Special issue: expanding and complicating the concept of creolization

Abstract

On 10 June 1776, an enslaved woman named Florimell, described as a ‘Negro’, fled from her slave owner in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Amongst the various details designed to describe and recapture her, the advertisement noted that, ‘she commonly wears a Handkerchief round her Head’ (Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle June 18, 1776). On the 29 April 1794, an enslaved ‘NEGRO MAN’ who called himself Charles fled from his owner Azariah Pretchard Senior of New Richmond, Quebec who described him in part as ‘speaks good English and some broken French and Micmac’ (Quebec Gazette May 22, 1794). Finally, when a man described as a ‘Negro’ named William Spencer busted out of the local Montreal jail in 1792, the jailer Jacob Kuhn, described him as wearing, ‘a round hat and generally a wig’ (Montreal Gazette November 22, 1792). All three cases are evidence of the multi-directional processes of creolization in the Trans Atlantic world. Although little discussed, these examples culled from the fugitive slave archive of Canada, expand the traditional limits of the definition and study of creolization. Often defined as a uniquely American (continental) phenomenon, creolization describes the processes and outcomes of cultural and social contact and transformation that occurred within the overlapping contexts of European imperialism and Trans Atlantic Slavery. While scholars like Sidney Mintz offered a rather constrained definition, bound by time and location, others like Linda Rupert have provided a more expansive description which allows for the possibility of different stages of creolization unfolding over time. For Mintz, creolization was a discreet seventeenth-century phenomenon lasting about a half a century and being characterized by the ‘plantation thrust’ through which the ‘first large introductions of enslaved Africans were occurring’ (2008, 255). Creolization for Mintz then is not merely the meeting of two races or cultures, but a meeting within the context of slavery wherein the majority population was not only African, but also enslaved. Therefore, creolization could only develop from the initial interactions between two newly introduced, foreign populations – European and African, only take place in tropical plantation regimes, and only involve slave majority populations. Due to their climates, the practices of slavery, the makeup of their enslaved populations, and the ratio of the enslaved to slave owners, Canada, the American North and Argentina (amongst other places) would not fit such a definition. What is more, for Mintz, once one or more generations of these newcomers had already experienced this ‘cultural blending and biological blending’, the term creolization no longer applied. (2008, 254). But if the heart of his definition is drawn out – the cross-cultural and cross-racial interaction between enslavers and the enslaved which resulted both in new institutions and new cultural forms – creolization could indeed be said to have transpired in both