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Since the slave population in New Netherland (1614–1664) was small compared to that of other Dutch Atlantic colonies such as Curaçao, Dutch Brazil, and Suriname, it has traditionally received little attention by scholars, including creolists. It is, therefore, not well known that traces of Iberian languages can be found among the black population of seventeenth-century Manhattan. While the paucity of sources does not allow us to make any decisive claims with regard to the importance of Spanish and Portuguese for the colony’s black community, this article attempts to reconstruct the language use of this population group on the basis of an analysis of historical sources from New Netherland in a broader Atlantic context.

Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. This article presents a new theory on the origin of the calenda (also known as calinda, colinda, corlinda, and caringa) by analyzing the term from an Iberian perspective. It claims that the term should not be understood as a type of dance or song, but as a festive period in the Iberian calendar. It explains the calenda with reference to an Afro-Iberian substratum in Black performance culture in the Americas and highlights the role of brotherhoods.

This article intends to show that a search for traces of Iberian influence on popular culture can also be productive in parts of the Americas that have a British, Dutch, French, or Danish colonial past. It does so by analyzing the cultural identity formation among the black population of the Antillean island of Curaçao, with a specific focus on Catholicism and Papiamentu. Few languages have generated more discussion among Creolists than Papiamentu, a language of Iberian parenthood spoken on an island with a Dutch colonial history starting in 1634. Strangely enough, religion and popular culture have received little attention, so far, in the discussion on the genesis of Papiamentu. Using research results from the field of linguistics on the influence of the Portuguese-based Creole of the Cape Verde islands on Papiamentu, this article argues that Afro-Iberian elements influenced the development not only of Curaçao's language but also of its cultural identity, and that Afro-Catholic mutual-aid and burial societies may have facilitated the transmission of that generation's key identity markers, including its language, to later generations.

Building on the acknowledgement that many Africans, predominantly in West-Central Africa, had already adopted certain Portuguese cultural and religious elements before they were shipped to the Americas as slaves, this article argues that syncretic Afro-Iberian elements must also have existed among slave communities outside of the Iberian realm in the American diaspora. It explores this possibility with a focus on Afro-Iberian brotherhoods. While it was long assumed that these so-called "black brotherhoods" were associated with slave culture on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America only, it can now be confirmed that Afro-Catholic fraternities also flourished in parts of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. A comparative analysis of king celebrations in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods with those at Pinkster and Election Day festivals in New York and New England reveals a surprising number of parallels, which leads to the conclusion that these African-American performances may have been rooted in Afro-Iberian traditions brought to North America by the Charter Generations.

Building on the suggestion by the editors of the Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011) to re-frame the fi eld of literary studies from a global and transnational perspective, this article suggests a new approach to the concept of 'contact literature'. Reading American literature as 'contact literature' assumes that even if an American literary text is written in English, the other languages of the 'contact zone' in which the text originated and/or to which it alludes also impacted the writing process and therefore need to be included in the analysis. This new approach to the analysis of American literature is applied here to Sojourner Truth's famous slave narrative, published in 1850. Since Truth spent the fi rst 30 years of her life as a slave in a predominantly Dutch-speaking environment in the Hudson Valley, analysing her narrative as 'contact literature' implies a focus on Dutch cultural traces. This is done in two chapters - one dealing with Dutch language and literature, the other with Dutch Pietism and the slave narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw - that present new perspectives on the impact of Dutch culture on Truth's Narrative.

This article presents a new perspective on the master-slave relationship in New Netherland in order to complement the existing theories on the treatment of slaves in that Dutch colony. It shows how prior to the loss of Dutch Brazil, the West India Company modeled its slave policy after Portuguese practices, such as the formation of black militias and the use of Christianity as a means to foster slave loyalty. It also points out that in the initial slave policy of the Dutch Reformed Church was characterized by the ambition to replace the Iberian Catholic Church in the Americas. While the Reformed Church in the early decades of the Dutch colonial expansion was characterized by a community-building spirit and a flexible attitude toward newcomers, the loss of Brazil shattered the dream of a Protestant American continent and gave way to a more exclusivist approach with a much stronger emphasis on orthodoxy. This led to a dramatic change in attitude vis-à-vis slaves, which is reflected in the segregationist policies-both at a social and a religious level-in later Dutch slave colonies such as Suriname.