Rutgers Affiliate Faculty

Creole Noise constructs a literary history of Creole literature—also known as dialect literature, or literary dialect—and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean from the heyday of colonialism in the late-eighteenth century to the post-Emancipation period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It does so from an understanding that Creole is an essential feature of Caribbean cultural production. In emphasizing travel, the gendering of literary dialect, pro-slavery authors, and multi-racial authors, the book revises the common view that Creole literature was an insular local practice of the twentieth century Caribbean, or solely the product of modern, anti-colonial, black-affirming nationalist projects. Authors of early literary dialect include white creoles, blacks and browns. The book reconstructs an earlier proliferation of dialect literature in the preceding centuries, usually dismissed as merely racist mimicry of “black talk”, not understood as part of a continuum of artistic production in the Caribbean. The book argues that the Caribbean’s history of dialect literature is a factor in the literary histories of the United States and the wider trans-Atlantic.