AM 214: African, European, Creole: American Identities

Plan of Lecture

• What is identity?

• Crececouer

• Problems of identity in New World

• Creolisation, Europeanisation, Africanisation

• White West Indians and Identity

• Africa in America

J. Hector St.John Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer

(1782)

Crevecouer- Sketch of a Contrast between the Spanish and the

English colonies• Spanish America –decadent

• British America – ingenious and industrious

• But what about what Peter Hulme calls “the extended Caribbean”?

• Abbe Raynal and his virulently anti-American history of American settlement

Crevecoeur on Jamaica

• “It made me head giddy with its Chaos of Men Negroes & things … it is a Great Gulph, perpetually absorbing men, by the Power of Elementary Heat, of Intemperance by the force of every Excess [so that[ Life resembled a Delirium Inspired by the warmth of the sun urging every Passion and Desire to some premature Extreme.”

The Problems of identity in the New World

• Identity formed by reference to the collective self

• Nature and potential of place and transformations of landscape

• Followed by people defining themselves collectively

• Invention of identity by David Hume

David Hume

• “Where a number of men are united into one political body, the occasions of their intercourse must be so frequent, for defense, commerce and government, that together with the same speech and language, they must acquire a resemblance in their manners and have a common or national character, as well as a personal one, peculiar to each individual.”

Creolisation

• A process that yokes together synthetically a variety of host cultures into new types of cultures

Europeanisation

• A cultural orientation towards Europe and an attempt to transform New World environments and New World peoples, through civilisation and improvement into societies and peoples recognisable similar to societies and peoples in the Old World.

Abbe Raynal

V.S. Naipaul

West Indies and identity

• Kathleen Wilson: the West Indies served a Janus faced function. “The West Indies retained in experience, imagination, and representation an ineffable otherness. Literally and figuratively islands of slavery, exploitation and physical and social death, they seemed to promise obliteration for the enslaved, the penuriousness and the prosperous alike”

James Ramsay- the West Indies as the Kingdom of I

Benjamin Franklin and Observations on the Increase of

Mankind

• “Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red.” (Franklin)

Image of West Indians in England

• Over-paid, over-sexed and over-here• West Indians transgressed civilised boundaries• Sir Peter Pepperpot in The Patron (1761): “a West

Indian of overgrown fortune, who dreams of a woman who is a sweet as sugarcane, strait as a bamboo, and [with] teeth as white as a Negro, a plantation of perfection”

William Beckford, Lord Mayor of London

Edward Long

The Sable Venus- Isaac Teale 1765

William Blake’s depiction of a semi-naked slave being whipped

in John Stedman

Brunias’painting of a washerwoman

Dance St Vincent, 1775

The headwrap- Barbados mulatta girl

Market scene

Gillray - Philanthropic Consolations on the Loss of the

Slave Bill (1796)