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Voices in a Sea of History: Why Study Language in the Caribbean
Abstract
In celebration of the 15th anniversary of this journal's name change, I situate recent linguistic anthropological scholarship in the Caribbean in a broader, interdisciplinary context. Caribbean ways of speaking—and especially contact languages such as creoles—have often been exceptionalised and subject to stereotypes. Taking Derek Walcott's “sea of history” as a key trope, I discuss the historical crosscurrents that have produced the diversity of Caribbean voices and their impact on the politics of language today. Attending to issues of voice and poetics demonstrates the creative mobilization of linguistic resources to impact politics, media, children's socialization, identity claims, and reclamations of deep ancestry. Such efforts contest the scholarly fragmentation of a region framed as having too much history and too shallow roots, to show productive connections with a broader anthropology of the Americas. The goal of this review is to make a compelling case for the ethnographic study of language in the Caribbean. Para celebrar el decimoquinto aniversario del cambio de título de esta revista, ubico el estudio antropológico‐lingüístico en el Caribe dentro de un más amplio contexto interdisciplinario. Los modos de hablar caribeños se han tratado de excepción y estereotipo. Con “el mar de historia” tomado de Derek Walcott como tropo clave, demuestro cómo las contracorrientes históricas han producido la diversidad de voces caribeñas y su impacto en la política del lenguaje. Lo que demuestra la atención a las cuestiones de la voz y la poética es la movilización creativa de los recursos lingüísticos para impactar a muchas esferas de la vida. Estos esfuerzos resisten la fragmentación académica de una región que se ha planteado con demasiado historia y raíces poco profundas, para elaborar las conexiones fructíferas con una antropología de las Américas. El objetivo de esta reseña es plantear el caso del estudio etnográfico del lenguaje en el Caribe.
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Examines attitudes toward cultural identification with the French language, recently increased in education, relative to English and Kwéyòl, among St Lucians, through a postcolonial conceptual framework. Author contextualizes this within St Lucia's history, as first French and later British colony, and relates it to the multiplicity, characteristic of St Lucia (and Caribbean) Creole identity, and a connected fluidity in language use. Through a rural and Castries sample, he further studies the evaluations of St Lucians of French, English, and Kwéyòl, in relation to their sense of cultural and social relevance and affinity of and with these languages. He shows how English is seen by most as high-status and important for St Lucians, especially for upward and outward mobility, while especially for St Lucia's national identity Kwéyòl is also valued by most, despite its recent partial waning. French, recently stimulated as main second or third language, is seen as quite important, and should according to a majority of the sample (especially in Castries) be learned more by St Lucians, and is seen as more relevant than Spanish. Author points out how this is related to a strong cultural affinity St Lucians sense with nearby Martinique, practical connections (traveling, migrating) to Martinique, or French/Martinican tourists in St Lucia, as well as to French's similarity to Kwéyòl, thus possibly helping to bolster Kwéyòl's status.
What was the impact of one-way radio messages aimed at hostages kidnapped by the FARC and held captive in the Colombian jungle? Messages were read out on air every Saturday night (reception in the Colombian jungle is best between 01:00am and 04:00am) for 22 years. Here, radio animated emotional registers of lived experience as one-way radio messages intensified novel forms of imagination for both speaker, hearer and the ‘community’ of other hearers, in this case thousands of hostages dotted around the jungle. This article examines the linguistic instrumentality of the radio voice. The research is based on interviews with all parties (released hostages, defected guerrillas and relatives of hostages). By analysing the Voces del Secuestro messages, it is shown how a phenomenological listening of the radio voice gave hope in times of anguish.
In recent years, awareness of and research attention to “emerging sign languages” around the world has increased dramatically (Meir et al. 2010). This volume brings together the first set of works treating these new languages, linguistic communities, and sign systems in the Americas, including North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.
