Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community - Paperback

by Rain Prud'homme-Cranford (Editor), Darryl Barthé (Editor), Andrew J. Jolivétte (Editor)

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.

With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.

Author Biography

Rain Prud'homme-Cranford is assistant professor of English and international Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary. Darryl Barthé is the visiting professor of History at Dartmouth College. Andrew Jolivétte is professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.