Fetishzation & Exotization of US Creoles, Louisiana history & People

[GoAggieGo.]

The argument on “ here” is that Louisiana culture is not unique on to itself and that AA all over the south have similar cultural practices, like food, music, and to some extent religious practices. My point of contention is that if that’s true, why don’t I see that culture on display in Mississippi, South Carolina, or Alabama. Millions of people travel to New Orleans yearly because the city is unique (there’s more to the city Bourbon street).



I’m not saying we’re the only state in the south that has culture, I am saying our culture is unique, and if that’s a result of other regions of the south letting their rich heritage slip away, then dont blame the people here for continuing to pass it down and celebrating it.

It ain’t my fault

You’re not paying attention, or it’s plain arrogance, if you don’t see culture in Mississippi. I lived in Biloxi/Gulfport, MS and witnessed it everyday.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Yea I'm merging.

 

[TNOT]

You’re not paying attention, or it’s plain arrogance, if you don’t see culture in Mississippi. I lived in Biloxi/Gulfport, MS and witnessed it everyday.

Look breh...... you’re not paying attention. There is culture everywhere. New Orleans black culture is unique. Not unique because “ it’s something other than black” but because the black people here express it differently, which makes it unique. I’ve too been to Biloxi. It’s not the same breh,

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Look breh...... you’re not paying attention. There is culture everywhere. New Orleans black culture is unique. Not unique because “ it’s something other than black” but because the black people here express it differently, which makes it unique. I’ve too been to Biloxi. It’s not the same breh,

new orleans black culture isn't any more unique than mississippi, texas, memphis, carolinas, atlanta etc.. black culture. It's just has a local flavor, the same way those other regions have a local flavor. You're painting the picture as if every other region of southern black culture is a carbon copy/homogeneous while New Orleans is the opposite. For example, you said

Bounce is being copied by the biggest artist, and is responsible for 2 of the biggest/popular songs made last year. Not to mention how much Beyoncé loves to copy the New Orleans bounce sound.

using hiphop as an example since that's what bounce is

Spoiler

new orleans



but

...memphis has it's own style





texas has it's own style



atl has it's own style

..........this can be applied across the south from other genres of music, local cuisine, slang, dialects etc...

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@im_sleep @Supper


seminoles who came to new orleans and influenced black to become "mardi gras indians"

 

[IllmaticDelta]

MYTH - BEING CREOLE MEANS YOU ARE OF HAITIAN DESCENT

^^some old chatter on the subject


Creole in the Louisiana sense of the word just means you have roots in the region dating back to the French/Spanish era. It doesn't mean anything about the caribbean. For example, Suzzane and Bryant are both LA Creole descent but neither has any haitian ancestors

None of Beyonce's mother's ancestors are Haitian. They're all, native Louisianians with

afro roots - via Senegal and/or Congo

anglo roots - white merchant from Virginia

french roots - straight from france

acadian roots - white french canadian

• Beyonce revealed in Vogue that she is descended from a slave owner who fell in love with and married a slave
• Her great-great-great grandmother, a black slave called Rosalie Jean Louis, was born in 1800
• Rosalie escaped slavery by marrying Joseph Lacey, a well-off white American merchant
• In 1830 they had a daughter, Celestine, who then had 13 children as the mistress of a married white man

Importantly, Beyoncé and Solange’s Louisiana Creole family have been in south Louisiana since before Louisiana was an American state. Her Broussard ancestors arrived on Bayou Têche in Summer 1765, led by brothers Joseph Broussard and Alexandre Broussard, also known as the “Beausoleil” brothers. They were the first of the Acadians to settle in Spanish colonial southwest Louisiana after their deportation from Nova Scotia at the hands of the British. Her Derouen (Drouin) ancestors arrived from Québec (then called Canada) around the same time, first settling in St. Charles Parish, then migrating to the Attakapas District in southwest Louisiana in the 1780s.

