| Abstract: | A central debate within slavery studies centers on the question of whether enslaved Africans ‘retained’ their cultures or became ‘creolized’ in the Americas. Focusing on two enslaved women and the six children they bore by their master in late seventeenth-century Barbados, this paper suggests how creolization operated in the early modern English Caribbean. The women and children were baptized and provided for in their master’s will. Yet they were also part of the plantation’s 180 strong West African enslaved population. Contextualizing all of the influences that shaped their experiences on Barbados, this paper examines naming, baptism, and birthing rituals to provide an account of the women’s lives that does not privilege either European or West African cultural practices. It argues that creolization was not a marker of identity, nor a unidirectional process of Europeanization, but rather a multivalent and multidirectional negotiation of cultural exchanges. |