One aim of this book is to provide an areal comparison between different sign languages that emerged and evolved in the same region. Few studies have looked at areal comparisons of historically unrelated sign languages (Nyst 2013; Tano and Nyst 2018) and, before this volume, none in the Americas. While emerging sign languages have been considered comparatively on a worldwide scale (de Vos and Pfau 2015), the Americas provide an interesting field for comparison.
Mark Lewis asks that socially engaged linguists go beyond Labov's (1982) principle of error correction (PEC) so that we can enlist critical race theory (CRT) to address ‘more difficult and fundamental questions of the sociohistorical conditions of a representation of language, challenging its premises and showing its connections to racial, economic, or other forms of violence’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 341). The ultimate goal is the actual transformation of the socioeconomic structures responsible for structural violence against speakers of stigmatized languages.
In the literature on Caribbean creoles two descriptive models have dominated to explain the structures of linguistic codes, the relationships between them, and their distribution: diglossia and the creole continuum. Most Anglophone linguists have argued that it is most accurate to describe the linguistic contexts of Martinique and Guadeloupe as stable diglossic situations in which two recognizable linguistic varieties with specific functional assignments are spoken. They contrast the French Antilles with the Caribbean islands where an English-lexifer creole is spoken, described as examples of creole continua. This paper reconsiders the applicability of the diglossia model for describing the linguistic varieties in Guadeloupe and the patterns of their use. I explain why most Antillean scholars describe the French Antilles as examples of diglossia, yet also acknowledge a creole continuum with intermediate varieties of both French and Kréyòl. As a further point, I consider whether or not Guadeloupe’s linguistic situation is best described as a stable one. In doing so, I counter the argument of Meyjes (1995) that language shift is occurring in favor of French monolingualism. My goal in this paper is to foster dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone creolists and to clarify some of our basic assumptions about Caribbean creoles.
Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, or “time-space,” contributes to a theoretically robust anthropology of history by highlighting how our experience and thus subjective feel for history and place emerge through semiotic processes that can generate different kinds of historicity. In rendering Bakhtin’s suggestive concept of chronotope more precise, I apply his more widely known concept of dialogicality to argue that the historical imagination emerges through dialogical interactions across multiple chronotopes. To illustrate, I then apply a chronotopic analysis to two ethnographic interviews from my study of Cuban folkloric and religious history-making practices. I argue that different understandings of time, history, and being are mobilized in these interviews, often in rapid succession, producing contrasting structures of morality, affect, belonging, and truth. Scholarly historicity’s past-making may even depend upon its modes of purifying and inscribing other chronotopes, including a chronotope of spirit copresence and its inverse in a chronotope of historical transcendence.
Although the author Anthony Trollope (1815–82) enjoyed great success as a novelist, he was also an eager and perceptive travel writer. In this account of his voyage to the West Indies and Central America, published in 1859, he recounts the many places he visited, including Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados, Trinidad, Panama and Costa Rica. Trollope brings his eye for detail to these islands at an important time: slavery had been abolished in the British colonies, but persisted in Cuba, and he depicts this complex region and its people with all the vividness of his novels. Though sometimes reflecting the beliefs and prejudices of the Victorian period, the work remains essential and engaging reading for those interested in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Trollope's writings on North America and on Australia and New Zealand are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.
