Creole identity in Latin America has long attracted scholarly attention, while creolization in the British North American colonies has been far less studied. Influenced in part by Atlantic history, this volume of 17 essays authored by literary scholars seeks to address the neglected “wider Atlantic phenomenon” of creolization (p. 2). The essays grew out of discussions at the First Early Ibero/Anglo Americanist Summit held in Tucson in 2002, sponsored by the Society for Early Americanists. (For the conference mission statement see Early American Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2003.)
A fine introduction by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti includes brief etymological and bibliographic essays. From the Portuguese, crioulo was first used to distinguish slaves born in Brazil from those brought from Africa (and continued to be used in this sense until the end of the colonial period in slave regions such as Haiti). Picked up in Spanish America...