Beyoncé and Solange Knowles breaking boundaries - Page 4 of 4 - Louisiana Historic and Cultural Vistas

Éloi-Réné had known Joséphine all of her life, and his family, stretching back 4 generations, had owned Joséphine’s mother’s family. Joséphine was born in 1827, a slave then belonging to Éloi-Réné’s cousin, Pierre BROUSSARD fils, and later to his paternal great-grandmother, Anne BENOÎT, widow of Armand BROUSSARD (Chart 2). Anne owned Joséphine because her mother (Rosalie JEAN-LOUIS) belonged to Armand and Anne.1

It doesn’t end there. Joséphine’s maternal grandparents, Rosette and Jean-Louis fils, both nègres, were Louisiana Creole slaves belonging to Armand and Anne. Jean-Louis fils had come from Armand’s sister and brother-in-law, Isabelle BROUSSARD and Réné TRAHAN. Simon BROUSSARD, a paternal first cousin to Armand and Isabelle, and brother to Pierre BROUSSARD père, purchased Jean-Louis fils’s father, Jean-Louis père, nègre of the Congo nation, before 1790. In 1793, Simon made arrangements to emancipate Jean-Louis père through coartación. Jean-Louis père, who had been born in the Congo, finally gained freedom at age 40 in 1796 after Simon’s death. 2

Through his masters’ family, Jean-Louis père came to know Isabelle BROUSSARD and Réné TRAHAN’s slave, Vénus, négresse. Réné had purchased Vénus, born in 1759, from Michel JUDICE of the Lafourche-des-Chétimachas Post in 1777. In the sale, appraisers described Vénus as being a négresse “with tribal markings on her stomach.” Not much is known about her before her arrival at the Attakapas that year, but we do know that she bore several children (presumably) for Réné TRAHAN. He provided for the emancipation of Vénus and her 4 mulâtre children in 1790. After freedom, those children used RÉNÉ and SÉNÉGAL as surnames, and they are the genitors of Lafayette, St. Landry and St. Martin Parish families today bearing the surnames RÉNÉ, SÉNÉGAL, JOLIVETTE, GATHE/GOTT/GOSCHE, BONNET and MORRISON. Based on the frequency of Vénus and Réné’s children and grandchildren using the surname SÉNÉGAL, this may point to Vénus’s “tribal” origins as being one of the ethnic groups in the French comptoir along the Sénégal River.

Beyoncé Knowles: Myths, Acadian & African Ancestors

Armand BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil, the 7th of ten children born to Joseph BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil and Agnès TIBAUDEAU, had been born in 1745 near Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia. His family had risen to some prominence in French Acadia and later British Nova Scotia. Joseph and his brother Alexandre married two TIBAUDEAU sisters (Agnès and Nanette). In the late 1720s, or early 1730s, Joseph and Alexandre BROUSSARD moved their new families to Chipoudy, a seigneurial domain which their grandfather-in-law Pierre TIBAUDEAU had acquired and established as a community. As historian Carl BRASSEAUX shows, Joseph had for years “defended Acadian homes against British incursions,” and “frequently harassed British patrols in the eastern Chignecto area.” When in 1764 local British and Anglo-Canadians rounded up or arrested Acadians, Joseph and the 600 Acadians he led, arranged for “vessels at their own expense,” ultimately ending up on the shores of Bayou Têche in Spring 1765. Perhaps more fortunate than many of their Acadian counterparts, the BROUSSARD group arrived in Spanish New Orleans on a ship they funded and, unsurprisingly, with money to exchange for local currency (Image 2), testament of the mobility and privilege they had enjoyed in French Acadia and British Nova Scotia. This context helps to explain why the BROUSSARD first cousins (Armand, Isabelle, Simon and Pierre) owned slaves so early in colonial Louisiana.1

 

[IllmaticDelta]

People of African descent in the contiguous US have for the greater part of their history have CONVERGED culturally, politically, and ancestrally into a single ethnic community for almost 250 years. This cultural convergence of African-Americans as a people occured in many stages, most notably being:

- the domestic slave trade



- the great migrations of blacks from the south to the north, going back to the earliest exodusters in 1879


​

Nothing to do with colonial heritage, "13 colonies", or any other bs. You can not truly understand African-American culture and identity without a thorough understanding these events, and guess what- PEOPLE FROM LOUISIANA WERE HEAVILY INVOLVED WITH ALL OF THEM!

