable. Case study presented is situated in this social-political context. It is focused on second generation of afro-Caribbean minority in 70ʼs and its reaction to expulsion from British society, denying British identity and its fight against oppression through music and especially through language used itself. Jamaican Creole and in British, most notably in London surroundings, on Creole based system of adaptations called London Jamaican became significant feature of ethnic identification of afro-Caribbean (black) adolescents. This feature was used in conversations almost always through phenomenon of code-switching, where Creole features used were linked to attempt to define the speaker against dominant white society and oppressive system. Using of the features was often purposeful, because second generation of migrants was fully competent in using standard British English....