Shirley Elizabeth Thompson . Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans . Cambridge : Harvard University Press . 2009 . Pp. 362. $49.95.

Abstract

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson's precision of insight, depth of archival research, and accessible narrative make her book a superior undertaking and a wonderful read. Thompson's narrative explores how pre-1803 Spanish/French New Orleans viewed the concept of “race” so differently from Ango-American definitions of the same elsewhere that New Orleans was essentially a foreign territory. This distinguished it from other “empty” regions elsewhere in the Louisiana Purchase and other lands newly acquired by the new nation. While farther north, groups such as the Métis could be easily removed, ignored, or erased, in New Orleans generations of interracialism, forgotten genealogical trackings, and entrenched entanglements with multiracial communities throughout the Caribbean (especially Saint Domingue/Haiti and Cuba) made the assignment of specific racial identity—increasingly necessary in the decades leading up to the Civil War—nearly impossible. Thompson maps out these conditions through the experiences of individual families. Her archival ambit ranges from diaries and letters to court transcripts, property records, published narratives, Creole-of-color poetry (“Les Cenelles”: A Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century [1979]), and white fiction, such as George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1898).