When Were We Creole?

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.