An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann

Abstract

Reviewed by: An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann Darryl G. Barthé An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. By Andrew N. Wegmann. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 238. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6078-2; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6076-8.) Andrew N. Wegmann is a talented researcher who has ventured bravely into the murkiest of historical contexts with his monograph An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. Histories of race and nation are, presently, among the most treacherous of scholarly discourses, and the author should first be commended for wading into those waters in the first place. Some of his observations are contentious, and it is certain that future scholars will take him to task for an incomplete contextualization of Gulf Coast Creolité and for Indigenous erasure. However, Wegmann has elected to have a hard conversation at a time when many prefer to avoid hard conversations, and that deserves recognition. The book itself is well written. Wegmann accomplishes a skillful navigation of the legal discourses surrounding race across two centuries and three colonial regimes. This is no small feat in itself. At its best, An American Color demonstrates the dialectical progression of racist thought and legislation in Louisiana, showing the consistencies (and/or lack thereof) from one regime to the next. Scholars have long recognized that racial lines in Louisiana were often blurrier and more negotiable before 1803 than in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, under the American regime. That fact can often give the impression that Latin Louisiana was, somehow, more enlightened or tolerant when it came to issues of race and caste. Wegmann does not fall into this trap, however, and rightly observes that every colonial regime in Louisiana—French, Spanish, and American—has been predicated on white supremacy. Yet, in his attempt to emphasize the commonality and experiential continuity between the communities of free people of color in Francophone and Creolophone New Orleans and communities of free African Americans in Anglophone colonial spaces in the United States, one cannot help but feel at times that the author overstates his case. Wegmann attempts to place “New Orleans and its foreign, bizarre, frightening ‘mulattoes and quadroons’ into the narrative of American racial identity and relations during the first half of the nineteenth century” (p. 7). This, however, is an effort that defies nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole people’s own self-identification as neither “American” nor “foreign” to the land where they lived. An American Color does not engage the subject of Louisiana Creole Afro-Indigeneity at all. By the end of his work, Wegmann announces with authority that Creoles in New Orleans were “American. It just took them a while to admit it” (p. 145). This observation, however, is not consistent with New Orleans Creoles’ own [End Page 349] views of themselves during the nineteenth century (or during the first half of the twentieth century, according to primary source accounts left by A. P. Tureaud, Marcus Christian, and Gilbert Martin, among others). In the end, readers are left to wonder at the distance between Wegmann’s perception of nineteenth- century New Orleans Creoles and nineteenth-century New Orleans Creoles’ perception of themselves. One does not have to agree with Wegmann’s conclusions—and often I do not—in order to recognize the skillfulness of his labor. Future scholars of Creole Louisiana will, no doubt, derive some benefit from his efforts. At the same time, I could not read An American Color without being reminded that in Louisiana, French is not taught as a heritage language but as a “foreign” language to people with names like “Boudreaux” and “Poché,” “Broussard” and “Barthé,” even when those people are, as I am, only a generation removed from native Francophones and Creolophones. This is Americanization contemporarily manifested, and, to be certain, Wegmann’s is an American’s history of Creole New Orleans, constructed from the outside looking in, with all that that entails. Darryl G. Barthé Dartmouth University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association...