New Orleans, Nodal Point of the French Atlantic

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of New Orleans within French and Francophone Studies, with a particular emphasis on a French Atlantic perspective. A historical overview discusses the role of New France, slavery, native Americans, Spain, immigration from Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase and the American Civil War in the formation of the city, and the rich and under-researched field of the city’s nineteenth-century literary output in French is surveyed. Among the unique aspects of this history are the coherent African cultures exported to Louisiana due to the trafficking of slaves of mostly Bambara ethnicity, their crucial role in the material survival of the colony, and the large presence – from intermarriage, manumission under Spanish rule, and an influx following the Haitian revolution - of free people of colour who contributed to the formation of a Caribbean-type racial hierarchy that did not exist elsewhere in the United States. The article ends with an overview of French representations of the city, in particular A Cotton Office in New Orleans by Edgar Degas, and the city’s place in world tourism, generating questions about the mobile and hybrid meanings attaching to ‘Frenchness’ in this context.