“A Strange, Ventriloquous Voice”: Louisiana Creole, Whiteness, and the Racial Politics of Writing Orality

Abstract

Abstract Documents of nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole folklore have largely been equated with the black Creole-speaker’s voice—and studied separately from white writers’ literary or satirical uses of the language. Building on Jordan and de Caro (1996), who show how early folklore study in Louisiana offered a mechanism of white self-situation, this article considers folklore collection alongside other modes of representing orality in writing. From Reconstruction Era satires or supposed folktales to blackface theater of the 1930s, these texts shape ideologies of language across disciplinary and generic boundaries, racialize orality, enact literacy, and even help to claim the ethnic label Creole as “whites only.”