Vanishing Creole in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic: The United States, Panama, and the Caribbean

Abstract

Certain key concepts in the (post)colonial Atlantic change as they traverse regions, languages, empires, and oceans over centuries. Terms such as “pirate”, “renegade”, “neophyte”, “convert”, “captive”, “Creole”, and others undergo trajectories of racialization, ambiguation, demonization as they leave their European language of origins to enter the Anglophone sphere. This is famously the case for the word “Creole”. If the Spanish criollo and the Portuguese crioulo indicated that something or someone was born in the colonies, the US Anglophone sphere declensed the word “Creole” into a multitude of competing definitions, all of which were intensely, although ambiguously, racialized. In literary works across the American North and the American South, “Creole” became synonymous with the illegibility of blended ancestries, often unleashing waves of incontrollable interracial desire. In this paper, I will linger on the word “Creole” and its ambiguities in two antebellum works set in the South of the United States: James S. Peacocke’s novel The Creole Orphans (1856), and Caroline Norton’s poem “The Creole Girl” (1840). In their travels across the North and South of the US, the Caribbean, and Europe, the titular “Creoles” will encounter a wide spectrum of parallel but dissonant definitions of Creoleness, and of themselves, tinted with varying degrees of racialization. This paper follows the iterations of the word “Creole” in these texts and, marginally, in other similar Creoleness textualities, to showcase the instability of the discourse of Creoleness in the Anglophone Atlantic. I also intend to show how Creole ambiguity, indeterminacy, and shiftiness release a peculiar mystique that often finds expression through a vocabulary of eroticism and interracial desire.