Five years ago, I started my doctoral program at Tulane University in the Department of Anthropology. Not long thereafter, I decided what I wanted to be the subject of my dissertation: Texas Creoles. My advisors were a bit skeptical at first; “Is there Creole in Texas?” they asked, but I managed to persuade them. After all, why should curiosity about Creoles mysteriously dry up at the Sabine River? History makes it clear that Louisiana peoples and cultures have been flowing into Texas for centuries.
And so it began–multiple trips out to Southeast Texas in search of Creoles who still spoke their ancestral tongue. A couple years later, I repeated the same exercise in Southwest Louisiana in order to compare those who’d moved away and those who’d stayed put. Finally, after four years of work, I set down to write my dissertation.
But then I made an unsettling discovery. The dissertation I was writing–that I had to write–was not going to be very accessible to the communities I had been working with for all this time. That’s when I decided that I would produce a sort of companion guide to my dissertation. The goal was to render my findings in the most accessible way possible without sacrificing too much of the depth of the dissertation itself. The result of these humble efforts I present to you now: “Creole” – a Louisiana Label in a Texas Context.
I don’t want to spoil the surprise of the contents for you, but in short, it looks at the ways in which Texas-resident Creoles define the ethnolinguistic label Creole as a descriptor for people and as a descriptor for language.
This book is available in two formats: in print from the Lulu Bookstore (the price goes 100% to production costs–I am not making a penny of profit on this) or as a PDF from my Academia.edu page (free). And for those of you who would like to view the dissertation this book sprang from, you can access it here.
I sincerely hope you enjoy.
-N.A.
Tulane linguistics ‘ anthropology is really bad about assuming they know anything and everything about cultures in and around Louisiana instead of properly presuming there is far more they don’t know than they will ever know.
It unfortunately colours their attitudes toward research such as yours and has been an issue for at least the past 15+ years. They’re good people; they just suffer from the usual academic conceit that haunts every department at Tulane and causes the faculty to take a very provincial and dismissing view of the people and cultures of the Gulf Coast.
Good for you in sticking to your guns and doing the research you knew needed to be undertaken!
That may be true about Tulane, but ultimately my dissertation committee was very supportive and helpful. As you say, they’re good people. I certainly owe them some credit for pushing me to finish what I set out to accomplish.