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This essay reviews Belinda Edmondson's literary yet cross-disciplinary study Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which questions the Blackness of orality versus the Whiteness of narrative in the growth of Caribbean literature. Caribbean language history and discourse analysis have much to contribute to the exploration of ventriloquist beginnings of the regional narrative as well as to the nuancing of interpretation, and the review calls for such exchange across the relevant disciplines. The review also welcomes comparisons between literary developments of Black American and Caribbean literature that highlight the cross-cultural relevance of Edmondson's analysis. Creole Noise is timely and useful in contributing positively to such matters as border disputes on Caribbeanness, with regard to regional and diasporic writing, and to challenges that face writers who are native speakers of Caribbean Creole as they convey local voices to foreign readers.

[First paragraph]Les Creoles: Problemes de genese et de description. GUY HAZAELMASSIEUX. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Universite de Provence, 1996. 374 pp. (Paper 260 FF)The Kiss of a Slave: Papiamentu's West-African Connections. EFRAIM FRANK MARTINUS. Curacao: De Curacaose Courant, 1997. 292 pp. (Paper US$ 57.50)Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis. JOHN H. MCWHORTER. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 199 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.95)In two of the three books reviewed here (those by Hazael-Massieux and Martinus), theory takes a back seat to description, while in the third (McWhorter's) the roles are reversed. The work by Guy Hazael-Massieux, whose recent and untimely death saddened his many friends, is entitled Les Creoles: Problemes de genese et de description, but the author is more concerned with history and description than with creole genesis. The book is a collection of twenty-one essays, all of which have been previously published. However, since their loci were extremely scattered and in many cases difficult of access, especially for Anglophone readers, his widow, Marie-Christine Hazael-Massieux, has done the field a service by collecting and editing them. Ten of these essays are gathered under the rubric "Genese et histoire des Creoles," and a further seven are described as "Elements pour une morpho-syntaxe des Creoles francaises," leaving only four that concern themselves directly with "Definition et classement des Creoles."

Aus der Einleitung: Diese Arbeit verfolgt vor allem zwei Ziele: sie will Prozesse ethnischer Gemeinschaftsbildung in einer diachronischen Perspektive untersuchen und eine Sozialgeschichte der afroamerikanischen Bevölkerung in der Atlantikregion Nicaraguas (Creoles) schreiben, die bislang nur wenig erforscht ist.