Review of: Charles Stewart, ed. Creolization: History, Ethnography,
Theory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast, 2007.
- Ever since James Clifford declared in 1988 that "we are all Caribbeans now
living in our urban archipelagoes" there has been a rise in the theoretical cachet of
creolization as a term that-- along with its synonyms hybridity and
transculturation--might explain the cultural diversity that has emerged with
globalization. What distinguishes Clifford's quote is its use of the Caribbean as a
site whose experiences might be generalized as a universal concept. The utopian
impulse behind Clifford's phrase appears as a leitmotif in the essays edited by
Charles Stewart in Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory which
admirably seeks to rescue this term from its status as an epigram and recover its
analytical force by turning to its origins in linguistic, anthropological, and
historical theories and methodologies. While this interdisciplinary collection does
not offer a single definitive interpretation of creolization, it does represent a
shared concern with the specific question of what happens when a term that is meant to
be descriptive becomes prescriptive. Using Clifford Geertz's terms, they ask how and
why scholars collapse a model of into a model for. In what ways is
creolization different from its synonyms? These essays answer these questions by
examining the fate of a creative metaphor as it travels across disciplines and takes
its place within many different theoretical and conceptual models. While each of the
essays makes its own particular critique of creolization, they all offer models for
how it might be disentangled and more usefully deployed.
- Traditionally, most work on creolization has been based in history,
linguistics, and cultural studies of the Caribbean region, from Fernando Ortiz's
landmark work on transculturation to the early 1970s work of Kamau Brathwaite, Sidney
Mintz, and Wilson Harris, where creolization emerged, to Chris Bongie's later
Islands and Exiles. Antonio Benitez-Rojo's recent essay, "Creolization in
Havana: The Oldest Form of Globalization," is typical of recent uses in viewing the
term as a synonym for globalization. The term is also used interchangeably with
hybridity, and to describe global flows, as in the 1992 declaration by the
anthropologist Ulf Hannerz that "this world of movement and mixture is a world in
creolisation" (qtd 2). By contrast, the twelve essays in this collection follow in
the wake of recent historical studies of creolization that expand our sense of the
term beyond the Caribbean region, such as Megan Vaughan's history of Mauritius,
Creating the Creole Island and Michel Rolph Trouillot's Global
Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, both of which avoid using
the term as only a metaphor for globalization. But this work is most unique in its
interdisciplinary connections--returning anthropological appropriations of the term to
its roots in linguistics--and in its geographical scope as it expands our sense of
creolization beyond the Caribbean basin. Yet as Stewart observes in his carefully
balanced and thoughtful introduction, the shared impulse of the collection to recover
an original theoretical formulation stands in ironic opposition to the conventional
sense of the term, which has come to signify the refusal of return to origins or of
the kind of faith in etymology that underlies many of these essays.
- Etymologically derived from the Portuguese crioulo and the Spanish
criollo, creole referred to a "slave born in his master's house" (from the
Latin verb criar, "to breed," but also "to bring up"), and was first used in
the seventeenth century to describe the products of the New World. Marking
geographical, not racial, difference it referred to those born in the Americas; thus,
a Spanish couple could have one child born in Spain and one born in the New World and
the former would be European and the latter would be creole. This classification,
which resembles Linnaeus's system for distinguishing plant life from the New World,
was also used to distinguish between slaves born in the Americas and "Guinea" slaves
born in Africa. With the demise of the slave trade in the Caribbean and the reduction
of the European population in the nineteenth century, the term came to be associated
with a largely black population. It is this sense that has informed the French
Creolité movement of the 1990s which, as Mary Gallagher demonstrates
in her essay, deliberately chose to ignore the etymological history and to repress its
contingent meanings in mobilizing the phrase as an essentialist identity. But even
this history needs to be qualified in each of its contexts. For instance, in
Réunion Island creole refers to everyone born on the island, and in Trinidad
the general population is called creole with the notable exception of the Asian
population, who are excluded. In Suriname, a creole refers to a person of African
origin, whereas in French Guyana it refers to someone who has become more European in
style or language. Thus while its origin as a geographical classification is apparent
in its earliest uses (outside of the Caribbean) in Brazil, Latin America, Mexico, and
in the Indian-Oceanic islands of Réunion and Mauritius, its history and
adaptations afterwards remain specific to each locale. These essays emphasize the
ideological ramifications of ignoring the meanings that vary depending on these
diverse contexts.
