Atlantic Creoles

Abstract

Berlin 1996 (cited under Overviews) introduced the term “Atlantic Creoles” to describe Afro-descendants whose experiences in the age of the Atlantic slave trade were not primarily defined by the plantation. According to Berlin, Atlantic Creoles distinguished themselves through behaviors that “were more akin to those of confident, sophisticated natives than of vulnerable newcomers.” They displayed “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.” The term “Creole” is supposed to denote transformations in identity through encounters across cultural difference. Berlin applied this term to a generation that preceded the consolidation of plantation systems (prior to the 18th century), even though he alluded to the possibility of using this concept spatially, too—to describe Afro-descendants living outside plantation systems as late as the end of the 18th century. Landers 1999 (cited under Overviews) took up this latter approach systematically. Scholars have since applied the label “Atlantic Creoles” broadly to cultural and political brokers who drew on repertoires from Africa, Europe, and the Americas as seamen, traders, diplomats, litigants, settlers, wives, workers, or healers. According to Berlin, the term was not meant to obscure the violence that Afro-descendants were subjected to, but to capture a historical moment when racial categories were more fluid and some could access opportunities. Berlin’s piece has a vast legacy. It drew attention to an array of Afro-diasporic experiences and emphasized the role of West Africans in the making of early Atlantic networks. Since 1996, attention to Africans in Atlantic networks has expanded. Scholars have also examined more closely how their actions and trajectories can shed light on the arc of African history, not just the American one. Yet some scholars have critiqued the term “Atlantic Creoles” for excessive capaciousness. In Ferreira 2012 (cited under 18th Century and the Age of Revolutions), Roquinaldo Ferreira argues that it obliterates the specificity of African experiences within pluralistic communities in Africa. Other scholars have critiqued it for romanticizing mobility and insertion into state apparatuses. Upward mobility for some Afro-descendants could often only come with fewer opportunities for enslaved people. Finally, the term assumes a somewhat linear identity formation. In Sweet 2013 (cited under Healing, Religion, and Science), James Sweet argues that historians too often assume that Creole Afro-descendant identities move away from African cosmologies toward Western ones.