Jacqueline Knörr

Contemporary Creoleness; or, The World in Pidginization?

“Creolization” has often been terminologically equated with “hybridization,” “syncretization,” and other terms referring to processes of mixture. Normative assumptions concerning categories of race, origin, and culture as well as emic labeling have had a strong impact on who and what was labeled as creole. I argue for a more concise and contextualized understanding of the term “creole” to warrant its usefulness for comparative cultural analysis. Examining the social and historical context of creolization and tracing the etymology of “creole” and its meanings over time show that creolization has been distinct in involving indigenization and—to varying degrees—ethnicization of diverse and in large part foreign populations. Taking into account creolizations—and creole terminologys—historical semantics helps unfold the latters heuristic potentials for a more systematic and comparative analysis, conceptualization, and differentiation of contemporary processes of interaction and mixture. By connecting the historical semantics of creolization and creoleness with specific sociolinguistic approaches to distinguish between creole and pidgin variants of language, historical creolizations major contemporary “outcome”—pidginization of culture and identity—comes to light, a process prevalent particularly in postcolonial societies. Theoretical assumptions will be substantiated by empirical examples from Indonesia and Sierra Leone.

'Free the dragon' versus 'becoming Betawi' : Chinese identity in contemporary Jakarta

The Chinese in Indonesia suffered considerable discrimination particularly during Suhartos rule (1967–1998). They were considered a foreign threat that needed to be kept under state control. Since the end of Suhartos regime and as a result of liberalisasi, demokratisasi and desentralisasi a revival of Chinese identity has set in, initiating a public discourse on the compatability of Chinese and Indonesian identity. This discourse refers to different categories of identification which are connected with specific conceptualizations concerning the interrelatedness of indigeneity, ethnicity and nationalism in Indonesia and Jakarta in particular.

Introduction: deconstructing tropes of politics and policies in Upper Guinea Coast societies

The editors, Hojbjerg, Knorr, and Murphy, summarize and reevaluate key explanatory themes in the broad research program on Upper Guinea Coast ethnography and history in light of contemporary changes, crises, and continuities. Intense sociopolitical transformations in this West African region—for example, civil war, refugees, regional insecurity, postconflict nation-building, and transnational epidemics—challenge the standard research paradigms for understanding the region. The introduction explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented this research, such as “big man” patronage and patrimonialism, firstcomers and latecomers as tropes of historical precedence shaping contemporary migration and settlement patterns, secret society initiations as part of postwar social reconstruction, and the language of autochthony as shaping ethnic and national identities, citizenship, and creolization within and of the imagined nation-state.

Creolization and pidginization as concepts of language, culture and identity

The study of creolization and pidginization in contexts of postcolonial diversity is important not because the latter are the only contexts in which creolization and pidginization may occur, but because these are the contexts in which they achieve particular social and political meanings and relevance. I will focus on the terminology and meaning of creole and creolization first and will deal with how pidgin and pidginization relates to and differs from it later on. Creolization is only one possible path the interaction between people of heterogeneous backgrounds can take and it consists of more than just the more or less random mixture of cultural features and social practices. An historical perspective shows that, irrespective of the manifold meanings the notions of ‘creole’ has adopted in different local contexts at different times, creolization has always been connected to processes of (various degrees of) indigenization1 and the creation of new common identity among peoples of different origins that relate to and are associated with commonalities with regard to (historical) experiences, language, localities, conditions of life, social and cultural practices (Olson 1983; Patterson 1975, 1982).2 Although diversity of origins is a constitutive dimension of creoleness – manifested in social and cultural practices and collective identification – creolization as an identityrelated process implies demarcation in that the emerging creole group/