Travelling with Renegadoes: Declensions of the Word 'Renegade' across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic
In the course of European imperial history, oceans did not only enable the circulation of goods, ideas, human and non-human beings, but also of words. During their repeated transfers between the ‘Old’ World and the ‘New,’ words such as ‘creole,’ ‘renegade,’ or ‘pirate’ have changed in form and meaning, articulating new politics and new semantics as they traversed “salt water spheres as zones of epistemic and cultural contact” (Call for Papers). This paper follows the word ‘renegade’ in its multiple crossings of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: to each crossing corresponds a shift in meaning that reflects the historical moment and strategic uses of the word. My analysis begins with renegados in fifteenth-century Spain, touches upon British renegade narratives, clarifies the role of Christian renegades in the American Barbary captivity narrative, travels to North America where Cotton Mather thundered about the perils of the renegado condition, and then proceeds to analyze the ambivalent uses of the term in the nineteenth-century United States. The semantic journey of the word ‘renegade’ across Atlantic empires results in a radical revision of the affects attached to it: the word rises from utter abjection to a mixture of awe and terror, and ultimately gains a heroic aura. I will also show how the term’s repeated transfers, crossings, and shifts result in a tangible semantic instability: renegades on both sides of the ocean enter a condition of unreadability I call ‘ambiguation.’ This perceived ambiguity is not merely a consequence of the renegade’s cultural or religious betrayal, but it also depends on the stratification of the concept itself.