Historically and contemporarily, politically and literarily, Haiti has long been relegated to the margins of the so-called 'New World.' Marked by exceptionalism, the voices of some of its most important writers have consequently been muted by the geopolitical realities of the nation's fraught history. In Haiti Unbound, Kaiama L. Glover offers a close look at the works of three such writers: the Haitian Spiralists Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète. While Spiralism has been acknowledged by scholars and regional writer-intellectuals alike as a crucial contribution to the French-speaking Caribbean literary tradition, the Spiralist ethic-aesthetic not yet been given the sustained attention of a full-length study. Glover's book represents the first effort in any language to consider the works of the three Spiralist authors both individually and collectively, and so fills an astonishingly empty place in the assessment of postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics. Touching on the role and destiny of Haiti in the Americas, Haiti Unbound engages with long-standing issues of imperialism and resistance culture in the transatlantic world. Glover's timely project emphatically articulates Haiti's regional and global centrality, combining vital 'big picture' reflections on the field of postcolonial studies with elegant close-reading-based analyses of the philosophical perspective and creative practice of a distinctively Haitian literary phenomenon. Most importantly perhaps, the book advocates for the inclusion of three largely unrecognized voices in the disturbingly fixed roster of writer-intellectuals that have thus far interested theorists of postcolonial (Francophone) literature. Providing insightful and sophisticated blueprints for the reading and teaching of the Spiralists' prose fiction, Haiti Unbound will serve as a point of reference for the works of these authors and for the singular socio-political space out of and within which they write.
Recent work in anthropology has attended to the imbrication of music, sound, listening, and language in research on, and from, Latin America and the Caribbean, as part of a broader movement across regions. In this article, we argue that these relations have their own intellectual genealogies in Latin America and the Caribbean, which have often been neglected in studies written about the region. We focus on recent theorization of aurality—the immediate and mediated practices of listening that construct perceptions of nature, bodies, voices, and technologies. We provide an overview of regional discourses on the interrelations of voice, orality, and writing, and then we discuss the aural turn in four areas: race; migration; socialization and youth cultures; and epistemologies of history, memory, and heritage. We put different bodies of discourse into dialogue as a means of charting a path toward decolonial (inter)disciplinary transformations that are built on other histories, vocalities, and modes of knowledge.
In the 1980s, a research team led by Parisian scientists identified several unique DNA sequences, or haplotypes, linked to sickle cell anemia in African populations. After casual observations of how patients managed this painful blood disorder, the researchers in question postulated that the Senegalese type was less severe. This book traces how this genetic discourse has blotted from view the roles that Senegalese patients and doctors have played in making sickle cell “mild” in a social setting where public health priorities and economic austerity programs have forced people to improvise informal strategies of care. The book shows how geneticists, who were fixated on population differences, never investigated the various modalities of self-care that people developed in this context of biomedical scarcity, and how local doctors, confronted with dire cuts in Senegal's health sector, wittingly accepted the genetic prognosis of better-than-expected health outcomes. Unlike most genetic determinisms that highlight the absoluteness of disease, DNA haplotypes for sickle cell in Senegal did the opposite. As the book demonstrates, they allowed the condition to remain officially invisible, never to materialize as a health priority. At the same time, scientists' attribution of a less severe form of Senegalese sickle cell to isolated DNA sequences closed off other explanations of this population's measured biological success. This book reveals how the notion of an advantageous form of sickle cell in this part of West Africa has defined—and obscured—the nature of this illness in Senegal today.
