In the 20th century, a variety of academic disciplines began to use the term creolization.
Linguists first used the term to signify changes in European languages produced in the Americas, and in 1972 American anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price adopted the linguistic model of creolization to argue that African slaves torn from their roots and scattered in the diaspora retained only basic elements of their original languages and cultures.
In 1982 sociologist Orlando Patterson took that idea even further, arguing that enslaved Africans experienced a “social death.” Scholars better versed in precolonial Africa, such as Paul Lovejoy and John Thornton, among others, responded that more African culture survived the Middle Passage than the creolization school acknowledged, and they found evidence of African retentions in language, architecture, religious practice, social structure, and patterns of warfare, among other cultural forms.
Historians who study Atlantic Creoles reject the older deracinated view of creolized culture as well as attempts to identify some essential and immutable African culture. Instead, they borrow from Mary Louise Pratt’s model of the contact zone: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” They argue that despite subordination, Atlantic Creoles living on the African coasts, in Europe, or in the Americas were able to engage in a variety of cultural, political, social, economic, and even religious systems, without an implied loss to their original cultural base.
Rather than view culture as a zero-sum game, this school considers the added skill sets and experiences that altered, but did not eradicate, Atlantic Creoles’ original identities. Geopolitics and global economics propelled them through a variety of political regimes, geographies, cultures, languages, and religions that could not have but shaped them in some fashion. And although many of their peregrinations were forced, Atlantic Creoles made choices as well about how they self-identified and what they used of their background in particular situations—much as they probably did when still on the African continent.
As merchants, slave traders, linguists, sailors, artisans, musicians, and military figures, Atlantic Creoles interacted with a wide variety of European and indigenous groups and helped shape a new Atlantic world system.