'neophytes', 'renegados', 'creoles': Dynamics of (Dis)ambiguation in Early American Discussions of the Transition from Colonialism to Nationhood

三个思想人物--浓缩在关于美洲原住民或非裔美国基督教新教徒、叛徒和克里奥尔人的对话中--伴随着北美从殖民主义到民族国家的缓慢过渡。这些思维模式挑战了这样一种观念，即这一转变可以被描述为从殖民模棱两可到早期国家消除歧义的典范转变。至少直到十九世纪末，北美仍然是跨文化进程和语言、宗教、文化和种族翻译和转移的基本程序的全球中心。在早期现代，识别和区分的手势是认识论的练习，与不确定和不可读的程序剧目不谋而合。在归属和区别的各种可能性之间经常观察到的紧张关系构成了殖民性和民族性的文本和视觉表达。要调查的人物生活在文化、政治和宗教背景之间的本体论“灰色地带”。他们似乎陷入了跨文化的过程中。这项研究通过歧义的棱镜阅读了这些文本现象，但使用了“歧义”一词，以解释这样一个事实，即许多主要材料包含关于叛徒、克里奥尔人或美洲原住民的叙述。这意味着，叙述者的存在使自我描述的可能性失效，将这些人物放在从外部描述其状况的文本的边缘。分析术语歧义和消除歧义突出了代理问题，将重心转移到对不属于各自叙述者可获得的身份范畴的主题的感知和表征上。审查中的人物形象在跨越海洋、世纪和地理背景时发生了重大变化。为了更好地解决词义的流动性问题，我们在方法论中主要使用“解密”这一术语来解释当“皈依”、“叛变”和“克里奥尔”等词跨越时空时所发生的突变和调整。该项目的地理框架在主要材料的选择上是美洲和跨大西洋的(即最初以法语、西班牙语、英语、荷兰语和德语出版的文件)，在时间意义上是跨历史的(即最早的原始文本是Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca的La Relationship，1573年；乔治·华盛顿电缆的The Grandissimes，1880年，是该项目的终点)。这一广泛的框架允许对邻近的殖民、国家和帝国制度之间的文化转移及其表达经济采取系统的方法。

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.