This article argues that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), a tribunal serving twelve independent primarily Anglophone Caribbean states, uses a variety of linguistic techniques in its pursuit of a regional future. Created upon a complicated (post)colonial landscape and charged with resolving the nonsovereignty of its member states, which, for the most part, continue to utilize the United Kingdom's Privy Council for their final court of appeal, the CCJ does not view sovereignty as a solution. Instead, as I demonstrate through several examples of the Court's use of, talk about, and abstention from language, the CCJ's judges and employees seek to constitute a yet‐to‐be‐fully‐defined nonsovereign region that carves out a Caribbean people, pointedly rejects ongoing British legacies and logics, refuses to adopt the legal practices associated with sovereignty, and strives to remain untethered to either nation‐state or suprastate. [law, language, sovereignty, region, Caribbean] Este artículo argumenta que la Corte de Justicia del Caribe (CCJ), un tribunal al servicio de doce estados independientes primariamente anglófonos del Caribe, usa una variedad de técnicas lingüísticas en la búsqueda de un futuro regional. Creado sobre un paisaje (post)colonial complicado y encargado de resolver la no soberanía de sus estados miembros, la cual, en su mayor parte, continúa utilizando el Consejo Privado del Reino Unido para su corte final de apelaciones, el CCJ no ve la soberanía como una solución. En cambio, como lo demuestro a través de varios ejemplos acerca del uso de la Corte de, hablar sobre, y de la abstención de lenguaje, los jueces y empleados de la CCJ buscan constituir una región no soberana, aún por definir enteramente, que forja un pueblo caribeño, rechaza intencionalmente lógicas y legados británicos, rehúsa adoptar las prácticas legales asociadas con la soberanía, y lucha por permanecer libre de ataduras al Estado nación o al supra‐Estado. [ley, lenguaje, soberanía, región, el Caribe]
Academic interest in sign languages in the global South, especially those that developed in small signing communities has grown rapidly in recent years. Many basic questions about what researchers have to offer to such communities remain largely neglected. Supposedly neutral theoretical constructions of such communities and languages may in fact apply exoticizing and objectifying labels, and lead to research which is insufficiently grounded in the realities and concerns of community members. Very similar observations have been made about the ways in which Creole languages have been theorized. Local researchers, and local institutions have crucial roles to play in developing sustainable, enduring research partnerships which respond to the needs of local communities.
A finales del año 2016 la moneda venezolana comenzó a depreciarse aceleradamente. Los venezolanos de clase media y trabajadora vieron esto como una señal de altos índices de inflación para el mes de diciembre y para el año 2017. Durante este periodo, ejercicios comunicativos de comparación y escala tomaron lugar central en muchas conversaciones de la vida diaria. En este articulo argumento que tales ejercicios constituyen un registro contextual usado para codificar sentimientos de ansiedad, rabia y desesperación de cara a un desastre económico inevitable. Este registro ayuda a los Venezolanos a articular una disposición cambiante acerca de la política y la economía. Este también ayuda a la gente a comunicar estos afectos los unos a los otros. Las comparaciones y la escala se han vuelto un instrumento no para discutir meros hechos y datos sobre la crisis sino para comunicar el desespero y rabia que esta produce. [Economía, política, Venezuela] At the end of 2016, Venezuela's currency started to depreciate rapidly. Self‐described working and middle‐class Venezuelans saw this as a sign of looming high levels of inflation in the coming month of December and in 2017. During this time, communicative exercises of comparison and scaling took a central place for many people's daily conversations. In this article, I argue that such exercises of comparison and scaling became a contextual register useful to encode people's feelings of anxiety, rage, and desperation in the face of an unavoidable economic disaster. This register helps Venezuelans to articulate a changing disposition about politics and the economy. It also helps people reaching out to make each other feel how the crisis affects them. Comparison and scaling became an instrument not only to discuss mere economic and political facts, but to reach out to others in a moment of despair and anger. [Economics, politics, Venezuela]
This chapter investigates the relationship between monologue and dialogue in Cuban revolutionary discourse. It proposes to attend to the “mono-logic”-the semiotic and ideological forces designed to compel alignments toward unity, coherence, and continuity, that are, asymptotically, never quite reached. Cuba’s political leaders have for decades insisted that citizens undergo a continual process of conscientization in which inner selves and outer displays jointly cultivate commitment to revolutionary principles. There are two semiotic calibrations of such discourse: (1) the charismatic, in which heroic figures such as José Martí and Fidel Castro speak with overwhelming authority; and (2) the nomic, in which slogans on banners and in graffiti present universalized Truths voiced by no one and therefore, potentially, by everyone. Inevitably, heteroglossic criticism of the mono-logic surfaces in irony, parody, and even silence. The chapter argues that the monologic drive for unity across psyche, self, society, and history co-constitutes and reframes the dialogic.
