Coercing the Delta. The French Grammar of Control in the African Landscape of Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1732

Abstract

Abstract The long-term transformation of the Louisiana delta beginning in 1699 has been primarily understood as a French colonial struggle for the control of nature. Yet, in order for French colonisers to control nature, they first sought to control enslaved Africans. While slave coercion was a daily problem for French inhabitants, documentation of the 'routinized violence' of chattel slavery is predictably absent in records of the built environment. As a result, the building of colonial New Orleans, beginning in 1718, has become a story of French design, not of enslaved African labour. This paper examines the accounts and correspondence of French colonisers who veiled their own dependence on indigenous, indentured and enslaved people by adopting a performative language of mastery as they projected or described labour projects essential to the 'control of nature'. What colonisers could not master in person they performed on paper via pronouns, tenses, constructions and the passive voice. The 'French' Louisiana delta is better understood as an African-built landscape reinscribed on Indigenous territory under French coercion.