A Port City of the French Empire and the Greater Caribbean

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-93
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Port City ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Way ◽  
Racial Slavery

This chapter argues that racial formation did not take place in French New Orleans in isolation from the rest of the Atlantic world and that imperial rather than trans-imperial relationships were the most influential in shaping the way the local society developed. Within the imperial framework, connections between the colony and the metropole were increasingly replaced by intercolonial exchanges. Saint-Domingue, in particular, was a model to be emulated. What gave New Orleans its Caribbean character was, not its participation in smuggling, but racial slavery.

From “Louisians” to “Louisianais”

2019 ◽  
pp. 444-497
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Free People ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the emergence of a sense of place among French New Orleans residents of all conditions through the analysis of the uses of ethnic and national categories. It demonstrates that the French Regime did not witness the birth of a single “Creole” identity that united all historical actors across racial boundaries. Racial formation prevented the development of a shared relationship to the city between settlers, slaves, and free people of color. Nevertheless, after the succession of two generations by the end of the 1760s, as the elite fought to keep the colony within the French Empire during the 1768 revolt, New Orleans emerged as a distinctive place in relation to both the metropole and Saint-Domingue.

Introduction When the Levees Rose

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Urban Slavery ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
It Practices

The introduction presents the book’s argument according to which it is more accurate to view eighteenth-century New Orleans as a Caribbean port city than as a North American one, as its late foundation, its position within the French Empire, and its connections with Saint-Domingue explain why the interplay of slavery and race profoundly shaped its society from the outset. It situates the book vis-à-vis Louisiana and Atlantic historiographies on urban slavery, slave societies, and racial formation, arguing that historians need to move away from a comparative history of racial slavery in the Western Hemisphere that contrasts the Caribbean and North America as two distinctive models. Finally, the introduction discusses how the book draws on two methodological approaches in order to analyze how racial formation unfolded under the influence of global, regional, and local circumstances: it practices a situated Atlantic history and develops a microhistory of race within the urban center.

scholarly journals Public Slavery, Racial Formation, and the Struggle over Honor in French New Orleans, 1718-1769

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Slave System ◽  
White Population ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Prejudice And Discrimination ◽  
The Way ◽  
French Regime

In New Orleans throughout the French Regime (1718-1769), ruling authorities did not only shape the slave system through the way they exercised their political and administrative prerogatives and functions, but were directly involved as slaveholders. Public slavery facilitated the emergence of New Orleans and Lower Louisiana society as a slave society, and was not necessarily incompatible with racial prejudice and discrimination. On the contrary, it fueled the construction of race. At the same time, it made visible the fact that honor did not only define the boundary between the free and the non-free and the identity of the white population.

Caribbean New Orleans

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Social Order ◽  
French Empire ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racial Discourses

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cécile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city’s development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana’s capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America’s most intriguing city.

From Louisiana to Saint-Domingue and from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana

2019 ◽  
pp. 498-514
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
National History ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

The conclusion explains how this book, by reconsidering the interplay of slavery and race in French New Orleans under the influence of Saint-Domingue, has proposed an alternative way of understanding how an urban slave society operated and what it meant for a slave society to become racialized. It has also tried to better fulfill the promises of Atlantic history. Like other kinds of transnational history, Atlantic studies were conceived of as a way to move away from the primacy of the present-day nation state as a unit of analysis and from the tendency toward exceptionalism inherent to national history, but this historiographical field has not yet succeeded in fully escaping from a North-American-centric perspective. At stake is the recovery of the place the Caribbean occupied within the early Atlantic world as well as the development of a comparative and connected history of racial formation as a sociopolitical process in the Americas.

The Many and Changing Faces of Ògún

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
Robin Poynor
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
North Central ◽  
Central Florida ◽  
Religious Competition ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

Ògún, the Yorùbá god of iron, is venerated throughout the Atlantic world. While many African-based religions coexist in Florida, the shrines discussed here were developed by individuals connected with Oyotunji Village in South Carolina. South Florida's urban shrines differ remarkably from north central Florida's rural shrines. I suggest several factors determine this variation: changing characteristics of Ògún, differing circumstances of the shrines' creators, the environment in which the owners work, and whether the setting is urban or rural. Urban shrines reflect religious competition where many manifestations of òrìṣà worship coexist but are not in agreement. In these shrines, Ògún is vengeful protector. The urban shrines tend to be visually strident, filled with jagged forms of protective weapons. In rural north central Florida, Ògún is clearer of the way, a builder, and reflects the personalities of those who venerate him. These shrines are less harsh and are filled with tools.

scholarly journals Between Mainland and Island: Causes for Migration and the Way of Life of Chinese Mainland Migrant Workers in Bó’áo

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Gumpenberger
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Hainan Island ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Rapid Transformation ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article presents the results of a case study conducted in Bó’áo, a small town on Hǎinán Island currently undergoing rapid transformation. Triggered by the founding of the Boao Forum for Asia, an unknown fishing village has turned into an important location for conferences and tourism. On the basis of Grounded Theory this case study focuses on migrant workers from mainland China, using qualitative semi-structured interviews in order to explore the causes behind this migration influx to Bó’áo. In addition, this paper investigates the way these migrants organise their lives in this small town by raising the question of social integration within the local society—a topic largely neglected in the general academic discourse in and on China. The results of this study show that the level of education determines both reasons for migration as well as the way the migrant workers organise their everyday lives and the way in which they interact with locals. This paper also scrutinises common concepts of integration, e.g. the need to acquire the language spoken by the majority.

“A Scandalous Commerce”

2019 ◽  
pp. 244-284
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Slave System ◽  
Moral Ideal ◽  
Common View ◽  
The Family ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
The Common

This chapter explores how the slave system weakened the European religious and moral ideal that restricted sexuality and the family to Christian marriage in French New Orleans. Yet, it challenges the common view according to which the prevalence of métissage was the sign of a lenient racial regime. Sexual relationships across the racial line did not undermine racial formation; on the contrary, they contributed to reinforcing the system of racial domination. Rather than a general moral and religious disorder, what developed was a plural set of sexual and family values and practices that differed according to status, gender, and race.

The City with Imaginary Walls

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-142
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Urban Center ◽  
European Descent ◽  
The World ◽  
Civic Community ◽  
The City

This chapter shows that racial formation was also shaped by the relationships French New Orleans maintained with its hinterland. Racial tensions were instrumental in developing a sense of collective belonging among urban dwellers of European descent that was defined in confrontation with the world beyond the city’s imaginary walls. The Natchez Wars in 1729–1731 and slave unrest afterward played a crucial role in the construction of the Louisiana capital as a white civic community. In contrast, for the slaves living on the plantations nearby, the urban center increasingly symbolized both a place of greater autonomy and a place of repression.

James Baldwin’s Decolonial Love: Uncovering the Revelation of the Beat

2018 ◽  
pp. 100-116
Author(s):  
Joseph Drexler-Dreis
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic World ◽  
World System ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Theological Perspective ◽  
The Way

James Baldwin worked out what decolonial love might mean from the experience of living within the center of the modern world-system as a result of colonialism in the Atlantic world. Within an orientation of decolonial love, Baldwin connects the categories of salvation and revelation. The task of revealing the reality that exists underneath the way Western modernity configures reality is itself an actualization of salvation. While Baldwin doesn’t use terms such as revelation and salvation in ways that are tied to religious discourse in the sense of being controlled by doctrines, creedal statements, or dogmatic theology, they do have religious—and this chapter argues theological—significance. Connecting Baldwin’s terms to a theological perspective demonstrates a connection between decolonial love and theology, and opens up decolonial love as a theologically pedagogic site.

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