The Creolizing Turn and Its Archipelagic Directions

Abstract

Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the term creole in several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.