Creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and degeneracy: A critique of selected histories of Sierra Leone and South Africa

Creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and degeneracy: A critique of selected histories of Sierra Leone and South Africa

Current Sociology
Volume 59, Number 5 (September 2011)
pages 635-654
DOI: 10.1177/0011392111408678

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

This work examines the nexus between creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and discourses of degeneration. It focuses on two sites: (1) 19th- and 20th-century Freetown, Sierra Leone, and (2) the early Cape and 20th-century South Africa. The author engages three key thinkers: Édouard Glissant, Jean-Loup Amselle and Mahmood Mamdani to illustrate how these colonial administrations deployed creolization to construct partial citizenships derived from ideas of ‘mixed race’ and ‘corrupted’ or ‘lacking’ culture. The author argues that ‘Creole’ and ‘creole’ signified, in the colonial imagination, a ‘degenerate type’ behind its legal category, ‘non-native’, and shows how uses of the concepts ‘creolization’ and ‘creole’, in selected histories of the Cape and Freetown, surrender to their colonial meanings, obscure their biopolitical significance and so, collude with discourses of degeneration. The article concludes first, that Edouard Glissant’s conception of creolization as method counters ethnological reasoning and second, that his concept ‘Relation’ enables citizenship(s) that contest social inequality and live with difference.

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