'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洲裔美国人基督教新教徒、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。这些人物的思想挑战的概念，这一转变可以被描述为一个范式转变，从殖民地的模糊性，以早期的国家消除歧义。至少在世纪末之前，北美一直是跨文化进程的全球中心，也是语言、宗教、文化和种族翻译和转移的基础程序。在近代早期，认同和区分的姿态是认识论的练习，与不确定性和不可读性的纲领性剧目相吻合。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。被调查的形象居住在一个本体论的“灰色地带”之间的文化，政治和宗教信仰。他们似乎陷入了一个跨文化的过程。这项研究通过多义性的棱镜来解读这些文本现象，但为了解释大部分主要材料都包含关于而不是由叛徒、克里奥尔人或美洲原住民新手叙述的事实，我们采用了“多义性”一词。这意味着，叙述者的存在使自我描述的可能性丧失，将这些人物置于文本的边缘，从外部描述他们的状况。分析术语歧义和消歧突出了主体的问题，将重心转移到对不适合各自叙述者的身份主义类别的主体的感知和表征上。所审查的图形随着它们跨越海洋、世纪和地理环境而发生重大变化。为了最好地解决它们的意义的流动性，我们诉诸于术语“变格”作为我们的方法的主要内容，以解释当“转换”，“变节”和“克里奥尔语”等词穿越时空时发生的突变和调整。该项目的地理框架是跨美洲和跨大西洋的主要材料的选择（即最初以法语，西班牙语，英语，荷兰语和德语出版的文件）和跨历史的时间感（即最早的主要文本是Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca的La Relation，1573年;乔治华盛顿凯布尔的The Grandissimes，1880年，是该项目的终点）。这个广泛的框架允许系统的方法，相邻的殖民地，民族和帝国制度及其表达经济之间的文化转移。

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.