Becoming Creole

Nature and Race in Belize

By Melissa A. Johnson

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

Becoming Creole explores how people become who they are through their relationships with the natural world, and it shows how those relationships are also always embedded in processes of racialization that create blackness, brownness, and whiteness. Taking the reader into the lived experience of Afro-Caribbean people who call the watery lowlands of Belize home, Melissa A. Johnson traces Belizean Creole peoples’ relationships with the plants, animals, water, and soils around them, and analyzes how these relationships intersect with transnational racial assemblages. She provides a sustained analysis of how processes of racialization are always present in the entanglements between people and the non-human worlds in which they live.

Timely and timeless, Johnson's elegant writing carries us into the Belizean forest, literally and metaphorically. Showing how culture and nature are mutually constitutive, this intimate work is by far the best portrayal of the complexities of race in Belize, and sheds new light on the entire Atlantic world. Richard Wilk, distinguished professor emeritus, Indiana University

Beyond the Belize known by outsiders for its beautiful coral reefs and jungle ecotourism, anthropologist Melissa Johnson immerses us in the rural Creole experience of human-environmental relations. Employing her skills as an ethnographer, combined with engaging family stories gathered over several decades, she reveals how local skills, knowledge, concepts, and lifeways of the interior villages are crucial to the ways that Belizeans creatively engage with the more-than-human agentic powers of this co-produced world. Becoming Creole is a close study of rural socio-natural entanglements and an important contribution to both rural studies and Caribbean studies. Mimi Sheller, author of Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies

Recommended. Choice

New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies' interview with Melissa Johnson New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies

Becoming Creole is a welcome addition to scholarship on the role of the other-than-human world in shaping individual identities. It reflects on emergence, connection, race, and transnationality in ways that are often either missing from existing scholarship or that are otherwise underdeveloped. Although subtitled Nature and Race in Belize, neither nature nor race are ever clearly defined in a way that would force them into fixed categories, instead allowing their meaning to develop and change alongside the stories being told, and Belize is never the lone or privileged backdrop on which identity construction occurs. This is a goal to which more scholars should aspire. AAG Review

The book [is] most engaging in discussions of the patchy records of the historical, economic, and cultural geography of Belize.' The Journal of Latin American Geography

[An] interesting ethnographic finding in Johnson’s data on Creole language is its creative use to generate metaphors of otherness, and its borrowing from Creole perceptions of the natural world. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

Timely and timeless, Johnson's elegant writing carries us into the Belizean forest, literally and metaphorically. Showing how culture and nature are mutually constitutive, this intimate work is by far the best portrayal of the complexities of race in Belize, and sheds new light on the entire Atlantic world. Richard Wilk, distinguished professor emeritus, Indiana University

Beyond the Belize known by outsiders for its beautiful coral reefs and jungle ecotourism, anthropologist Melissa Johnson immerses us in the rural Creole experience of human-environmental relations. Employing her skills as an ethnographer, combined with engaging family stories gathered over several decades, she reveals how local skills, knowledge, concepts, and lifeways of the interior villages are crucial to the ways that Belizeans creatively engage with the more-than-human agentic powers of this co-produced world. Becoming Creole is a close study of rural socio-natural entanglements and an important contribution to both rural studies and Caribbean studies. Mimi Sheller, author of Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies

Recommended. Choice

New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies' interview with Melissa Johnson New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies

Becoming Creole is a welcome addition to scholarship on the role of the other-than-human world in shaping individual identities. It reflects on emergence, connection, race, and transnationality in ways that are often either missing from existing scholarship or that are otherwise underdeveloped. Although subtitled Nature and Race in Belize, neither nature nor race are ever clearly defined in a way that would force them into fixed categories, instead allowing their meaning to develop and change alongside the stories being told, and Belize is never the lone or privileged backdrop on which identity construction occurs. This is a goal to which more scholars should aspire. AAG Review

The book [is] most engaging in discussions of the patchy records of the historical, economic, and cultural geography of Belize.' The Journal of Latin American Geography

[An] interesting ethnographic finding in Johnson’s data on Creole language is its creative use to generate metaphors of otherness, and its borrowing from Creole perceptions of the natural world. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

MELISSA A. JOHNSON is a professor of anthropology at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Becoming Creole
2 Hewers of Wood: Histories of Nature, Race and Becoming
3 Bush: Racing the More than Human
4 Living in a Powerful World
5 Entangling the More than Human: Becoming Creole
6 Wildlife Conservation, Nature Tourism and Creole Becomings
7 Transnational Becomings: From Deer Sausage to Tilapia
8 Conclusion: Livity and (Human) Being
Appendix/Glossary: Belizean Kriol Words and the More than Human??
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

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