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Vernacular
The word creole has a wide variety of meanings in different academic contexts, but in this book it is used to refer specifically to European-descended people who lived in overseas European colonies. This includes the children of Spanish colonists growing up in Latin America, for instance, as well as white colonists in what are now the United States and South Africa. Because they served an important role mediating between imperial centers in Europe and the native populations of the colonies where they lived, and yet were still economically oppressed by Europe, the creole classes were particularly well-suited to lead independence movements—every independence movement in the Americas, Anderson notes, had creoles at its helm.
Creole Quotes in Imagined Communities
The Imagined Communities quotes below are all either spoken by Creole or refer to Creole. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4
Quotes
At the same time, we have seen that the very conception of the newspaper implies the refraction of even “world events” into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers; and also how important to that imagined community is an idea of steady, solid simultaneity through time. Such a simultaneity the immense stretch of the Spanish American Empire, and the isolation of its component parts, made difficult to imagine. Mexican creoles might learn months later of developments in Buenos Aires, but it would be through Mexican newspapers, not those of the Rio de la Plata; and the events would appear as “similar to” rather than “part of” events in Mexico.
In this sense, the “failure” of the Spanish-American experience to generate a permanent Spanish-America-wide nationalism reflects both the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century and the “local” backwardness of Spanish capitalism and technology in relation to the administrative stretch of the empire.
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What I am proposing is that neither economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community to be defended from these regimes’ depredations; to put it another way, none provided the framework of a new consciousness—the scarcely-seen periphery of its vision—as opposed to centre-field objects of its admiration or disgust. In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen played the decisive historic role.
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Creole Term Timeline in Imagined Communities
The timeline below shows where the term Creole appears in Imagined Communities. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4: Creole Processes
...many distinct states in the Americas, nor the fact that due to independence “the upper creole classes […] were financially ruined” in the short term (although independence surely benefited them in...
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Even though they were culturally identical to Spaniards, creole bureaucrats born in Spain’s Latin American colonies were prohibited from rising to posts beyond their...
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Chapter 7: The Last Wave
...European empires and bureaucracies were so large when operating in Africa, they recruited not only creoles, but also bilingual natives. And thirdly, the spread of education made travel to Europe more...
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Chapter 11: Memory and Forgetting
...to which they moved, European migrants in the New World “successfully established coherent, wealthy, selfconsciously creole communities subordinated to a great metropolitan core.” This was an important reason why nationalism began...
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