Project Details
Projekt
'neophytes', 'renegados', 'creoles': Dynamics of (Dis)ambiguation in Early American Discussions of the Transition from Colonialism to Nationhood
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Barbara Buchenau
Subject Area
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
from 2018 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322729370
Three figures of thought - condensed in conversations about Native American or African American Christian neophytes, renegades, and creoles - accompany the slow transition from colonialism to nation states in North America. These figures of thought challenge the notion that this transition can be described as a paradigmatic shift from colonial ambiguity to early national disambiguation. At least until the late nineteenth century North America continued to be a global hub for processes of transculturation and the foundational procedures of linguistic, religious, cultural, and ethnic translation and transfer. In early modern times gestures of identification and differentation were epistemological exercises that coincided with programmatic repertoires of uncertainty and unreadibility. The often observed tension between various possibilities of belonging and distinction is constitutive of textual and visual expressions of coloniality and nationality. The figurations to be investigated dwell in an ontological 'grey zone' between cultural, political, and religious affiliations. They appear to be caught in a process of transculturation. The study reads these textual phenomena through the prism of ambiguity, but resorts to the term 'ambiguated' in order to account for the fact that much of the primary material contains narratives about and not by renegades, creoles, or Native American neophytes. This means that the presence of a narrator disables the possibility of self-description, relegating these figures to the margins of a text that describes their condition from the outside. The analytical terms ambiguation and disambiguation highlight questions of agency, shifting the weight onto the perception and representation of subjects that do not fit into the identitarian categories available to the respective narrator. The figurations under review change significantly as they traverse oceans, centuries, and geographical contexts. To best address their fluidity of meaning, we resort to the term 'declensions' as a staple of our methodology to account for mutations and adjustments occurring when words like 'convert', 'renegade', and 'creole' travel across space and time. The project's geographical frame is Interamerican and Transatlantic in its choice of primary material (i.e. documents originally published in French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and German) and transhistorical in its sense of time (i.e. the earliest primary text is Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's La Relation, 1573; George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes, 1880, is the project's endpoint). This broad frame allows for a systematic approach to cultural transfers between neighboring colonial, national and imperial systems and their economies of expression.
DFG Programme
Research Units
