Black Culture, White Discourse and Creole History: a Study On
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BLACK CULTURE, WHITE DISCOURSE AND CREOLE HISTORY: A STUDY ON INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY *** ULRICH FLEISCHMANN ÍNDICE INTRODUCTION: SOME PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS...............................................................1 PART I. TALES OF THE PAST ...................................................................................................... 7 I.1. MEMORIES OF AFRICA......................................................................................................................7 I.2. SLAVERY AND BLACK HISTORY.................................................................................................15 I.3. THE PLANTATION: IDEOLOGICAL AND LITERARY CENTRE OF AFRO - AMERICA................................................................................................................................................24 I.4.SEARCHING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE HERO: THE EPIC MAROON ...............................32 PART II. ARCHETYPES AND HISTORY.................................................................................................41 II.1. SLAVERY IN THE OLD WORLD..................................................................................................41 II.2. INDENTURED LABOUR AND DOMESTIC SLAVERY.........................................................48 II.3. SUGAR AS LIFE STYLE AND “SOCIAL DEATH”...................................................................57 II.4. SPANISH AMERICA AND THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY ................................................................................................................................................67 PART III. BETWEEN AFRICA AND AMERICA........................................................................ 78 III.1. AFRICAN IDENTITIES: ORIGINS, “NATIONS” AND LINGUISTIC CHANGE..........78 III.2. SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND THE ROLE OF THE AFRICAN NATIONS IN PLANTATION COLONIES ...............................................................................................................86 III.3. THE POWER OF THE AFRICAN GODS ..................................................................................93 III.4. CREOLE AND AFRICAN RESISTANCE.................................................................................102 PART IV. CREOLE CULTURES AND THEIR COUNTERPARTS...............................................112 IV.1. MESTIZOS, MULATTOS AND CREOLES: TERMS AND CONCEPTS...........................112 IV.2. A PARTICULAR CASE: CREOLE LANGUAGES ..................................................................118 IV.3. BLACK “FUNDAMENTALISM” AND THE MISGIVINGS OF THE HETEROGENEOUS SOCIETIES..................................................................................................125 IV.4. CONCLUSION: ETHNIC CONSCIENCE AND UNIVERSAL CREOLISATION.........132 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................................................... 140 INTRODUCTION: SOME PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS The first Africans probably reached America in the company of Christopher Columbus. This first trickle swelled in the following centuries and reached its peak during the 18th century, dying down only in the 19th century. Recent calculations suggest that the total number of African immigrants was between 18 and 20 millions. With the exception of the cold zones in the extreme North and South they dispersed to all parts of the continent. Major concentrations emerged in the present United States, the Caribbean Basin and Brazil, but other areas, for instance the Andean countries and parts of Central America, also received a large share. During most of its colonial history America maintained a close contact with the “dark” continent which nevertheless remained unknown to the majority of the American population and up to the present day stereotypes have predominated over more genuine information. These stereotypes travelled with the Africans; they had, in fact, preceded them. When they stepped ashore Africans were confronted with an already formed image of themselves which determined what kind of people they were, what their purpose and their destiny had to be and how they were to be controlled. Nearly all of them had been brought to work in the plantations which were considered as the main wealth of the New Continent and the most current stereotypes were concerned with this. First of all, Africans were Negroes and Negroes were slaves. Certainly most European and American whites were aware that somewhere there was a “Dark Continent” where black people must have enjoyed some kind of freedom, but this remained a very abstract idea because until the end of 19th century the only black people that most white people came into contact with were either slaves or former slaves. These “empirically” supported equations produced their own forms of rationality: black persons were slaves by nature because on the one hand their mental capacities and other human attributes were inferior and on the other because they were able to endure very hard work and to survive on very little when forced to. Another equally important stereotype was linked to moral aspects: Africans were “wild” people, i.e. they lacked the human accoutrements of civilisation and, above all, Christianity. Seen from this angle, their reduction to slavery was of benefit to them, but they remained ungrateful either by their nature or by a lack of comprehension; they did not comply with their part of the contract which would provide them with humanity in exchange for work, because they were lazy by nature and needed a strong hand to lead them. In this respect they were like children and the slave master was their father. Already this short and incomplete list of stereotypes shows two important and interrelated aspects: first they are linked to each other by seemingly “logical” sequences whereby one stereotype leads to others, thus producing syntagmatical chains of arguments which survive without any empirical basis; and second, that most stereotypes have two (or even more) faces and values which often are contradictory. For instance the attribute “wild” connotes, at least since the Renaissance, the quality “good by nature”, producing the image of the noble savage who is unable to support serfdom. Freedom is seen as a basic human quality which produces the “noble savage” who in abolitionist literature is more human than his master. Another important contradiction results from the close association of the “natural” and the moral justification of slavery: when slavery is considered as a school of civilisation and Christianity, any slave who graduated from it would be equal to his master and hence free. This argument, in fact, besides having certain material advantages, was used as a powerful inducement to adaptation to the colonial ways. The “colonial promise” was never kept and it converted into the “colonial lie” infuriating the “good savage” and turning him into a resentful and rebellious subject. The basic opposition of adaptation and resistance is, right from the beginning, a central theme of this study and closely related to its main topic: creolisation. Before we 1 elaborate on it we also have to take a step back to the first peculiarity of the stereotypes we enumerated: their structural dependence from each other which transforms them into a chains of syntagmata based on their own “logic” reality. This leads to important termino - “logical” questions. So far we have used the term stereotype, but it is not satisfactory because being too general it does not reproduce the idea of a concatenation and argumentative dependence. The terms prejudices and archetypes which were part of the provisional title of this study, had been discarded for the same reasons, though the latter - archetypes - had been retained as title of Part II indicating well - known basic oppositions which are not subject to further reductions. Ideology is certainly a term which would come very close to our requirements, if it were not so closely associated with Marxism and sociology who determine it by opposition to other terms - as for instance “reality” - whereby it contains an implication of moral rectitude. Instead we chose the “modern” and relatively neutral term of discourse which needs some explanation which is based on something more concrete: the text. By this term we do not only understand written texts which necessarily are the hard core of this study; more important, particularly for any study on slavery, would be the multitude of oral texts, for instance conversations between slaves, masters and between both groups. The majority of these text will remain for ever the invisible part of an iceberg; some of the oral texts acquire a more stable form of records at court, of songs, of tales etc.; finally some, in fact very few, survive as documents which add to our knowledge on slavery. All texts consist of various textual elements: the stereotypes as for instance Africa as “dark continent” or the Africans as “wild” persons. They form intertextual relationships which determine the significance of textual elements, for instance “wild” associated with “tropical agriculture” has another meaning compared with its association with Christianity. One of the purposes of our study is to determine such textual elements and to demonstrate their intertextual relationship with others. An essential feature is that these relations may support each other to such an degree that other functions of the text - for instance that of being a useful representation