- Often assumed by cultural theorists as an aspect of subaltern identity
formation, creolization has also been connected to elite cultures. As Jorge
Cañizares-Esguerra reveals through a richly textured analysis of an anonymous
eighteenth-century painting of María de Guadalupe (the patron saint of creoles)
being worshiped by two Hispanic and two indigenous nobles, the distinction between
creoles and mestizos in Mexico and Latin America derived from ancestral
"mixture." In colonial Mexico, creole signified a mixture between Spanish and
indigenous nobility that was crucial for an ideology of manifest destiny and for
maintaining social divisions according to race and class; yet, as
Cañizares-Esguerra demonstrates, this same conceptualization of creole identity
later allowed for its ideological role in the anti-colonial Wars of Independence, when
Bolívar expanded the meaning of "creole" to include those mestizos
that the term was once designed to exclude by redeploying its geographical reference.
While creole was part of the emancipatory project in Latin and South America, it was
resented among the British colonials in North America who saw it as a particularly
Iberian designation. As Joyce Chaplin notes, the colonials were anxious over what the
term revealed about the instability of human differences. But what is the term
"American" if not an Anglophone version of creole? These contrasting American
contexts reveal how the power enjoyed by concepts of creolization and how its meaning
changes from different perspectives.
- Those of its advocates who celebrate its resistance to totalizing ideologies of
the national belonging fail to recognize its history of uses as part of statist and,
in the Portuguese context, colonial projects. As Miguel Vale de Almeida aptly asks,
how can a theory of emancipation function at the same time as a theory of
colonization? In a wide-ranging and riveting analysis of the multiple formations of
creolization in the Portuguese empire from Asia to Brazil to Cape Verde, de Almeida
reveals how creolization developed into a colonial policy of "Luso-Tropicalism" after
World War II. This derived from the anthropological theories of Gilberto Freyre,
whose argument for an exceptionalist Portuguese identity based on ethnic hybridity was
adopted by nationalists to highlight the civilizing mission of the Portuguese
colonization. Paradoxically, Freyre's concept of Luso-Tropicalism became intrinsic to
Cape Verdean national identity after independence, partly as a means of distinguishing
Cape Verde from Africa. As many of these scholars note, we only become creole
post-hoc, so that as in all of these cases--the Mexican, North American, Portuguese,
Cape Verdean--creolization always becomes a rhetorical position tied inextricably to
those identitarian discourses that it supposedly problematizes.
- Where these historical and ethnographical perspectives reveal the shifting and
contingent uses of the term, the theoretical essays strive to follow the example of
Gregory Bateson, who cautions that "if one uses creative analogies, one ought to go
back to the field from which the analogy was taken to investigate its internal logic"
(156). Almost all of the essays examine the historical use of the term to describe
not only racial mixture but linguistic mixtures that occur on the peripheries. The
most thorough of these contributions is the essay by Philip Baker and Peter
Mühläusler which surveys the history of creole linguistics; it focuses
mainly on the work of Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), who was the first linguist to treat
creoles as serious languages (though as a term it was not used until 1933 [93]).
Schuchardt originally sought to overcome the limitations of the family model of
language relationships and in the process compiled the earliest linguistic data from
areas where contact languages were spoken. In contrast to the pre-existing (and in
many cases, persisting) interpretations of creoles according to superstratist,
substratist, and universalist modes, Schuchardt emphasizes the implicit role of pidgin
languages, those go-between languages formed for trade purposes, and raised the
possibility of decreolization. Linguists assume that creole language occurs to suit a
particular context, taking on both aspects of the native and of the foreigner. It is a
creole when it has become a single language in perpetual use, but then it can
potentially devolve over time as new stratifications of class and race take place. The
sole agreement that linguists find among their different theories resembles the
version of creolization adopted by Stewart in his introduction, describing it as a
process of "major restructuring." Baker and Mühlhäusler distinguish this
sense of "major restructuring" from what they see as the more facile uses of the term
by anthropologists like Clifford and Hannerz for whom creolization functions more in
terms of what linguists would call "borrowing."
