The Louisiana Texas Borderlands Research Papers (original) (raw)
Louisiana Creoles are often described via euphemistic reference to things like "gumbo" and the "melting pot." While such metaphors may capture the inherently heterogeneous nature of Creoleness in the Gulf South, they can also seem to... more
Louisiana Creoles are often described via euphemistic reference to things like "gumbo" and the "melting pot." While such metaphors may capture the inherently heterogeneous nature of Creoleness in the Gulf South, they can also seem to suggest that "anything goes" when it comes to Creoles and their cultural practices. In this talk, I suggest using the notion of the chronotope (Bakhtin 1981; Blommaert and De Fina 2017) to better explain the contested nature of Creole identity today while avoiding essentializing Creoles as somehow uniquely constituted on the basis of their mixedness. I focus on a particular index of Creole ethnolinguistic identity--associated language variety (Eastman and Reese 1981)--and trace how this trait has evolved over time and space. This evolution, rather than delegitimizing Creoleness, highlights the various time-space frames (i.e., chronotopes) through which Creole identity can be viewed. The enduring practice of delimiting Creoleness, irrespective of the mechanisms used, provides Louisiana Creoles with discursive and ideological continuity despite the co-existence of contradictory criteria for group membership.
This book analyzes how the word Creole is defined as an ethnic and a linguistic label among those who self-identify as Creole-speaking Creoles in Texas. These individuals are often ignored in discussions of the Creole population of the... more
This book analyzes how the word Creole is defined as an ethnic and a linguistic label among those who self-identify as Creole-speaking Creoles in Texas. These individuals are often ignored in discussions of the Creole population of the Gulf South because they no longer reside in Louisiana. Debate over the exact definition of Creole has been ongoing for over a century. Rather than promote some new definition, this book displays the paradoxes of Creoleness by presenting the words of Creoles themselves without any attempt to regularize the incongruencies that appear. The book is divided into two parts. The first part develops the concept of ethnolinguistic identity, indicates the historical uses of the term Creole in Louisiana, and traces the migration routes that led Creoles to Texas. It wraps up with a discussion of contemporary understandings of the word Creole based on fieldwork among Texas-resident Creoles. The second part presents and offers commentary on a sample of Creole translations for seventy-five English sentences. These translations, drawn from interviews with Texas Creoles, illustrate the wide variety of language forms that go by the name Creole in Texas. Collectively, this work demonstrates the challenges migration poses to ethnolinguistic identity.
In our connected world, the task of finding a single point on the Earth can be done with remarkable precision and speed. Want an aerial photo, a satellite image, or historical photos? No problem. Understanding how that was done in the... more
In our connected world, the task of finding a single point on the Earth can be done with remarkable precision and speed. Want an aerial photo, a satellite image, or historical photos? No problem. Understanding how that was done in the early 1800s absent all our modern tools is the focus of this work. The main "character" in this book is one of the most disputed locations in Texas history-the spot at which the thirty-second parallel of latitude intersects the middle of the Sabine River. From that point of intersection with a meandering river, a boundary line was defined in 1811 going due north, separating the state of Louisiana from Spanish Texas. Due to the nature of the instruments available at the time to locate that parallel, the east-west meander of the river, and the absolute wilderness of the river bottoms, a half-mile error north or south of the parallel could add or remove hundreds of square miles to the territory.