Publications

Publication details [#45152]

Price, Richard. 2007. Some anthropological musings on Creolization. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 22 (1) : 17–36.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/jpcl

Annotation

This paper traces the move of the concept of “creolization” from the discipline of linguistics to those of anthropology and history during the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on its uses in New World slavery studies. Two positions are contrasted in recent studies of North American slavery, those of African-Centrists and those of creolists, with the first stressing the continued importance of African heritage and identities in the New World and the second emphasizing the newness of the institutions that enslaved Africans and their descendants created in the Americas. Several exemplary studies of creolization in different parts of the Americas are reviewed. The paper suggests that ideology and subject position often drive historical analyses and that only strict historicization will permit further advances in understanding the complex processes that we call “creolization.”