^^^These are the defining factors in the development African-American culture and identity(which is a post-emancipation phenomenon not a colonial one), not "13 colonies" heritage or w/e ridiculous non sequitur creole fetishist/exoticist love to use. Puerto ricans and Virigin Islanders do not share that heritage with African-Americans, AA creoles very much do share that with other AAs like Sojournor Truth despite her being of colonial dutch NY/NJ heritage and speaking a dutch dialect as a first language.

In fact I'd say that African-Americans are more culturally unified than most ethnicities of our size because of these unique events. Although I'm not an expert, I doubt that Afro-Brazilians across different regions of Brazil cluster as closely with each other as African-Americans all across the US do.

To add to this

Although many historians and ordinary people today assume that all free people of color in Louisiana were Creoles, it is ahistoric to assume so. In the Summer of 1812, the Louisiana legislature, in its first session as a state, enacted the incorporation of state militias, composed of “certain free men of color, to be chose from among the Creoles.” The provision excluded Americans who were free people of color. Free African Americans and Melungeons had been in Louisiana for three decades by 1812. In New Orleans, these free people of color can be found in the American municipalities “uptown.” In 1825 or 1826, Asa Goldsbury founded the First African Baptist Church in New Orleans with 20 members. Goldsbury’s congregation grew out of an earlier Baptist congregation in New Orleans with a white and a nonwhite minister catering to each separately.2

In the rural setting, a large number of American free people of color had arrived around 1790 from Virginia, North and South Carolinas and settled all over south Louisiana. Their families had intermarried for generations and knew one another before arriving in Louisiana, ensuring continued endagomy in rural south Louisiana. The Chavises (now, Chévis), Drakes, Sweats, Gibsons, Nelsons, Johnsons, Ashworths, and others, were among these American free people of color families. John Chavis, free mulatto, native of North Carolina appears in the 1792 colonial census of the Opélousas District. But he and his wife, Rachel Keys, also appear in Catholic parochial records in the Lafourche District in this same decade. Unlike most members of this American free people of color community, John and Rachel’s children left their parents’ community to marry into local Creole communities. Aaron Drake of Elizabeth County, Virginia, and his two sons Paul and John, all free mulattoes, registered cattle brands in the Attakapas District in 1807. In 1811, George Nelson, a free man of color from Bladen, North Carolina, married a free woman of color named Elizabeth “Betsy” Carter, widow of Robert Sweat, in Opélousas. Betsy was a native of Casswell, North Carolina. Frances “Fanny” Nelson and Gilbert Taylor Nelson, two children of George by his first marriage to Delaney Taylor married Johnson siblings David and Rebecca, natives of the Edgefield District, South Carolina, children of Gideon Johnson and Nancy Sweat. By 1830, we find this nucleic community living huddled together on Bayou Têche near Grand Côteau, on the Mermentau River, and on the Calcasieu River. Thus, Creoles and Americans of various degrees of African descent shared the same land, but separate cultural milieux and residential settlement patterns.3

Beyoncé and Solange Knowles breaking boundaries - Page 2 of 4 - Louisiana Historic and Cultural Vistas

and

But to sum up the Antebellum period: there were no (legal) importation of slaves to Louisiana from Africa or the Caribbean. Saint-Domingue and Cuban refugees who arrived between 1809 and 1810 in New Orleans did bring slaves with them. But they remained mostly in New Orleans and to a lesser extent in Pointe-Coupée, the Acadian and German Coasts (all along the Mississippi River). Nathalie Dessens’s study (From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans) as well as Emily Clark’s discuss this. The vast majority of slaves entering Louisiana during the Antebellum period entered New Orleans slave market by way of the US interstate market, mostly from Virginia, with smaller numbers from Kentucky, Maryland, and Tennessee. This is why so many Creoles in Grand Côteau and Sunset have English surnames – the Jesuits were ousted from Maryland in 1821 and they established a colony, with their slaves, at Grand Côteau that year. That colony became Sacred Heart Convent, Sacred Heart Church (now St. Charles Borromeo) and St. Charles College school for (white) boys.

