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Re-Visiting the Creole Myth: Race and Ethnicity on the New Orleans Stage
- Author(s):
- Juliane Braun (see profile)
- Date:
- 2021
- Group(s):
- GS Drama and Performance, LLC 19th-Century American, LLC 19th-Century French, LLC Francophone, LLC Literatures of the United States in Languages Other Than English
- Subject(s):
- Louisiana, Theater, History, Race, Ethnicity, African Americans--Social life and customs
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- definition of creole, Nineteenth-Century African American, race and ethnicity, New Orleans, French Creole, Theater history, Race/ethnicity, African American culture
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/1dnv-j528
- Abstract:
- Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on a newspaper article and two case studies related to the New Orleans theatre, this essay proposes a new periodization for the emergence of the “Creole myth” and a re-evaluation of the cultural and political work it was doing. I want to suggest that conceiving of the Creole myth as an antebellum phenomenon (rather than examining it in the context of the postbellum era) allows us to see that its creation was not just motivated by French Louisianian concerns about cultural integrity and ethnic survival but also by this population’s anxiety about race and the status and mobility of free people of color. As a rhetorical tool that gained traction in the 1830s, the strategic redefinition of “creole” to exclude all people of African descent operated in tandem with other attempts to curtail the rights of free people of color, preventing their social, economic, and political ascent during the antebellum period.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 2 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
- Share this:
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2021_qs_braun.pdf