When Were We Creole?
Michael Malouf
Department of English, George Mason University
mmalouf@gmu.edu
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.
Michael Malouf
Department of English, George Mason University
mmalouf@gmu.edu
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