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Examines the economic activity, language, world view, kinship patterns, and religion of contemporary Sea Islanders in order to illustrate the Islands' cultural conservatism and, thus, their appropriateness for the study of Africanism in the United States. (GC)

If Patrick Chamoiseau's work on the issue of language has been amply studied, this article intends to shed new light on it through an analysis of its relation to the printed book, as represented in the Martinician writer's novel. The purpose of this article is not only to offer a more developed approach of the contrast between oral and written, which takes into account the role played by print, but also to study the ways in which Chamoiseau creates, through the fictionalized book, his own 'linguistic mythology'. According to Chamoiseau, this is the ultimate goal of literature as it participates in the renewal of linguistic codes. The writer's political posture, which seeks to determine which approach is more legitimate, the oral language or the written, Creole or French, is replaced with an aesthetic posture focused on the contribution of Chamoiseau's personal writing style to francophone literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, rather than providing a comprehensive discussion around Paulo Freire's ideas, focuses on one aspect of his body of work: colonialism. The emphasis is on the 'oppressor consciousness' and cultural invasion (seen in its broadest context to include institutional colonialism with special reference to the traditional, modernizing and prophetic church. It also deals with the complex issue of language in postcolonial contexts, with special reference to education in Guinea Bissau and its implications for other colonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major theme in contemporary social theory is the questioning and destabilization of boundaries – self/other, culture/nature and gender being the most obvious areas. Not least for this reason, creole identities, ostensibly premised on openness and mixing, deserve renewed attention. Although the term creolization, as borrowed from linguistics, is sometimes used in a broad comparative sense, the creole world refers to the outcome of a particular historical experience, namely that of displacement, slavery, emancipation and its aftermath reverberating into the present. Key terms are uprootedness, cultural mixing and creole languages existing in diglossic situations with metropolitan ones. Creole intellectuals in the Caribbean have celebrated the cultural creativity characteristic of these societies but have been criticized for ignoring class, racism and gender issues. By embracing the egalitarianism and openness of creoledom, they have become vulnerable to criticism of being handmaidens of neoliberalism or neocolonialism. Controversies over creole identity are related to fundamental questions in anthropology. Drawing on material mainly from the Indian Ocean region, in this article I attempt to create a dialogue between debates over creole identity and theoretical questions raised in social and cultural theory concerning the relationship between cultural difference and social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a contribution to enhance the discussion about the spread of the symbolic power of English in Colombia through a National Bilingual Policy, this paper aims at raising awareness about two main aspects: 1) Colombia has a variety of languages that should be seen as resources and not as problems (Ruíz, 1984) and 2) There is a pattern in our government language policies that tends to favor the elite. The conclusion of this paper is that not much has changed in the linguistic planning in Colombia since the Spanish colonization; privileged groups continue to legislate to favor privileged groups. This approach contributes to enlarge the gap between the haves and the haves not in Colombia.

Saint Lucia, like much of the rest of the Caribbean, is a Creole society. Due to unique historical circumstances, Antillean Creole cultural identity is fluid, fragmentary and multiple. Saint Lucians perceive cultural commonalities between their island, on the one hand, and the Francophone, French Creole-speaking and Anglophone Caribbean and wider world, on the other, and value the different languages of their colonial legacy—French, Kwéyòl and English—both for intangible reasons related to local and pan-cultural identities and for the access these languages open up for practical economic and life-chance opportunities. Under the influence of globalization, there is a definite hierarchy in the value-based ordering of these tongues. Saint Lucians hold English in highest esteem; it gives the greatest pay back in terms of socioeconomic mobility on and off the island. Islanders also value French, as a complementary, secondary global language and for communicative versatility in neighboring, affluent Martinique and in their island's tourist sector. Although most Saint Lucians profess the importance of their French-based Creole, Kwéyòl, as a unique symbol of Saint Lucian nationhood, this vernacular is the biggest loser in the postcolonial, global-era competition of languages. As a society in a globally-induced state of flux, the traditional cultural orientation of Saint Lucia is changing; English is supplanting the waning Kwéyòl. However, new cultural and linguistic forms are emerging. Vernacular English of Saint Lucia, itself a creolized English strongly influenced by Kwéyòl, has become the nation's new lingua franca, particularly among the urban working class and youth island-wide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how creole categories of people who have constituted a small but influential minority in Guinea- Bissau for centuries contributed to a countrywide, integrated national culture since the eve of independence in 1974. Since independence, several cultural representations previously exclusive to creole communities have been - driven by the nationalist independence movement and the early postcolonial state - transformed into representations of a new national culture, crossing ethnic and religious boundaries. The fact that creole identity and culture had been transethnic - i.e. creole identity brings together individuals of heterogeneous cultural, ethnic and geographic descent - during the colonial period, has fostered in postcolonial times the countrywide spread of previously exclusively creole cultural features. I argue that this 'transethnicisation' of creole cultural representations has unified Bissau-Guineans across ethnic lines, causing a strong commitment with their nation 'from below'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of Caribbean creole languages in the imagining and “mass mediating” of postcolonial nationhood. The focus is radio broadcasting in St. Lucia, where an Afro-French creole language known as Kwéyòl coexists with the official language, English. Since St. Lucia's independence in 1979, Kwéyòl has been used increasingly on the airwaves (formerly the exclusive domain of English) by broadcasters intent on rapidly “modernizing” the language to transform it into a vehicle of national development on a par with English. But when Kwéyòl is forced into strongly regimented “English” broadcasting formats and genres, as when international news reports received at the studio in English are translated word for word into Kwéyòl, the results often seem less than “authentically” St. Lucian. In recent years some broadcasters have been responding to such problems by experimenting with distinctively “creole” programming formats that give voice to local folk perspectives and counterdiscourses. These densely heteroglossic broadcasts simultaneously capture and comment on the predicaments facing Caribbean peoples as they negotiate steadily globalizing political economies of language and information that are often hostile to speakers of “small” languages such as Kwéyòl, and to “micro-states” such as St. Lucia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]