Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper seeks to analyze creolization within an African Diaspora framework. The discourse on creolization/creolite is complex especially since there are many definitions and layers to “Creole”. Stuart Hall talks about Race being a “Floating Signifier”; that is that its implications will change and “float” based on the context. In a like manner, the same applies to “creoleness”, which can shift by definition depending on where one is; however, from a diasporan perspective, which is broad and vast, the subject of creolité must be regarded in a different light. One who may be considered creole within one’s own country may take on a different identity as he or she moves throughout the diaspora. We are conditioned to think that creole is something seductive and exotic. We may feel that it a distinction or makes us different to be called creole. All the while, not realizing that Africa has been around the world since the world has been round. We have to be careful of inversing white supremacy; painting Africa as if it were a “dark continent” making it seem as if slavery was Africa’s first venture into the world, and homogenizing African peoples. When we move into the diaspora creolite becomes less significant as a distinction because that is when our interconnectedness and the diversity of “Africanness/Blackness” truly shows.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The study of nationalism is an unusually promising venue for the testing of social mechanisms approaches to the explanation of social phenomena. In this paper, I attempt to construct a social mechanisms explanation for the unusual reluctance of Cuban elites to join the cause of independence from Spain. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's description of creole nationalism in the new world, the Cuban case seems to defy our expectations, since most of the variables Anderson identifies are represented in the Cuban case, yet creoles did not support the war for independence. My claim is that the historically specific pattern of race relations in Cuba altered the preferences of Cuba's creole elite, and encouraged them to withhold their support for the cause of independence.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Elizabeth McAlister (Religion/African American Studies) will look the international circulation of religion its music.  She will discuss how religious networks, ideas, practices, and also musical styles, productions, and sensibilities are circulating between and across various national spheres, and how both US and non-US productions are best understood by taking a global view.   She will discuss the crucial question of religious nationalisms and the role and image of American "chosenness" in non-U.S. Christian networks abroad. She will contrast the Christian example with re-Africanizing efforts in Afro-Creole religious movements in the Americas such as Santeria, Vodou, and Rastafari.  Some religious actors in Afro-Creole networks eschew religious "centers" in the Americas in favor of a move to "re-Africanize" their practice and privilege roots and routes to "Africa."

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the past decade the “tragic mulatta” in U.S. antebellum and post-bellum fiction has been extensively “revisited” and “reconsidered” as a contested figure of a hybrid, racially transgressive, or interracial “American” national identity. Yet, many of these so-called “tragic mulattas,” especially those in 19th-century post-bellum fiction set in New Orleans, were really circum-Atlantic Afro-Latin Creoles. In my talk I will examine how the re-imagining of the Afro-Latin Creole as an Anglo-African mulatta disclosed a profound uneasiness about, and fear of, a trans-American South, and its circum-Atlantic cultural influences, which would threaten a Northern liberal capitalist vision of a post-bellum “American” national culture.
My talk builds on the work of revisionist historians such as Caryn Cosse Bell, Joseph Logsdon, Arnold Hirsh and Sybil Klein, who have challenged the assumption that the Afro-Latin Creoles of New Orleans simply allied themselves with a slaveholding South. In the aftermath of the Civil War, while the main wing of the Garrisonian Northern abolitionist community sought to turn the focus of anti-race work to education and gradual uplift with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Afro-Latin Creole leaders of New Orleans insisted that the U.S. broaden its vision to the non-English speaking world, particularly France and the Francophone West Indies. Many of these New Orleans “free men of color” had traveled to France and had joined the radical “People of Color” society that published the Revue des colonies, one of the first international postcolonial journals by African diasporic people against French colonialism (Brickhouse). Moreover, these Afro-Latin Creoles had adopted the republican millennialism of the Revolution of 1848 that insisted on universal manhood suffrage and equality in addition to liberty or “emancipation.”
In the first part of my talk, I will juxtapose Lydia Maria Child’s 1867 novel, A Romance of the Republic with Victor Sejour’s “Le mulatre” (1837) and Amand Lanusse’s poems from Les Cenelles (1845) to compare their portrayal of the “mulatta.” While Child takes a tolerant view toward miscegenation according to a dominant U.S. black/white binary, she engages in a practice of “deterritorialization.” To preserve Northern liberal economic and political culture as central to the reconstruction of a “national” identity, Child abstracts (and romanticizes) her French and Spanish speaking main characters, the “tragic mulattas" Flora and Rosa, from their history and cultural heritage. Child turns them into innocent children of nature who have no memory of their maternal lineage and its alternative cultural norms about family, sexuality, pleasure, religion, commercialism, or political consciousness, which might prove inimical to New England liberal capitalist values and beliefs.
After showing how the Afro-Latin Creole served as a contested figure in the defining of post-war identity and citizenship, I will then look briefly at the revitalization of this Afro-Latin Creole tradition at the time of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1898) and this tradition’s influence on writers such as Alice Dunbar Nelson. In her short story collection, The Goodness of St. Roque, (1898), Nelson seeks to “re-race” the tragic mulatta once again as an Afro-Latin Creole who allies herself with a francophone, circum-Atlantic culture and politics to challenge segregation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist: Reconsidering The Case for West-Indian Self-Government

F.S.J. Ledgister
Department of Political Science
Clark Atlanta University

The usual description of C.L.R. James’s political theory locates him at the intersection of Marxism and pan-Africanism, generally more towards the former than the latter. The bulk of James’s work bears this out. For example, in The Black Jacobins he defines the rebels of Saint Domingue as proletarian without forgetting their blackness. James unambiguously defined himself as in the tradition of Marx and Lenin.

Nonetheless, James’s earliest political monograph aligns him more with Creole nationalists such as J.J. Thomas, Eric Williams, or Norman Manley, than with Walter Rodney or the New World Group. In this paper I analyze that work and delineate the ways that the ideas he expressed at that time connect to a West Indian Creole nationalism that stressed the need for an end to colonial trusteeship and that saw West Indians as peoples (or a people) shaped by the colonial experience and ready and able to govern themselves.