The ten essays in The Crucible of Carolina explore the connections between the language and culture of South Carolina's barrier islands, West Africa, the Caribbean, and England. Decades before any formal, scholarly interest in South Carolina barrier life, outsiders had been commenting on and documenting the "African" qualities of the region's black inhabitants. These qualities have long been manifest in their language, religious practices, music, and material culture. Although direct contact between South Carolina and Africa continued until the Civil War, the era of Caribbean contact was briefer and ended with the close of the American colonial period. Throughout this volume, though, the contributors look beyond the cultural motivations and political appeal of strengthening the links between coastal Carolina and Africa and examine the cost of a diminished recognition of this important Caribbean influence. Not surprisingly, the influence of the pioneering linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner is reflected in many of these essays. The work presented in this volume, however, moves beyond Turner in dealing with the discourse and stylistic aspects of Gullah; in relating patters of Gullah to other Anglophone creoles and to various processes of creolization; and in questioning the usefulness of "retention," "survival," and "continuity" as operational concepts in comparative research. Within this context of furthering and challenging Turner's work in the barrier islands, and in seeking a truer measure of both African and Caribbean influences there, the contributors cover such topics as names and naming, the language of religious rituals, basket-making traditions, creole discourse patterns, and the grammatical morphology of Gullah and related creole and pidgin languages. Other contributors consider the substrate contributions and African continuities to be found in New World language patterns into new patterns adapted to the various situations in the New World. Opening new and advancing previous areas of research, The Crucible of Carolina also contributes to a further appreciation of the richness and diversity of South Carolina's cultural heritage.

Responses to enslavement are automatically seen as struggles (heroic or otherwise), but in the case of the English Caribbean colonies, the claim was irately made by pro-planter factions, reacting to criticism, that the enslaved Africans were not struggling, they were happy and better off than the poor in England and the idea of hideous enslavement was a prejudiced distortion. Evidence presented was the universal singing, dancing and carousing of the enslaved. A conviction that is really at the base of this irate retort is that society is inescapably hierarchical, with happiness as the ideal for the lower classes and pride or valour as the ideal only for the rulers. The question that may be asked then is: What should the oppressed do - reject this view, fight and die valiantly if necessary or try to survive by amusing themselves and making the best of a bad situation? The fact that the most popular images of the Caribbean today are those of "play" (carnivals, Bob Marley, Rihanna, Bolt), not heroism (as in Haiti) seems to show what option the enslaved in the English colonies chose. A Response to Enslavement addresses the dilemma that the enslaved Africans (mostly young people) faced and how they dealt with it. Peter Roberts examines the critical role of play in human existence as the basis for its role in their response to enslavement and suggests that in a world today where people resort to catastrophic acts of suicide to win their struggles, the choices of the enslaved present a viable alternative.

This book is original in its conception, perspective and treatment of the languages and identities of the West Indies as a whole. Peter Roberts makes extensive use of a huge range of multiple and multilingual historical sources to let the voices of the past speak for themselves, and unearths forgotten connections that reveal the interrelatedness of territories and their 'historical saga'. The author presents a lucid account of a movement from a written, wholly European construction of Caribbean identity towards a more Caribbean one. He relates how the identity of the Caribbean region and the identities of the separate islands within the region were shaped and set out within a chronological sequence starting from the time of the European encounters with the Amerindians and finishing at the end of the nineteenth century.