Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities

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Creole identity in Latin America has long attracted scholarly attention, while creolization in the British North American colonies has been far less studied. Influenced in part by Atlantic history, this volume of 17 essays authored by literary scholars seeks to address the neglected “wider Atlantic phenomenon” of creolization (p. 2). The essays grew out of discussions at the First Early Ibero/Anglo Americanist Summit held in Tucson in 2002, sponsored by the Society for Early Americanists. (For the conference mission statement see Early American Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2003.)A fine introduction by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti includes brief etymological and bibliographic essays. From the Portuguese, crioulo was first used to distinguish slaves born in Brazil from those brought from Africa (and continued to be used in this sense until the end of the colonial period in slave regions such as Haiti). Picked up in Spanish America as a derogatory term, criollo was eventually embraced with pride by the American-born elites who sought to differentiate themselves from peninsulares. As the term moved north, however, negative connotations remained: in describing what he viewed as the bad behavior of his early eighteenth-century compatriots, Cotton Mather contended that he was besieged with “Criolian degeneracies” (p. 5). Europeans agreed with Mather and believed that their American-born cousins had degenerated because of inferior climate or food, or because they had indigenous or African wet nurses. The essays here delve into European-descended elite creoles’ published responses to that negative ideology and specifically the ties between creole and national identities; they do not address creole Africans (or creole Indians).The most successful chapters are those that take a comparative approach. David S. Shields’s essay illuminating the links between Britain’s narratives of empire, the Black Legend, and North American creole identity — which all meet in the person of Francis Drake — is convincing and would work well as classroom reading. Two narratives of the British Empire competed in the early colonial period: the benevolent and peaceful trading partner versus swashbuckling individualism. Both narratives turned on the Black Legend, as Britain defined itself as Spain’s obverse. Radical Protestant (and pirate) Francis Drake personified the individualist image that prevailed in the English colonies, while the British themselves eventually embraced the shopkeeper/merchant image. As Shields, citing Ralph Bauer, points out, “the entire English literature of empire must be read as a gloss on the Spanish imperial literature” (p. 108). Bauer’s own essay follows this maxim, comparing “creole rewriting of history” in the poetry of Ecuadorian José Joaquín Olmedo (1780 – 1847) with New Englander Joel Barlow (1754 – 1812). Bauer concludes that by holding Africans in slavery and either exterminating or removing the indigenous population, the United States could agree that all men were equal, while the South American republics could not do the same “for they had failed to disqualify their nonequals as men” (p. 464). Luis Fernando Restrepo’s essay on seventeenth-century Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita efforts to recast Muisca (also known as Chibcha) history also takes a comparative turn: Restrepo demonstrates that Piedrahita put the Muisca on par with the much larger Inca empire to redeem Muisca history. A mestizo, Piedrahita “integrated Muisca past with a universal Christian narrative” (p. 339), much as writers such as Garcilaso de la Vega did for the Inca. In equating the Muisca with the Inca, Piedrahita “elaborated a local history that made sense only from a point of view of an emerging sector in colonial society, the criollos” (p. 350). Restrepo is the only author in this volume who takes a reflexive turn; his study of seventeenth-century creole identity aims also to shed light on modern Colombia.As literary scholars, the authors are concerned exclusively with published texts, not with the messy archives and documents that historians attend to. Perhaps this partly explains why sixteenth-through eighteenth-century Spanish words are sometimes used anachronistically (raza, nación), and contemporary racial terminology (“white”) is used to label people of the colonial era who did not themselves use this term to categorize persons. Even so, some of the clearest writing on “race” in colonial Latin America comes from a literary scholar, Ruth Hill, whose work is cited frequently in the volume. (See for example her Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America, Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.) The reliance on published texts also tends to blur intentions with reality. From these essays we learn what elite creoles wrote about, but we don’t learn about their daily lives and concerns — the kinds of matters gleaned in legal cases, letters, diaries, notarial records, and other materials not written with publication in mind.The essays here will appeal to Atlantic world scholars from many disciplines. Many of the essays are suitable for undergraduate courses and could be paired profitably with historical studies.