As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

This wide-ranging conversation, for the first time, attempts to trace possible resonances between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thinking of translation going all the way back to her influential essay The Politics of Translation published 25 years ago, and various ideas of performance. She begins by saying that the question might be more complex than simply positing a relationship between translation and performance. Instead, she refers the reader/listener first to Derrida’s notion of spacing as the place to begin thinking about non-languaged aspects of meaning-making (approaching, in this sense, the spatial, non-verbal attributes of theatre and performance), and as such the work of death; and second, to the idea that translation takes place after the death of the sonic/phonic body of language. The interview ends by way of Spivak’s reflections on her experience of translating a play, the futures of créolité, and the pitfalls of machine translation.

The literary history of Royal Street in New Orleans begins with the folktales of the flatboatmen, the songs of the enslaved trafficked through the city, and the Afro-Creole poets of the 1840s–1860s. It then continues in the late nineteenth century with major, national voices on the subject of the city (Cable, Hearn, King, Davis), and the arrival of O. Henry at the turn of the century. It then flowered again in the 1920s with the bohemian circle around Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, with the emergence of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams in the 1940s, and then yet again with the various 1960s undergrounds of John Rechy, Robert Stone, The Outsider Magazine, and organized crime figures implicated in the Kennedy assassination. There then followed in the 1970s and 80s a series of important books rooted in a mythological vision of the area by Ishmael Reed, Tom Robbins, Anne Rice, Harry Crews, Dalt Wonk, and Paula Fox. The neighborhood’s most recent literary masterpiece appeared in 2003 in Valerie Martin’s Property. Much of the major writing of this neighborhood shares an interest in masks – identities concealed, divided, fabricated, transformed, or sustained against the odds in both stories and story-telling.

This chapter introduces the volume by offering a reflection on the notion of transition within and across Latin American literary production from 1492 to 1800. This period is defined by a series of transitions as, motivated by personal ambitions or brought by force, Europeans and later Africans and Asians crossed oceans to inhabit the already inhabited lands of the Indies. Native societies and the emergent European colonial societies were transformed by these interactions and the processes that underlay them. This introductory essay explores the broad historical context for this period of transition as it was registered on local and global scales. The book is organized around six thematic areas, which in turn are introduced.

In this chapter the author addresses the following questions: What does it mean to say that a language is a creole? Do creoles constitute a separate global typological class apart from other language typological groupings? The author calls for research on creole languages that is free from linguistic feature bias, creole language list bias, and genealogical bias. He compares expansion languages from the Meso and South American indigenous language families, particularly the Quechuan family (focusing on Ecuador, the northern border), with the Arawakan, Tupian, Cariban, Jêan, Chibchan, Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, and Otomanguean families. The comparison highlights processes of ethnogenesis, morphological reduction, and sub- or adstrate influence. The findings help broaden the definition of “creole” to refer to a special lexifier– descendant relationship, making the notion of creole a relational one, to facilitate comparisons with other languages and with “linguistic areas.” Questions that remain include: Are there area-specific features? And can this approach shed light on the characterization of creoles as a particular group of languages? What role can language contact play in reconstructing language families?

The NT displays the greatest intellectual retrieval of Hebraic thought and literature in antiquity. In this chapter, I explore the idea that the New Testament authors largely favor the Hebraic philosophical style and strategically engage the styles of Jewish-Hellenism and Roman philosophy. Any consideration of the philosophical style of the NT authors must reckon with the Hellenistic styles du jour. Hellenism’s philosophies developed into sophisticated Roman rhetorical forms in the first century, forms in which some of the NT authors might have been steeped. In this chapter, I consider which aspects of Hebraic and Hellenistic philosophical styles the gospel authors employ and possible motivations behind their employments.

Since the West Indies saw the forced introduction of the most enslaved Africans in all of the Americas, the most written about element of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean writing in contemporary scholarship is without a doubt plantation slavery, including abolition and slave revolt and rebellion. However, even while drawing attention to these concerns, much of nineteenth-century Caribbean writing, in the works of Cuba’s Félix Varela, Haiti’s Émeric Bergeaud, and Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances, for example, also shows distinct concerns with ideas of sovereignty. Rather than illustrating an obsessive concern with racialized revolution or at once idyllic and treacherous scenes of tropical paradise, the Caribbean writers under discussion in this essay demonstrate a clear shift towards trying to determine the meaning of freedom in a life after slavery, and what kinds of new identities the inhabitants of a post-slavery Caribbean might take on.

This chapter covers languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Three language families receive special attention in this chapter: Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo and Khoisan languages. Linguistic peculiarities of languages in this region, such as unusual consonant sounds and noun classes, are described and illustrated. The final section deals with the issue of multilingualism on the social level and considers the concepts of official languages, trade languages, and creole languages, which are widespread in the region.

