Welcome, accidental and intentional visitors. There’s not a lot to see here yet, but that will change on down the road.
In the meantime, I thought I would say a few words about the title of this blog. When working on my dissertation, I had a look at the etymologies of signifiers for the offspring of miscegenous relationships. What follows below the fold is my discussion of the Spanish word criollo (”creole”):
El Inca [Garcilaso de la Vega--not the Spanish poet but the Peruvian-born author of Comentarios reales de los Incas e historia general de Perú]reports that the word originated with Africans who wanted “to distinguish those who came from this side [i.e., the Eastern Hemisphere; de la Vega wrote the Comentarios in Spain] and were born in Guinea from those born in the New World, since the former are held in greater honor and considered to be of higher rank because they were born in their own country, while their children were born in a strange land.” The Spaniards borrowed the term and used it to designate their own children born under equivalent circumstances (607) [this and subsequent quotes from the Comentarios are from this translation]. The Oxford English Dictionary repeats this etymology but also provides another, no less interesting one. Under the entry for the English equivalent creole, we find that criollo is “believed to be a colonial corruption of criadillo, dim. of criado ‘bred, brought up, reared, domestic’, pa. pple. of criar ‘to breed’.” (As a side note, the Spanish nouns criado and criada once were used to designate house servants but are now considered by some Hispanic Americans to be pejorative terms.) These etymologies do not really conflict except in terms of ultimate origins. What does seem clear from both these accounts is that, whatever its origins, criollo began its existence in the Americas literally as a household word and not as a European-produced scientific description or legal concept. This term, and the scores of other terms used throughout the Americas to indicate the fact and extent of a person’s racial admixture, arose out of a peculiarly American necessity. (116 of my dissertation)
From these ideas, it wasn’t too many steps to my arrival at the phrase “domestic issue” as a way to suggest, at once, the site not only of miscegenation (the household and, by extension, the plantation) but also of the invented and borrowed vocabulary to describe the progeny of interracial relationships, and that miscegenation first came to be a sustained intellectual preoccupation in this hemisphere.
It’s the aspiration of this blog to explore all that. My dissertation ranges over the 500 years from Columbus’s arrival to the present, but it skimps a bit on contemporary treatments of miscegenation. This blog will revisit and, if need be, update and reassess conclusions about material discussed in the diss.; in addition, it’ll address and comment on material–literary narratives, film, theory and criticism–that has appeared since the mid-’90s. Also, given that this year we have a viable candidate for President who not only openly announces his interracial origins but, as I understand him, founds his politics in part on those origins, this blog will have occasion to meditate on Barack Obama, too.
I hope that this sounds, at the very least, interesting to some of you. I also hope that some of you will feel welcome to contribute to the discussion here. I’m looking forward to it.
Filed under: culture, language, meta, miscegenation, terminology
