Reviews of Books

Writing West Indian Histories. By B. W. Higman. Warwick University Caribbean Studies. (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1999. Pp. xiv, 289. £15.50.)

There can be no more important question in New World history than the problem of how migrants, forced and free, came to claim the Americas as their own and to see themselves as belonging to it. These two very different works address aspects of that complex process we have come to call "creolization."

1

The word "creole" has its origins in the Spanish criollo, the name for those whites who, born in the New World, were perceived to have and ultimately perceived themselves as having identities and interests different from the peninsulares born in Europe. Slaves born in Jamaica or St. Domingue came similarly in the eighteenth century to be distinguished as creoles from African arrivants. This was a way of describing the Caribbean from the outside. But as early as the late nineteenth century, most famously in the Trinidadian J. J. Thomas's essay on "The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar," creole became a chosen identity. Since the 1960s, in particular since Edward Kamau Brathwaite's The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford, 1971), this meaning has acquired a central place in Caribbean intellectual life, as it came to embrace the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's vision of the "transculturation" of European, African, and Asian lifeways. Caribbeana, an unusual anthology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings on and sometimes from the Caribbean, provides a valuable portrait of the first part of this story: how the English plantation frontier generated a literature about its landscape and society. Writing West Indian Histories, a masterful study of Caribbean historiography, while reaching backward to the earlier period, is essentially a study of how the region came to construct its own past in the twentieth century, of how the creole, to borrow the Hegelian distinction, became self-consciously "for itself" and not merely "in itself."

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