In Puerto Rico, scholarly histories and common knowledge have presumed that the Taíno – the pre-Columbian population of the island – became extinct at some time between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. However, various people on the island challenge this assumption by claiming to be Taíno. The public reemergence of Taíno groups in Puerto Rico is highly disputed by scholars, governmental institutions and non-Taíno populations of the region, often on the basis of Puerto Rico’s long-documented history of creolization and state-sponsored ideology of racial blending. Within this context, the case of Taíno indigenous activism in Puerto Rico offers a critical lens through which to consider interactional challenges involved in claiming belonging to a presumably “extinct” ethnoracial category.
Con el brote de cólera en Haití del 2010, el ejército dominicano restringió la inmigración, medicalizando los cuerpos de inmigrantes haitianos al incorporar las infraestructuras de salud pública al proceso de cruzar la frontera. Este artículo sostiene que la reacción del estado dominicano en la frontera al brote de cólera trataba no con una amenaza real de salud, sino con una actuación con la intención de reforzar diferencias entre los dos países de la Española. Al interpretar reacciones del ejército y de salud pública como actuaciones, sugiero que generó una narrativa estratégica en la cual el caos y la enfermedad haitiana chocaban contra proyecciones de control y salud en la República Dominicana. Al situar la frontera entre discursos de identidad nacional, seguridad de salud, y poder del estado, el estado dominicano restringió la frontera, legitimando la enajenación de los haitianos basada en un criterio de salud y reestructurando fidelidades económicas que se consideraba históricamente como amenazas a los proyectos de identidad nacional.
This paper analyzes emergent speech practices among Taíno activists in Puerto Rico. While historical narratives of the Caribbean and conventional knowledge have largely presumed that the Taíno, an indigenous population of the Caribbean, have been extinct, several persons in Puerto Rico are actively identifying with and mobilizing around this ethnic category. One of the Taíno-identified challenges in such mobilization is that the Taíno language is no longer spoken and there is very little documentation from which to reconstruct it. Within this context, I consider the myriad ways in which Taíno activists understand what constitutes speaking Taíno and how this becomes emblematic of Taínoness. Such practices range from a reliance on speaking in what is understood by many Taíno as a Taíno style of Spanish to some Taíno organizations’ attempts at reconstruction through their studies of still spoken Arawakan languages.
This article considers the sources of knowledge and frameworks of knowing from which Puerto Rican Taíno draw in order to support their identification as Taíno. Widespread, authoritative historical narratives of the Caribbean claim that the Taíno population was decimated between the 16th and 18th centuries. This analysis highlights the role that prophetic narratives and communicative strategies played in reframing and recalibrating Taíno historical tellings and in the refashioning of personal trajectories of social actors as Taíno.
I offer a model of racialization, the ongoing process of making race meaningful, by proposing the concept of micro-mobilities: people's movements through immediate lived space. I examine how qualities of movement in an annual carnival procession normalize racialized bodies and places. In Santiago de Cuba's carnival, neighborhood-based conga societies participate in official competitive displays and grassroots neighborhood activities. The grassroots Invasion evokes Cuba's wars for independence. Thousands join the Conga de Los Hoyos to process through the “territories” of other congas. I examine the Invasion as a performed diagram of “routes of Blackness” mapped onto a reenactment of Cuba's national “roots” to argue that it mobilizes the racialization of bodies, cultural forms, and neighborhoods. My focus on bodies in motion challenges static mappings of identity, place, and history to instead show how Blackness and whiteness are constituted in the relation between race as embodied experience and object of discourse. [race, racialization, mobilization, festive performance, Cuba].
This article investigates language ideologies and attitudes in Trinidad by looking at the context of choral singing. It is based on data that was collected through questionnaires, interviews, and observations with choral conductors, singers, and audiences. It reports that a standard language ideology that favours British English exists in this context, though the local variety of Standard English also enjoys considerable prestige. The local Creole is highly stigmatized, contrary to earlier work that claimed that it enjoyed increased prestige. The study concludes that language ideologies are not uniform within Trinidad, can evolve, and are context dependent.
