Read more
Creole Noise is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. By emphasizing multiracial origins, transnational influences, and musical performance alongside often violent historical events of the nineteenth century - slavery, Emancipation, the Morant Bay Rebellion, the era of blackface minstrelsy, indentureship and immigration - it revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern, twentieth-century phenomenon, associated with regional anti-colonial or black-affirming nationalist projects. It explores both the lives and the literary texts of a number of early progenitors, among these a number of pro-slavery white creoles as well as the first black author of literary dialect in the English-speaking Caribbean. Creole Noise features a number of fascinating historical characters, among these Henry Garland Murray, a black Jamaican journalist and lecturer; Michael McTurk, the white magistrate from British Guiana who, as 'Quow', authored one of the earliest books of dialect literature; as well as blackface comedian and calypsonian Sam Manning, who along with Marcus Garvey's ex-wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey, wrote a popular dialect play that traveled across the United States. In so doing it reconstructs an earlier period of dialect literature, usually isolated or dismissed from the cultural narrative as racist mimicry or merely political, not part of a continuum of artistic production in the Caribbean.
List of contents
- Introduction: Speaking Badly (In Prose)
- 1: White Creoles, 'Bad' Grammar, and the Birth of Dialect Literature
- 2: Violent Ventriloquism: The Golden Age
- 3: The Charles Dickens of Jamaica
- 4: Travelling Dialect
- 5: Home to Harlem
- Epilogue: Global Creole
About the author
Belinda Edmondson is Professor of English and African American & African Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of several books on Caribbean literature and has won numerous grants and fellowships for her research. She is an elected member of the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars.
Summary
This book is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean. It revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern twentieth-century phenomenon, and explores both the lives and the literary texts of a number of early progenitors.
Additional text
This engrossing, detailed volume of the origins of Creole dialect affirms its authenticity as the lingua franca of the Caribbean and validates Creole as the authoritative mode of communication in speech, literature, and the performing arts.