- What then is needed? Rather than abolishing all uses of the term, most of
the essays caution against its romanticized and utopian construction and call for
a greater attention to both the various types of creolization and to its formation
as part of a continuum. As Eriksen observes, "it is not sufficient to point out
that mixing does take place; it is necessary to distinguish between different
forms of mixing":
sometimes, one group is absorbed into the other; sometimes it
is absorbed culturally but not socially (the ethnic boundaries remain intact);
sometimes the groups merge to create a third entity; sometimes a hierarchical
complementary relationship or a symmetrical competitive relationship occurs;
sometimes, again, one group eventually exterminates the other. (167)
It is
precisely the nuanced (or not so) power dynamics described here that make
the use of creolization as a synonym for hybridity or for mixing in an abstract
sense so irresponsible. A historically and ethnographically sensitive use of
creolization would also recognize that as an identity it is not static, but that,
as Schuchardt first observed about linguistic creoles, creolization can also lead
to decreolization: the boundary between the standard language and the
creole can be blurred, and the creole forms can begin to approximate the standard
form.
The linguist Derek Bickerton observed in Guyana that over time the Guyanese
people had decreolized their speech according to class,
profession, and location. Culturally, decreolization can also describe a return
by mixed groups to their identitarian roots. This phenomenon among creolized
communities is described in the essays here as occurring on the island of
Mauritius which, since the 1990s, has seen the rise of Hindu and Muslim
identified populations that travel to national homelands and form ethnically
identified political parties, a process
which has left the island's Creoles behind since their history does not allow
them to make the same connection to their African past. Yet these
decreolizations can also be unpredictable, as Joshua Hotaka Roth observes about
the children of Japanese migrants in Brazil, the Nikkei, whose return migrations
to Japan have led to an increased sense of identification with their creolized
Brazilian culture. Therefore, in addition to charting the types of creolization,
it is important also to note histories of aggregation and disaggregation as
part of an overall restructuring process.
- It is precisely this sense of "process" that is lost in romanticized
conceptions of creolization expressed by anthropologists, cultural theorists, and
literary critics. Comments like Clifford's ("We are all Caribbeans now") are too
easily taken to express an identitarian desire. But I would like to return to
Clifford's comment that, along with the work of Ulf Hannerz, is taken by many of the
writers here as representative of this kind of theoretical posturing that neglects
history and culture. It is worth recalling that Clifford's purpose in
Predicament of Culture was not unlike that of this essay collection
insofar as he was critically re-examining anthropological history (in his case, Michel
Leiris) in order to clear a rhetorical space beyond an erroneous theoretical
conceptualization. Where these essays struggle against the banal uses of
"creolization," for Clifford it was Levi-Strauss's primitivism that needed to be
contextualized. In his desire to show that the native was more than a blank slate
upon which westernization projects itself, Clifford sought to reverse the projection
by making us "all Caribbeans." But when conditions of power do not change as readily
as academic discourses, terms such as creolization begin to appear presumptious, as
Stephan Palmié argues about Clifford's quote nearly twenty years later:
we need to
keep matters in perspective lest we fool ourselves into believing that . . . the
Caribbean region's truly dreadful colonial history "somehow" prefigures our
existential condition as cosmopolitans economically empowered to pursue hitherto
unprecedented forms and degrees of consumptive eclecticism. (194)
What Palmíe points to here--and as
Françoise Vergés observes about the cruel history of Réunion
Island--is what happens when we abstract too much from the conditions from which
we borrow our creative metaphors. All of this is to ask, when
does a theory become overdetermined? Aisha Khan believes that this occurred for
creolization when its role as a model that describes historical
processes of cultural change and contact became conflated with the model that
interprets them (238). By instigating the reversal of this particular
instance of overdetermination, this valuable collection both recovers the power
of this crucial term and clears theoretical and rhetorical space for new
research and forms of knowledge.
Department of English
George Mason University
mmalouf@gmu.edu
COPYRIGHT (c) 2007 BY Michael Malouf.
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