A rapprochement between the anthropology of history and the anthropology of capitalism has created a temporal turn. This temporal turn has generated new theoretical insights into the times of capitalist modernity and vectors of inequality. Yet research has so far been divided into three separate streams of inquiry. Work addresses the techne (techniques), episteme (knowledge), or phronesis (ethics) of time, following traditions in the social sciences derived from Aristotelian categories. This review explores the potential and limits of such distinctions. It also traces contemporary dominant representations and experiences of time such as short-term market cycles, the anticipatory futures of the security state, and precarity. It follows how time-maps are assembled into technologies of imagination with associated material practices. In conclusion, it proposes a new theoretical vista on time for anthropology based on the heuristic of timescapes. From this perspective, the dynamic interrelationships among techniques, knowledge, and ethics of time can be traced and the inequalities generated by conflicts in time become visible. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 45 is October 21, 2016. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
Language socialization is the human developmental process whereby a child or other novice (of any age) acquires communicative competence (Hymes 1972), enabling him or her to interact meaningfully with others and otherwise participate in the social life of a given community. Language socialization occurs primarily through interactions with older or otherwise more experienced persons (Garrett and Baquedano-López 2002; Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986a, 1986b), but also, in most cases, through interactions with peers (Dunn 1999; Farris 1991; Paugh 2005; Rampton 1995a). The child or novice’s development of communicative competence through such interactions is largely a matter of learning how to behave, both verbally and non-verbally, as a culturally intelligible subject. While mastering the formal features of the community’s language or languages so as to be able to produce grammatically and pragmatically well-formed utterances (Ochs and Schieffelin 1995), the child or novice must also learn how to use language in conjunction with various other semiotic resources as a means of actively co-constructing, negotiating and participating in a broad range of locally meaningful (though largely quite mundane) interactions and activities — a process that Schieffelin and Ochs (1996) characterize as ‘the microgenesis of competence’.
en This article explores how pain ritually assists in producing Afro‐Surinamese Ndyuka Maroon understandings of subjectivity and the self. Ndyuka discourses conceive persons as composites of multiple human and spirit others. I describe how these discourses emerge dialogically during oracular interactions between possessed mediums and their patients. Beginning as inarticulate sensations, personal pain is ritually transformed into identifiable spirits who expose their hosts as embodiments of past and present social relations. Over the course of oracular interactions, the qualities of physical pain are made to communicate that the pain is both an identity and a vital part of the sufferers’ embodied self. In parallel to this process, spirit mediums perform pain in possession to establish the origins of their authority in relations with spirits. Ritually transforming pain into identities of relation, Ndyuka oracular mediumship persuades patients to re‐evaluate their subjective experiences as innate evidence of Ndyuka social ideology.
Abstract
fr
Le collectif dialogique : médiumnité, douleur et création interactive de la subjectivité des Noirs marrons ndyuka
Résumé
Le présent article explore la manière dont la douleur aide rituellement à produire les compréhensions de la subjectivité et du Moi chez les Ndyuka, un groupe de Noirs marrons afro‐surinamais. Dans les discours des Ndyuka, la personne est conçue comme un composite de plusieurs autres, humains et esprits. L'auteur décrit l'émergence dialogique de ces discours pendant les interactions oraculaires entre les médiums possédés et leurs patients. La douleur personnelle, commençant par des sensations informulées, est rituellement transformée en esprits identifiables par lesquels leurs hôtes se révèlent incarner des relations sociales passées et présentes. Au cours des interactions oraculaires, les qualités de la douleur physique servent à faire passer la notion que la douleur est à la fois une identité et une part vitale du Moi incarné de celui qui souffre. Parallèlement, les médiums spirites mettent en scène la douleur pendant la possession afin d'établir la source de leur autorité dans les relations avec les esprits. Par la transformation rituelle de la douleur en identités relationnelles, la médiumnité oraculaire des Ndyuka persuade les patients de réévaluer leur expérience subjective comme une preuve innée de l'idéologie sociale ndyuka.