Using French, Spanish, and English documents, Gwendolyn Hall carefully crafts an argument to negate the notion of the destruction of West African languages and cultures in eighteenth-century Louisiana, she explains how various components of West African life, such as oral tradition, facilitated the reproduction of West African cultures in diaspora, She argues convincingly for the importance of Africans in the creation of a distinctive and viable creole culture in Louisiana.
The author melds anthropology and history to produce a social history in the best tradition of recent historical writing, situating the time and process of history in the contextual analysis of anthropology. This work clearly illustrates the benefits of a multilingual, interdisciplinary, comparative approach to understanding the development of racial slavery and colonialism in Louisiana and their ramifications for colonial social life and policy.
A variety of sources, such as trial testimony, songs, and popular sayings, are used to depict Africans and African Americans as historical actors. Seldom-heard voices are reproduced in the words of Africans and African Americans, slave and free, and Native Americans about their fight for justice, freedom, and land, what emerges is a depiction of slavery and colonialism as volatile and contested. Hall does not simply focus on the resistance of the subordinate groups to the exclusion of the power of dominant groups; rather, she shows the colonial project for its reproduction of the status quo as well as the resistance it encountered. For example, she illustrates how separating Native Americans and African slaves was a fundamental goal of the French colonial administrators. That goal, however, was subverted by the blacks who joined the Natchez in their resistance during the Natchez Rebellion of 1729. Hall shows that Native Americans, Africans, African Americans, Europeans, and Euro-Americans did not exist in isolation but created social life in the context of one another’s presence.
While Hall emphatically denounces structural and static interpretations of history, still there seems to be an old and much discussed notion about African “survivals” lurking in the background of her argument. To establish the primacy of Africans in creating creole culture in Louisiana, a unidirectional process from Africans to African Americans is implied, even in the chapters on creole slaves. In reality, however, by midcentury Africans were entering a culture already in the process of being created by those who had come before. The absence of interethnic conflict and the failure of the only ethnic-based conspiracy in the region suggest that Africans were undergoing a transformation of identity—a “creolization.” The impact of creole African Americans on incoming Africans is minimalized here. But that does not detract from this book’s pathbreaking effort to fill in the lacunae of African contributions to Louisiana history. Hall brings her knowledge of West Africa and the Caribbean to bear on Louisiana, creating a vivid and nuanced portrait of social life in French colonial North America.
