among others in relation to the shaping of racial and cultural identity in South Africa and might offer a programme of possibility in relation to neglected questions, a point of interrogation directed towards a richly complex and extremely conflictual history. What many critics of the concept of ‘creolisation’ tend to overlook is precisely that the notion was born out of the historical experience of slavery and its aftermath.
In his pioneering study Singing the Master (1992) Roger Abrahams shows how the emergence of a typically African-American vernacular culture was the result of a dual legacy, a syncretic formation that was itself part of the events that brought together slave and master in the plantations of the Americas. Focusing on slave dancing practices Abrahams examines a context in which planters encouraged the display of what they recognised to be slaves’ ‘different set[s] of cultural practices’, while slaves came to recognise in the obligatory play and performance ‘an opportunity for cultural invention and social commentary’. Abrahams’s overwhelming impression of life on the plantation, he writes, is ‘that the representations of two cultures lived cheek to jowl for a matter of centuries, entertaining each other, subtly imitating each other in selective ways, but never fully comprehending the extent and meaning of these differences’ (p xxiv).
It goes without saying that this coming together happens in a context of a deep loss: loss of a home, loss of rights and political status, and overall terror (Hartman 1997). When considered historically, then, creolisation relates to the worst that society is capable of – the maintenance of human beings in the shadow of life and death. Yet even within this most violent of systems (and possibly because of it, where violence itself gives rise to the fractures and cracks that let the other in) cultural traffic occurs – mutual mimicries, mutabilities. The notion itself, therefore, does not foreclose possibilities of resistance, nor does it deny the material fact of subjection. It signals a register of actions and performances that may be embodied in a multiplicity of repertoires. In this sense creolisation is, first and foremost, a practice.
Although Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2002), in his work on creolisation, treats historical situations which come from the Caribbean slave plantation, he writes that ‘this treatment may be useful to historically oriented cultural anthropologists and linguists in general, inasmuch as it directly faces the issue of our management of the historical record’1 (p 190). For the majority of enslaved Africans and African Americans prior to the mid-nineteenth century, creolisation did not happen away from the plantation system but within it, writes Trouillot. This creation was possible because slaves found fertile ground in the interstices of the system, in the latitude provided by the inherent contradictions between the system and specific plantations. On some plantations, Trouillot shows, slaves were allowed to grow their own food and, at times, to sell portions of what they harvested. This practice was instituted by owners to enhance their own profits, since they did not have to pay for the slaves’ food. Eventually, however, these practices, which at first emerged because they provided concrete advantages to particular owners, went against the logic of the plantation system. Time used on the provision grounds was also slave-controlled time to a large extent. It was time to ‘create culture’ knowingly or unknowingly ... Time indeed to develop modes of thought and codes of behavior that were to survive plantation slavery itself (p 203). Trouillot writes about social time and social space seized within the system and turned against it; about the ability to stretch margins and circumvent borderlines which lay at the heart of African American cultural practices in the New World.
If slavery and the creolisation it produced were crucial to early modernity they were also central to the formation of diasporic communities. The articulation of race to space and motion is an integral part of even recent Marxist-inflected readings of early modern forms of racial identity-making. Some of these readings focus on the intercultural and transnational formations of the Atlantic world (Gilroy 1993; Linebaugh & Rediker 2000). This Atlantic world is peopled by workers: sailors, pirates, commoners, prostitutes, strikers, insurrectionists. Here, the sea is not a frontier one crosses, it is a shifting space between fixed places which it connects. This is a geography of worldliness, which could be opposed to the geographies of particularism and nationalism.
It is worth noting here how relatively few theorists have explored these geographies, although the work of John Thompson (1992), Veit Erlmann (1991) and Rob Nixon (1994) has been important in this regard. One critique of these readings is that South Africa, or the Cape at least, in fact looked to the Indian Ocean, as Robert Shell (1994) and Patrick Harries (2000) have suggested and which my own work with Françoise Vergès and Abdoumaliq Simone (2004) has explored.2 Given its tri-centric location between the Indian and Atlantic worlds as well as the land mass of the African interior, further readings of this space from an outer-national vantage point is likely to reinforce a creolité hypothesis.
Trouillot and others provide a reading of creolisation firmly located within paradigms of violence and mobility, spatiality and circulation, and it must also be on such terms, though with its own historical specificities, that any use of the notion in South Africa could be made.
South Africa can be characterised as a country born out of processes of mobility, the boundaries of which have constantly been reinvented over time, through war, dislocation and dispossession (the Mfecane, European colonialism, the Great Trek and labour migrancy, for instance). A multiplicity of forms of subjugation has emerged as a result of this, not all of which are class based. Here we might refer to the Mfecane as a series of violent encounters leading to lines of exchange and fusion; or to the mutual borrowings in the realm of domesticity between ‘servant’ and ‘mistress’ (of which Judith Coullie, in her book The Closest of Strangers (2004, p 2) remarks ‘…notwithstanding this utter separateness (and even somehow enabled by it), it was common for women to experience long-term mutual dependencies … the relationship was indeed the very closest, though the strict limits of intimacy … were rarely breached’)3; or to long-distance lines of connection in the mines between workers from South Africa and those who come from elsewhere on the continent and beyond, a transcontinental mixing which shaped worker identities and ideologies in South Africa in ways that have yet to be written about, although Harries (1994) and Coplan (1994) have begun this work, if still within circumscribed geographical limits.
Deborah Posel (2001) has pointed in her work to the vagaries of racial definition on which the apartheid state relied – a ‘common sense’ approach to who belonged to which race, based firmly within the materialities of everyday life. Rather than strict legal definitions, apartheid enforcers relied on such measures as the infamous pencil test, the idea that someone’s race was to be decided according to ‘what was generally accepted’ [as white or black or coloured] or ‘the environment and dress of the person concerned’ (pp 102-5). These ‘common sense’ definitions were then fixed and bureaucratised by the state. They were also definitions which, once the apartheid straitjacket was broken, appear to have remained internalised. Yet how people actually thought about themselves, and the interstitial manoeuvres they were able to make within this ‘common sense’ bureaucracy of race, remain to be researched in a properly microscopic way.
There is, perhaps, a further point to be made here, and that is in relation to the work of cultural theory itself. While social scientists seek a view of the social ‘whole’ and thus often repeat the apartheid metanarrative or prism of race in their interpretation of the social, cultural theory finds itself freer to ask questions left unasked, to inhabit zones, even of the past, that refute the master trope and give life to interstitial narratives that speak to the whole in defamiliarising ways.
Any deployment of aspects of the work on creolité coming from scholars such as Trouillot, Gilroy, and Linebaugh and Rediker would need to involve readings hardly yet undertaken of South Africa’s relationship to other spaces, aiming to open South Africa’s readings of itself to new boundaries. As I have emphasised above, in general the resources of such a hypothesis can only be put to work if the term is given a particular inflection, and that is its violence. Indeed, given a properly historical reading, both in South Africa and elsewhere, creolisation carries with it a particularly vivid sense (compared to, say,
