FYI,
For more info please contact "rmvieira".
David Sangurima
--/* Written 8:28 AM May 31, 1996 by rmvieira@cldc.howard.edu in igc:list.afrolat */
/* ---------- "Second JALAS&L Article Highlight." ---------- */ Reply-To: Rosangela Maria Vieira <rmvieira@cldc.howard.edu> From: Rosangela Maria Vieira <rmvieira@cldc.howard.edu>
----------------------------Original message---------------------------- * Please Circulate *
Copyright @ Spring 1996 by The Journal of Afro-Latin American Studies and Literatures, JALAS&L. All rights reserved. No portion of this Second JALAS&L Article Highlight may be printed and distributed without permission from JALAS&L. Electronic circulation of this post to other Internet fora and/or Internet/Bitnet private e-mail addresses must include this copyright statement and all the bibliographical citations posted herein.
Greetings and thank you for your letters and e/mail messages expressing your appreciation for the existence of JALAS&L, a publication of research and creation concerning the life, cultures, the arts, and the literatures of African-Latin peoples.
If possible, please share the news of our journal with your university library and let your colleagues know about our call for papers for the 1996 JALAS&L--the theme for this year will be "Race and Gender in Latin America and Iberophone Africa." We have already received some great submissions but still wish to receive many, many more so our selection process can be even more intense--the deadline is --> July 5, 1996. Anyone whishing to receive a copy of our 1996 call for papers should write to P.O. Box 2662, Kensington, MD 20891-2662, or send an online request to <egkbrasil@aol.com> or to <rmvieira@cldc.howard.edu>,
The articles to be highlighted today are: "Criollismo and Cultural Hegemony," by Dr. Jerry Williams, from West Chester University, and "African Roots of Creole Culture in Belize," by Dr. Michael C. Stone, of University of Texas at Austin. I sincerely hope these highlights are contributing to our awareness and knowledge of the African presence and legacy in Latin America.
First Article: "Criollismo and Cultural Hegemoney," by Jerry Williams.
BEGINNING OF QUOTE.
Given the sociopolitical status under which Latin American countries developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, criollos were thought to be victims of a form of -capitis diminutio- which was manifested in all their endeavors and colored their thinking (Sanchez, Luis Alberto. -El doctor Oceano: Estudios sobre Don Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo.- Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1967, p. 215).
In such a rarefied environment it was more the rule than the exception to view with skepticism independent intellectual advances in the colonies. The notion of -capitis diminutio- implied that New World inhabitants sparkled in the prime of their youth, displaying an extraordinary precocity and quick intellect that, at middles age, became dull and resulted in premature senility. Common opinion held that "los criollos o hijos de espanoles que nacen en America, asi' como les amanece mas temprano que a los de aca' el discurso, tambien pierden el uso de el mas temprano" (Feijoo, Benito Jeronimo. -Cartas eruditas.- Ed. Agustin Millares Carlo. Vol. 4, Madrid: Edicion de la Lectura, 1944, p. 9).
Nature was accused of exerting an undue influence on criollos, ensuring their degeneracy through exposure to factors that had negative impact on their disposition. Pseudo-scientific theories about the environment espoused by the likes of Feijoo and others were later upheld by the French naturalist Count of Buffon (George Louis Leclerc, 1707-1788) in his 44-volume -Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere- (1749) and by Cornelius de Pauw in -Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains- (1772). Speculative remarks by Buffon and de Pauw did as much to reverse the gains criollos made as did monarchical policies that limited the active participation of criollos in the political life of the colonies.
Creole writers such as Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo (1664-1743) and Carlos Siguenza y Gongora (1645-1700) were adjudged the intellectual equal of any European, yet in the eyes of the European academic community they remained firstly and foremost criollos, arresting cultural and political hybrids whose anomalous stature led the Old World to approach them from an assimilationist point of view. ... While Feijoo believed that in almost all the nations of Africa and America there was an entire lack of culture (1928, 4:208), he also opined that the intellectual distinction between criollos and Spaniards was not wholly a false one. ... Even the most common of Spaniards were looked upon as nobles, and often carried themselves as such, relying on their birthright, skin color, sonorous-sounding surnames, and purchased or inherited titles to accord them unearned privileges. ... For Spaniards, skin color bestowed dominance and privileges and gave way to the 'ugliness' of distorting the criollos' world, which resulted in victimization.
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Second article: "African Roots of Creole Culture in Belize," by Michael C. Stone.
BEGINNING OF QUOTE
As it is well known, Imperial British discourse on slavery regarded Africans as factors of production, property to be disciplined and reproduced for pecuniary ends. Little attention was paid to the slaves' evident cultural diversity, beyond registering it as a curiosity. Indeed, in the post-abolition era, government and religious efforts to educate and 'civilize' sought to efface manifestations of African identity in favor of a contrived identification with the received values, cultural practices, aesthetics, and aspirations of British colonial ideals.
An area often overlooked in the analysis of Caribbean slavery is Belize, the former colony of British Honduras, located south of the Yucatan on Central America's Atlantic coast. Unlike the sugar islands, the economy of Belize was based on the extraction of tropical hardwoods essential to the English wool-dyeing and furniture industries. As in the islands, however, administrators and proprietors in Belize rationalized slavery in terms of the putative racial, intellectual, ethical, and cultural 'inferiority' of African peoples.
The totalizing denigrration of African origins was internalized by Europeans and Anglo-identified Creoles alike, which fact effectively effaced direct evidence regarding African perceptions of and reactions to their subjugation in Belize. While this fact poses interpretative limitations, distinctive African cultural forms plainly persisted in Belize long after the end of the British slave trade in 1807, and well after aolition in 1838. Efforts to suppress African cultural forms and practices were notably ineffective, and people of African descent played a formative role in the forging of an emergent Creole culture in Belize.
As an idiom and apparatus of domination, slavery essentialized the diversity of African identity in an array of ideologically reductive stereotypes intended to discipline and suppress the diasporic culture's vitality and its capacity to crystalize resistance. Yet the variety and vivacity of African cultural practice is unmistakable in British accounts from Belize. This essay offers a summary and analysis of ethnohistorical evidence regarding the African peoples of this Central American enclave, from the waning days of slavery into the mid-19th century.
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Two weeks from now I will highlight the following articles: "Relato de una vida y escritura femenina: -Ekomo-, de Maria Nsue Angue," by Dr. M'Bare' N'Gom, from Morgan State University, and "Indigenous African Mode of Though and its Implications for Educating Future World Citizens," by Dr. Olugbemiro J. Jegede, from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.
(Respectfully submitted by Rosangela Maria Vieira, Editor of JALAS&L, <rmvieira@cldc.howard.edu>).
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