| Appropriating the conceptual and critical tools of postcolonial theory, this dissertation is a comparative study of the emergence and evolution of 'creole' American identities in the literatures of early British and Spanish America. It argues that American creoles, in British and Spanish America alike, had to 'inscribe' America into European languages of history, which had 'invented' America as a colonial space 'without' history in the ethnographic discourses of the discovery, exploration, and conquest. Writing at the colonial peripheries of transatlantic empires, early American creole authors such as the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Fransicsco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan, Mary Rowlandson, Carrio de la Vandera, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Joaquin de Olmedo, and Joel Barlow therefore transculturated European generic and discursive traditions and engaged in meta-historical critiques of imperial poetics of authorship, teleology, and division of labor. |
