Struggling to be Creole: A Case Study of Musical Contextualization in the French Caribbean Evangelical Churches

Abstract

“Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (Bernabe 1993, 75).
This famous claim of the Creolists1 is a useful way to begin any critical discourse in the field of
creole identities. African slaves, European colonizers, and Indian and Chinese free workers have
all shaped a plural and multiracial society in which descendants of slaves and their owners, the
colonized peoples and the colonizers, share the same geographical space: the Caribbean
archipelago.