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.