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

在北美，从殖民主义到民族国家的缓慢过渡过程中，有三种思想形象——浓缩在关于美洲原住民或非裔美国基督教新信徒、叛徒和克里奥尔人的对话中。这些思想人物挑战了这样一种观念，即这种转变可以被描述为从殖民模糊到早期国家消除歧义的范式转变。至少在19世纪后期之前，北美一直是跨文化进程的全球中心，也是语言、宗教、文化和种族翻译和迁移的基础程序。在现代早期，识别和区分的手势是认识论的练习，与不确定性和不可读性的程序性技能相吻合。经常观察到的归属和区别的各种可能性之间的紧张关系构成了殖民性和民族性的文本和视觉表达。要调查的图形驻留在文化，政治和宗教信仰之间的本体论“灰色地带”。他们似乎陷入了一个跨文化的过程。该研究通过模棱两可的棱镜来解读这些文本现象，但采用“模棱两可”一词是为了解释这样一个事实，即许多原始材料包含关于而不是由叛徒，克里奥尔人或美洲原住民新手的叙述。这意味着叙述者的存在使自我描述的可能性失效，将这些人物置于从外部描述其状况的文本的边缘。分析术语歧义和消歧义突出了代理问题，将重心转移到不适合各自叙述者可用的同一性类别的主体的感知和表征上。所审查的数字随着它们跨越海洋、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流动性，我们将术语“衰落”作为我们方法的主要内容，以解释“转换”，“叛徒”和“克里奥尔”等词在时空旅行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，其主要材料的选择（即最初以法语，西班牙语，英语，荷兰语和德语出版的文件）和时间意义上的跨历史（即最早的主要文本是Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca的关系，1573年；乔治·华盛顿·凯布尔的《伟大》，1880年，是该项目的终点）。这个广泛的框架允许对邻近的殖民地、国家和帝国体系及其表达经济之间的文化转移采取系统的方法。

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.