The purpose of this work is simply to provide a broad and thorough (as opposed narrow and specific)overview to one of the key issues in comparative language and literatures as well as in social and political science, history, development studies, anthropology and cultural studies. Professor Gallagher is one of the most active researchers and editors on this topic and has assembled an international group of scholars and investigators for a much needed discussion of cultural identities and changing societies due to the mas migration of people, the exportation of global cultures and the engulfing of monocultural, monolingual cities and nations. The phenomena of creoles, diasporas and cosmopolitianisms permeates all literary debate at the moment. And, while occurring in the past, the contemporary phenomena we are witnessing (and taking part in) is of world changing significance. And that significance is addressed by this work and its contributors which describes, celebrates, analyzes and records this overwhelming contemporary event.Creole languages appropriate pieces of other languages to make up new composite grammars and vocabularies; creole societies enroll, originally by force now mainly by economics, people from diverse places and tribes. The incorporation that might be singled out as the defining feature of the creole interacts with the diffusion and memory characteristic of the diaspora and with the attempt to construct or hold upon a cosmopolitan cultural spac