So by 1860, on all Creole plantations, there was a mixture of Creole, American, and really old African slaves; whereas on American plantations in Louisiana, virtually all slaves were Americans, with few Africans.

What may slaves in colonial Louisiana have looked like?

 

[Supper]

Continue on AA cultural convergence, although this may be more general Afro-New Worlder.

Brer Rabbit - Compair Lapin

These stories were popularized for the mainstream audience in the late 19th century by Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908), who wrote down and published many such stories that had been passed down by oral tradition. Harris also attributed the birth name Riley to Br'er Rabbit. Harris heard these tales in Georgia. Very similar versions of the same stories were recorded independently at the same time by the folklorist Alcée Fortier in southern Louisiana, where the Rabbit character was known as Compair Lapin in Creole. Enid Blyton, the English writer of children's fiction, retold the stories for children.

Br'er Rabbit - Wikipedia

 

[Bawon Samedi]

The "fetishzation" also happens with the Gullah/Geechee people.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

The "fetishzation" also happens with the Gullah/Geechee people.

To some degree but by regular people (mainly black outsiders) who are outsiders to afram culture as opposed to Creoles, who white intellectuals/historians, love bringing up, mainly because of their Afro-Euro nature, which gives them a chance to "de-blackify" certain things in Afram culture, that they want to lay claim to (jazz for example). Sea-Island Aframs could never be "de-blackified", so white historians never really waste time on them.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

myth: is that all Aframs with French surnames have ties to Louisiana Creole or Haitians

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people forget French enslavers were all up in the North East and various parts of the South outside of Mississippi-Louisiana/Golf Coast.

One of the most well known Afram surnames is French and it's Carolina based.

it goes back to a south carolina rice plantation

South Carolina - African Americans - Charles Manigault's Plantation Gowrie

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Angela Bassett

her roots are in virginia/georgia/carolinas



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His were in New England

 

[im_sleep]

myth: is that all Aframs with French surnames have ties to Louisiana Creole or Haitians

.
.
.
people forget French enslavers were all up in the North East and various parts of the South outside of Mississippi-Louisiana/Golf Coast.

One of the most well known Afram surnames is French and it's Carolina based.

it goes back to a south carolina rice plantation

South Carolina - African Americans - Charles Manigault's Plantation Gowrie

.
.

.
.
.

.
.
Angela Bassett

her roots are in virginia/georgia/carolinas



.
.

His were in New England

Good shyt, I always wondered about the Manigault surname.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Good shyt, I always wondered about the Manigault surname.

yeah, there are many others but I can't think of them right now besides this one, he was from Floridian slaves

 

[IllmaticDelta]

The "fetishzation" also happens with the Gullah/Geechee people.

To some degree but by regular people (mainly black outsiders) who are outsiders to afram culture as opposed to Creoles, who white intellectuals/historians, love bringing up, mainly because of their Afro-Euro nature, which gives them a chance to "de-blackify" certain things in Afram culture, that they want to lay claim to (jazz for example). Sea-Island Aframs could never be "de-blackified", so white historians never really waste time on them.

fresh example

James Brown’s family is from South Carolina where they speak patois (also in georgia and florida too) but keep letting cacs define borders between brothers.

Let y’all tell it, nikkas just stayed put pre civil war and didn’t travel back and forth from the mainland and the islands.

Let y’all tell it, the caribbean is off the coast of japan and not florida. Shyt is right there. Go look at a map. Might influence the way u think about culture outside of how cacs made it seem.

https://www.thecoli.com/threads/mor...wn-or-bob-marley.735358/page-10#post-35062294

 

[IllmaticDelta]

myth: is that all Aframs with French surnames have ties to Louisiana Creole or Haitians

.
.
.
people forget French enslavers were all up in the North East and various parts of the South outside of Mississippi-Louisiana/Golf Coast.

Spoiler

One of the most well known Afram surnames is French and it's Carolina based.

it goes back to a south carolina rice plantation

South Carolina - African Americans - Charles Manigault's Plantation Gowrie

.
.

.
.
.

.
.
Angela Bassett

her roots are in virginia/georgia/carolinas



.
.

His were in New England

to add to that

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the most famous ones