Courtney Gwin's List: creole

• local-but complex-world of Creole culture on the Louisiana landscape. It is a  world that has influenced national and global society and culture out of  proportion to other social orders of similar scale, owing to expressive forms  like zydeco.
• The contemporary Creole culture of the region was formed primarily through  contact between African and French peoples. Alongside the Cajuns, with whom they  overlap culturally to a degree, African French Creoles are significant in terms  of group size and settlement areas, and, for our purposes, their particularly  influential expressive culture
• Cultural creolization in its fullest sense describes the development of new  traditions, aesthetics, and group identities out of combinations of formerly  separate peoples and cultures-usually where at least one has been  deterritorialized by emigration, enslavement, or exile-and we can add  exploration, though that usually is accompanied by a quest for territory
• and colonial control
• Creolized societies conjoin two or more formerly discrete cultures in a new  setting to create a social order in which heterogeneous styles, structures, and  contents are differentially preserved while becoming wholly constituted in and  adapted to new circumstances with new and multifaceted meanings
• a creole cultural perspective suggests examining relations between and within  diverse groups rather than the assumed singular evolution of one group's culture  in the "hyphenated-American" image of the "melting pot" metaphor-an assumption  that persists even in many of the increasingly divergent multicultural  descriptions of America, especially in group-centric or unilinear explanations  of origin
• at minimum find creating their ethnicity as central to a self-conscious  worldview.
• root verb in Latin, crear, means "to create."
• Some Haitians actually fled to Louisiana at the outset of the nineteenth century and influenced the cultural processes described herein as they strongly reinforced south Louisiana's already African Mediterranean Creole qualities.
• Dominguez's White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana looks at creole ethnicity from a view dominated by the often obtuse rhetoric of ethnoscience. She tries to formally decipher Creole identity both historically and in the present era
• Linguistic interest in creole languages grows out of philological inquiry from the nineteenth century and earlier, culminating in Schuchardt's Kreolische Studien published in the 1880s (see Schuchardt 1928). The question of how to classify and describe the languages that grow from African European colonial contact initially led to answers that viewed such languages as derivative, dialectal, deviant, degenerate, or broken versions of the colonial European "mother tongues."

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• Creol
• Definition of “Creole”    A Creole is a n ‘white person descended from the French or Spanish settlers of Louisiana and the Gulf States and preserving their characteristic speech and culture.’ . . .

• We find that the meaning of the word may be further explained; that the Spanish verb criar, meaning to bring up, was the root from which criollo (creole) sprung, and that it was the French who changed this spelling to Creole, which distinguishes the progeny of the Spanish- and French created natives from those of an unknown or doubtful origin.” (Herrin, pa 28)

       

   
• Songs sung in Creole patois came from the plantations and the French Quarter of New Orleans. They included lullabies, love songs, songs about unhappiness or loneliness, and humorous songs about everyday life.
• Customs    Creole customs can be divided into two kinds: religious and non-religious. Religious customs focus on holidays : All Saints Day, Mardi Gras and Easter, for example.
• Non-religious customs of the Creoles can be illustrated by two activities: 1) lagniappe, which comes from the Spanish word la napa meaning a sweetening. Grocery stores in Louisiana give a small addition to one’s purchase, such as candy or small cakes as a token of appreciation to a customer; and 2) chiavari, which is a kind of cerebration of the remarriage of a widow or widower.
• The language spoken by the Blacks, according to Alcée Fortier was not a broken-down French but their own language.
• The literature of the Blacks, such as their proverbs and folktales were African in origin, used animals as heroes, had a humorous tone and contained elements of surprise and the supernatural. They showed a good understanding of human nature.
• Voodoo or všdum was a form of religion brought to this hemisphere by slaves from Dahomey and the Guinea Coast. Immigrants from Santo Domingo settled near New Orleans in the 1820’s and brought their worship of voodoo with them. It was a matriarchal institution giving much power to women. Even though the slaves were baptized and considered to be Catholics, they continued to worship their African gods. Catholic saints and the African gods coexisted peacefully.
• Creole cooks use everything they have in their dishes. Leftovers combine to make heavenly new taste sensations, especially when combined with green onions, celery, bell peppers, and parsley.
• Coffee is extremely important to Creole cuisine. When combined with chicory, Creole coffee leaves an indescribable taste in a person’s mouth!
• Creole Language    One can find three kinds of French in Louisiana; traditional French, Acadian, and Black Creole. Louisiana natives are definitely considered to be francophone, French-speaking.

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• The term Creole   (Spanish -- Criollo) was introduced in 1590. It derived from   the Latin word “crear”, which meant, “create.”   In 1590, Father J. de Acosta decided that the mixed breeds   born in the New World were neither Spanish, African, Indian,   but various mixtures of all three, thus a created race.

   

   

  So he identified them as "Criollos"
• South America began to apply the term   Creole to their children born in America, in order to distinguish   them from slaves freshly imported from Africa.

• The Louisiana Creole Heritage Center describes Creole people as those who are "generally known as a people of mixed French, African, Spanish, and Native American ancestry, most of whom reside in or have familial ties to Louisiana." They add that "many other ethnicities have contributed to this culture including, but not limited to, Chinese, Russian, German, and Italian."

• more akin to societies  in the Spanish and French West Indies than the American South
• over time the Cajuns  have absorbed and been affected by a wide array of cultures in  the area: Spanish, German, Italian, Anglo, Native American, and  Slavonian.