Pedagogies of race in nineteenth-century Louisiana

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jarrod Hayes is Professor of French Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research is situated at the intersections of French postcolonial studies and queer theory. He is the author of Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago, 2000), and his Queer Roots for the Diaspora, Ghosts in the Family Tree was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2016. He co-edited, with Margaret R. Higonnet and William J. Spurlin, Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). His current project is titled Reading across the Color Line: Racialization in the French Americas.

Notes

1 I am certainly not the first to propose such an argument; M. Lynn Weiss has done much important work in American studies by drawing attention to writings in French from nineteenth-century Louisiana (see Creole 2004; Séjour 2002a, 2002b).

2 This title would be roughly translatable as “The Quadroons of New Orleans.” I only use the French term, however, because the novels teach us that racial designations can only be incompletely translated. Many of the clichés that the label quarteronne conjures up are more consistent with the archetypal octoroon in Anglo-American literature. For example, in spite of his project of theorizing “circum-Atlantic performance” involving both French and English Americas, Roach (1996) concentrates not on quarteronnes but on octoroons, in part because the only literary texts associated with New Orleans that he examines are in English and were Anglo observations of Franco-Louisiana racialization. The first two volumes of this series were published as entire books under the pseudonym of Louise Raymond, of which several copies still exist in U.S. libraries (Raymond 1894, 1895). The last two were published in serial form in the newspaper Le Meschacébé. They were then printed for publication in book format but never bound for sale. Incomplete copies of both newspaper and book versions of the third and fourth volumes are extant. The handwritten manuscripts are also available at the Hill Memorial Library of Louisiana State University and were also available for a while online at http://www.louisianadigitallibrary.org/index.php. (See all works listed under de La Houssaye in the references.) More recently, the complete series has been republished by the Shreveport publishing house associated with Centenary College, Tintamarre (de La Houssaye 2009, 2014).

3 Clark (2013) provides detailed historical analyses of plaçage and the “quadroon balls.” On plaçage, see also Martin (2000). On “quadroon balls,” see also Guillory (1997).

4 I would like to thank Nathan Rabalais for providing me with this obituary.

5 All translations are mine.

6 For an account of the arrest, see Thomas 1997, 3–6.

7 On this case, see Fireside 1997; Medley 2003; Thomas 1997.

8 I should point out that the word Américain, when used by French-speaking Creoles in contrast with Créole, was insulting and pejorative. Americanization, even at the time, was considered to be a bad thing (see especially Caulfield 1998, 64–68, 133–163, 175–189).

9 It is important, however, to note that the one-drop-rule has not been a constant in the Anglo South either. Williamson (1980) provides an excellent account of its relative recentness and a history of its different emergences in the upper and lower Souths. One should thus be careful not to mistake historical differences for ones between the systems of slavery of different European powers. Often it is all too easy to assume that racial constructions in place immediately prior to the Civil War define the Anglo South all the way back to the colonial period. For example, Hodes (1997) does an excellent job of demonstrating that taboos against sexual relations between white women and black men are relatively recent in the Anglo South as well.