Historically, language contact has taken place under conditions of trade, imported slave and contract labor, military service, conquest, colonialism, migration, and urbanization. The linguistic outcomes are determined in large part by the social relations among populations — including economic, political, and demographic factors — and by the duration of contact. In some times and places, interactions between linguistically heterogeneous groups have generated (depending on one’s theoretical orientation) new languages or radically different language varieties. This article examines the formation of contact languages — understood here primarily as pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages — the history of which involves a Germanic language in a significant way.

Black British poetry is the province of experimenting with voice and recording rhythms beyond the iambic pentameter. On the stage and also on the page, it constitutes and preserves a sound archive of distinct linguistic varieties. David Dabydeen employs a form of Guyanese Creole to commemorate the experience of slaves and indentured labourers, whilst others adapt Jamaican Creole to celebrate folk culture and explore the postcolonial metropolis. Using modified forms of Guyanese Creole, Grace Nichols frequently constructs gendered voices and John Agard celebrates linguistic playfulness. The emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ indicates that borders between linguistic varieties are neither absolute nor static. Daljit Nagra’s heteroglot poems frequently emulate ‘Punglishd’, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Nagra’s mainstream success also indicates the clout of vernacular voices in poetry, which can connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, record linguistic varieties, and endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. These double-voiced poetic languages are also read here as signs of resistance against monologic ideologies of Englishness.

From a uniformitarian perspective, I interpret the emergence of Old English as the outcome of colonization and language contact. Likewise, I argue that its spread and speciation into so many varieties around the world, including creoles and pidgins, are consequences of different instances of colonization, which varied according to whether this involved settlement, exploitation, or trade. Each colonization style produced a different population structure, which in turn influenced how the language was appropriated and restructured by its non-heritage speakers. In England itself, one must invoke how the colonization of the land by other European nations subjected the language to the superstrate influence of the colonizers, who shifted to it. Ecological factors such as population structure (which determine patterns of social interactions and language transmission) and periodization (associated with particular moments of language shift or appropriation) help account for the differential evolution of English around the world.

Two texts bookend the major phase of literary activity by Creoles of color in New Orleans, the first book of poetry by US citizens of African descent, Les cenelles (1845) and Nos Hommes et Notres Histoires (1911). The first – a collection of poems – evokes sexual and romantic relationships between people of different races, a notion that runs radically counter to the racial politics of the rest of the US South. The second emerged as polemic as the Jim Crow Era gained full ascendance and marginalized nonwhite people in ways that ran counter to long-standing cultural patterns in New Orleans regarding the elite Creoles of color.

The first time Walt Whitman ever left the New York area and experienced the wide-open countryside of the United States in the late 1840s, he did so with the objective of arriving in New Orleans, where he lived and worked for three months for a newspaper. The rumor that Whitman had a child out of wedlock in New Orleans first took hold and held sway among the poet’s readers as the earliest iterations of the legend of his life took shape. Even more importantly, Whitman experienced in New Orleans such an extraordinary diversity of peoples mingling on the streets that he began to devise a new aesthetic of urban democracy, of strangers from radically different worlds mingling if only for a moment on crowded streets, a vision that would shape his poetry ever after and become a towering monument in American poetry in general.

Faulkner’s tragic masterpiece is, in essence, a novel of encounter, one in which different, even irreconcilable worlds collide most explicitly through their opposed understanding of race. New Orleans, in this novel, represents the radically cosmopolitan, a loose and ever-changing mix of Spain and France, Virginia and Kentucky, Haiti and Cuba, as well as many ethnicities and nationalities of Africa. In contrast, the world of Mississippi is organized according to the brutal simplicity of only two kinds of people: white masters and black slaves. Out of this conflict between New Orleans and Mississippi, Faulkner showcases the potential of New Orleans to lead the United States toward a progressive racial politics.

The most celebrated literary figure of nineteenth-century New Orleans was George Washington Cable. From his early work on mixed-race mothers coping with their light-skinned daughters’ abilities to pass back and forth between white and black communities to his discovery and national dissemination via Scribner’s to his masterpiece, The Grandissimes, its hostile reception in Creole New Orleans, and Cable’s consequent departure from the city and then his final reconciliation: Cable’s life stands as the most literary life in the New Orleans of that era. Cable’s engagement with the issue of race presages some of the discourse surrounding the topic today, with his particular attention to institutional racism and the often subtle, even unconscious ways that racism is perpetuated in ordinary, daily life.

Several figures led efforts by a white, Creole community in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century to preserve and perpetuate their Francophone literary traditions, particularly as they came to see its authority and significance eclipsed by the considerable fame of a writer who criticized their culture, George Washington Cable. Other factors added to these writers’ sense of increasing marginalization, including the fading of the French language from the workaday realities of ordinary life in the city, and the closing of French publishing companies as well. The efforts to rally against this marginalization led to public tension with Cable, which in turn launched the career of Grace King.