Robin Cohen wishes to thank research participants and friends in Cape Verde, Mauritius, Louisiana and Guadeloupe, including Maria Cândida Gonçalves, Vijaya Teelock, Lindsey Collen, Ram Seegobin, Robbie and Catherine Stephen, Arnaud Carpooran, C. Le Cartier, J. F. Lafleur, Rosebelle Boswell, Loran Medea, Sheila Richmond, Mary Gehman, Susan Dollar, Peter Gregory, Monique Bouyer, Terrence Mosley, Mary Wernet, Kathe Hambrick-Jackson, David I. Beriss, Michael S. Martin, Julien Merion and Rose-Lee Raqui.

Olivia Sheringham wishes to thank all her research participants and friends in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Cape Verde, including Richard and Sally Price, Dominique Aurelia, Paulo Athanèse, Patricia Donatien, Pascale Lavanaire, Gerry L’Etang, Gilles Alexandre, Roberte Verdan, Roger de Jaham, Patrick Chamoiseau, Christiane Emmanuel, Suzanne Laurent and Barbara Colombe in Martinique; Gerard Delver, Fred Reno, Léna Blou, Rose-Lee Raqui, Emmanuel Ibéné, Alijah, Carole, Nicole de Surmont, Julien Merion and Bernard Phipps in Martinique and Guadeloupe; and Josina Freitas, João Fortes, Manuel Lima Fortes, Tambla Almeida, Margarida Martins, Moacyr Rodrigues, Celeste Fortes, Manu Cabral, Kiki Lima and Jorge Martins in Cape Verde.

Interviews in French and Portuguese were conducted by Olivia Sheringham in Martinique and Cape Verde. (She has provided her own translations.) Interviews in Mauritius and Louisiana were conducted by Robin Cohen. To minimize the number of endnotes, we have simply indicated in the text that the source of information is an interview. Where appropriate, individuals have been identified by name.

On a personal note Olivia would like to thank Emma Klinefelter and James and Leo Cattell, while Robin likewise extends his thanks to Selina Molteno Cohen and Jason Cohen. He gives a special ‘thank you’ to Paola Toninato, his co-editor on The Creolization Reader (2010).

Both authors wish to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding this research (Grant number F/08/000/H) and the Oxford Diasporas Programme (http://www.migration.ox.ac.uk/odp/). Zoe Falk, Claire Fletcher, Jenny Peebles and Sally Kingsborough provided administrative and editorial support to us and to the programme at large. Colleagues who provided critiques and support include Josh de Wind, Khachig Tölölyan, Steve Vertovec, Ian Goldin, Nick Van Hear, Peggy Levitt, Jørgen Carling, Ralph Grillo, Denis Constant Martin and Edgar Pieterse. We particularly profited from Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s detailed reading of the manuscript.

We wish to acknowledge that some of the material in chapter 7 is reproduced from an article published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, February 2016.

‘Creole(s)’ (with a capital letter) refers to a person or people who are so identified by others or self-identify using that description.

When it appears in lower case, ‘creole’ is used adjectively, as in ‘a creole language’ or ‘creole food’.

The popular language in Cape Verde is ‘Krioulu’, which in Martinique is ‘Kréyol’. ‘Krio’ is widely spoken in Sierra Leone, while the majority of people in Mauritius speak ‘Kreol’.

Jamaican-born Stuart Hall, who died in 2014, was one of Britain’s most perceptive and revered public intellectuals. Asked to define the key issue of the twenty-first century, he responded as follows:

How are people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different languages, different religious beliefs, produced by different and highly uneven histories, but who find themselves either directly connected because they’ve got to make a life together in the same place, or digitally connected because they occupy the same symbolic worlds – how are they to make some sort of common life together without retreating into warring tribes, eating one another, or insisting that other people must look exactly like you, behave exactly like you, think exactly like you?¹

This book addresses Stuart Hall’s question. It is, of course, all too easy to list the countless examples of conflict between different ethnicities, nationalities and religions. News bulletins are replete with militant demands for ethnic exclusivity, minority-language education, religious orthodoxy and territorial separatism. Think, for example, of the conflicts between Kosovars and Serbs in the Balkans, Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Alawi, other Shias and Sunni in Syria or Russians and Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine. Instead of focusing on the many forms of ethnic and religious conflict, the potency of which we do not contest, this book is centred on how, when and where people of diverse heritages meet and converge, and why understanding this more positive outcome might be important for the future of humankind.

We decided to pursue a number of complementary strategies. We reasoned that new social identities arise at the formative moment of meeting (when initial stereotypes are generated), identities that become modified as encounters deepen and become more multifaceted. Social actors bring to these ‘thicker’ encounters what they cannot let go from their pasts and what they need to absorb, or want to embrace, from their present situations and contexts. This line of thinking induced us to develop and refine three seminal concepts – social identity formation, diaspora and creolization, all of which we delineate in chapter 1.

We also noticed a decided lack of compelling historical explanations with which to situate the beginnings of cultural difference. Was difference, as some religious accounts suggest, a result of God’s will – an act of divine punishment for humankind’s effrontery in seeking to reach for celestial power and understanding? (The story of the Tower of Babel exemplifies this narrative.) Did difference arise as a result of genetic mutation, migration and the differential adaptation to new environments, an inference that might be derived from a Darwinian starting point? Were differences simply inevitable, a sort of instinctual heterophobia driven by mutual distrust or terror as people who looked and acted differently, or spoke mutually unintelligible languages, encountered each other for the first time? In chapter 2 we look in some detail at these initial contacts between disparate peoples and show how cultural boundaries were imagined, constructed and transgressed.

Having addressed our problem conceptually and historically, we thought it indispensable to complement ‘the when’ with ‘the where’. Initial encounters between strangers, essentially driven by trade and exploration, later gave way to the production of tropical commodities, the expansion of industrial production and (now) to the globalization of finance and services. As we argue in chapter 3, particular contact zones (islands and plantations, port cities and ‘super-diverse cities’) embody these shifts in the political economy and provide the main sites, the creolizing spaces, in which emergent societies, shared social practices and new identities emerge.

Subsequent chapters provide empirical descriptions and comparative analysis of cultural encounter and convergence. Using arresting and instructive examples from original fieldwork, we show how diasporic resources are evoked and new social identities emerge, sometimes only in embryonic form. In chapter 4, we focus on language and music. Next, we consider how the celebration of carnival (chapter 5) and the construction and reconstruction of heritage (chapter 6) provoke a complex interplay between new and old identities, between diaspora and creolization. In chapter 7, we analyse how conflicting tugs of identity are ‘marked’ in terms of representation, cultural theory and political loyalties.

We conclude the book by indicating the way in which our account illuminates how people learn to live with difference, which is, as Stuart Hall’s prescient remarks signalled, surely one of the most challenging issues of our day (chapter 8).