Creole City Research Articles

Defining the Creole City by Walking: The Case of La Réunion

ABSTRACT This paper presents exploratory work to understand the characterisation of the ‘Creole city’ inLa Réunion, through an analysis of three renovated districts. The purpose is to inform urbanrenewal programmes so that they take better account of local lifestyles and needs. Theresearch on representations and symbols involves a method to collect and analyse data thatcombines in situ situations and a strong day-to-day approach, namely, walking. This method,that may be used elsewhere, reveals the functioning qualities of traditional Creole cities as anurbanity that is adapted to its environment, and based on proximity and soft transport modes.

The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole city by Dianne Guenin-Lelle

The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole city by Dianne Guenin-Lelle

Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans.

Nathalie Dessens achieves quite a feat in Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans, a book which is equal parts a detective story and history book. The book’s starting point is quite fascinating, both from a scientific and personal points of view: a set of 158 letters, totalling almost 1200 pages, sent by Jean Boze to Jean-Francois Henri de Miquel, Baron de Sainte-Geme (or Henri de Ste-Geme, as he was known in the Americas) between 1818 and 1839, and forgotten for almost two cen...

Creole City by Nathalie Dessens

Some valuable works of history are more source driven than thesis driven, such as published diaries or edited collections of primary sources. At first glance, Nathalie Dessens’s Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans, the story of early antebellum New Orleans as told in the letters of Jean Boze to Jean Francois Henri de Sainte-Geme, appears to be such a book. Boze and St. Geme were both refugees of the Haitian Revolution who, likely, befriended each other in Cuba, their first ...

The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City by Dianne Guenin-Lelle

The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City by Dianne Guenin-Lelle

Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction, by Stanka Radović

Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction, by Stanka Radovic. University of Virginia Press, 2014.192 pages. Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction goes beyond the promise implicit in its title not only to locate the destitute, those placed outside of colonial systems of legitimacy, but also to help readers recognize those Caribbean spaces and the identities they shape that do not appear on colonial maps. In locating those people who are excluded on the basis of space as it is configured by colonial ideologies, Radovic also makes visible these peoples' acts of creative resistance against colonial practices and denials. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre's concept of "third space," she articulates how the destitute shape and claim their own spaces, and thereby themselves in the world. They do so, Radovic argues, by drawing upon both the material and the imaginative resources accessible through narrative. According to Radovic, postcolonial studies still stumbles over its reliance on binaries and/or its promotion of an in-between solution to the problem of spatial and communal autonomy. As a result, it fails to take into account the "mutually constitutive relations between space and identity" (181). Locating the Destitute does the slippery and careful work of analyzing space as both a material lack and a metaphor. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre's concept of "third space," she articulates how the destitute shape and claim their own spaces, and thereby themselves in the world. With Lefebvre's aid, the book explores how Caribbean literature, with its common use of spatial symbols, highlights material inequities by way of the social, economic, psychological, and linguistic exclusions that often characterize postcoloniality. Radovic posits that while literature cannot correct these inequities, it can--by communicating both the practice and representation of space--potentially challenge material lack and imaginatively claim spaces of belonging. The book's argument is divided into six well-ordered chapters that make its discussion of Caribbean spaces and identities accessible to both scholars of the region and those who may be engaging with it for the first time. After an introduction stating the text's argument, goals, and methodologies, the first chapter offers one of Radovic's greatest contributions, putting pan-Caribbean postcolonial discourse into dialogue with contemporary spatial theory from Europe. The second chapter illuminates the unique particularities of Caribbean spaces and communities that evade Western (colonial) methods of identification, and thereby undermine Western pretensions to universality. Following these preliminary discussions, each of the subsequent four chapters analyzes a different Caribbean novel's use of space as both physical divider and crafted tool of agency. These text-based chapters move from exploring the West's traditionally exclusive conceptions of physical space to the more imaginative and thus inclusive notions of Caribbean cultures. Radovic's first chapter, "Caribbean Spatial Metaphors," establishes that the region's spatial identity and location have always been contested, "torn between fact and fiction," and argues that the notion of a third space best characterizes Caribbean lived experience (28).The chapter draws upon Caribbean theorists such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Edouard Glissant who articulate the region's difficulty in representing its own reality within Western classifications of realism that exclude what they cannot account for. Within the Caribbean counter-imaginary, the slave ship, the sea, the archipelago, the island's landscapes, flora and fauna, weather and constructed shelters all "maintain their geographical specificity while being transformed into a metaphor (and subsequently an emblem) of cultural location" (38). Radovic posits that readers of spatial metaphors in Caribbean literature and theory enter into a network of history and poetics whose metaphors work to create intimate connections between readers and the region, and thereby require readers to care in order to understand. …

Bangkok, Creole City: War Slaves, Refugees, and the Transformation of Culture in Urban Southeast Asia

AbstractSlave‐gathering warfare was an endemic feature of Southeast Asian statecraft in the pre‐colonial era. In this lightly populated region, capturing people was more important than seizing new lands. Armies laid siege to rival urban centers and carried thousands of people into captivity, among them artisans, performers, and musicians. This is a well‐understood feature of Southeast Asian statecraft, but the histories of captive people have gone largely unstudied. My project is to examine slave‐gathering warfare as a vector for cultural exchange. The forced relocation of skilled people laid the groundwork for processes of transculturation and cultural reinvention, but the evidence of these exchanges lays mostly outside the archive in the artistic, musical, and theatrical practices of the captive communities themselves. In this article, I examine a cluster of neighborhoods in Thonburi, one of the oldest areas in metropolitan Bangkok. Descendants of non‐Thai war captives and refugees populate this area, most brought to Bangkok in the late‐18th and 19th centuries from Laos, coastal Burma, and the Malay border region. I examine the cultural practices that originated in these communities through the lens of creolization theory, which allows us to better examine and comprehend the cultural contribution of foreign captives to Bangkok's urban culture.

Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans

Journal Article Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans Get access By Nathalie Dessens. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. xiv, 272 pp. $74.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 4, March 2016, Pages 1188–1189, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav789 Published: 01 March 2016

Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans by Nathalie Dessens

Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans by Nathalie Dessens

Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by Rien Fertel

Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by Rien Fertel

The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition by Mary Dunn

he makes a convincing argument for why de Foix all but disappeared from French history textbooks in the mid-twentieth century while simultaneously illuminating nineteenth- and twentieth-century French attitudes toward heroism. Altogether, this is a well-written and valuable contribution to the study of a historical figure who until now has been as neglected by scholars as by history. Ithaca College (NY) Rachel A. Paparone Dunn, Mary. The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition. New York: Fordham UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8232-6721-7. Pp. 224. $45. Marie de l’Incarnation was the foundress of the Ursuline order in New France. Dunn carefully examines how Marie came to abandon her son in order to pursue her passion of serving God. The fourth of Florent Guyart and Jeanne Michelet’s eight children , Marie was born in 1599 in Tours. Dunn explains how at the tender age of seven, Marie experienced her first of many mystical encounters with Jesus Christ and how at age fourteen, she declared her desire to enter religious life among the Benedictines of Beaumont. However, Marie’s parents intended that she marry Claude Martin, a master silk worker. Accepting her fate, Marie married Claude in 1617 and gave birth to their son Claude in 1619. Six months after her son’s birth, her husband died, leaving her a nearly penniless widow. Placing her son in the care of a wet nurse, Marie isolated herself for two years, reading and praying, furthering her spiritual development.When reunited with her son, Marie, rather than being joyful, attempted to detach herself from him so that he would not feel her absence so deeply when the time came for her to leave him. Despite her efforts, her son Claude became very attached to her and she to him. Marie and Claude then moved in with her sister and her sister’s husband Paul Buisson, owner of a successful transportation business. There, while suffering from her yearning to serve God more directly, she managed the house and the kitchen. In 1630, the invitation from Mother Françoise de St. Bernard to join the Ursulines arrived : “Although Marie fretted about Claude, ‘who was not yet twelve years old and whom I saw stripped of all goods,’ God soon gave her to believe that ‘He would take care of what I wanted to leave out of love for him’” (4). Despite her own qualms and against the wishes of her family, Marie turned the care of her son over to the Buissons and entered the Ursuline convent on 25 Jan. 1631. While Marie thrived in the convent , her son was devastated and made several attempts to see her. In spite of his efforts , Marie was determined to live her life in God’s service, and inspired by a vision, she set her sights on a vocation in New France. In 1639, Marie, with Madeleine de la Peltrie and three other Ursulines, set sail from Dieppe for the New World and for the next thirty-three years would work tirelessly to instill the virtues of Catholicism in the 198 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 199 native populations. But Marie’s story does not end there: she maintained correspondence with Claude; correspondence that supplemented her formal Relations writings and allows us to understand how hard it was for her to abandon her son. It is within the context of Marie’s writings that Dunn sagaciously explores abandonment (e.g., within seventeenth-century French family life), the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and maternal sacrifice. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Guenin-Lelle, Dianne. The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. ISBN 978-1-49680486-0. Pp. xv + 200. $65. This well-researched, interdisciplinary study on the history of colonization of Louisiana and its largest city New Orleans uncovers the complex factors behind the persistence of an imagined“Frenchness,”self-fashioning, and“cultural slippages”(168) that permeate colonial history and the Louisianan urban landscape. Guenin-Lelle shows that creolization and nineteenth-century French Creole literature underline that Louisiana is an in-between space, unique in North America. The first...

Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

Journal Article Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Get access By Rien Fertel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. xii, 203 pp. $39.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 3, December 2015, Pages 864–865, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav674 Published: 01 December 2015

Creole city: a chronicle of early American New Orleans

Creole city: a chronicle of early American New Orleans

Nathalie Dessens, Creole City. A Chronicle of Early American New OrleansNathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans. Migration and Influences

Book after book, Nathalie Dessens continues her exploration and analysis of the connections between the American South, more specifically Louisiana and New Orleans, and the Caribbean sphere. Her first opus, Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies, released in 2004, had already broached the subject via the prism of slavery. The following two, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans. Migration and Influences and Creole City. A Chronicle of Early American ...

Between Catastrophe and Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, and Life Narratives

This cluster of "Life Stories from the Creole City" brings together essays that focus on fi gures negotiating subjectivity within different "creole cities" at specifi c historical junctures, as these urban spaces become compelling sites for narrating subjectivity in negotiation with forces of globalization, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism. The essays variously illuminate the diffi culties and payoffs associated with narrating lives in—and of—porous urban space.

Carnival in the Creole City: Place, Race, and Identity in the Age of Globalization

In this essay I argue that Haitian-American artists Edwidge Danticat and Wyclef Jean employ Carnival symbolism to explore the practices and politics of belonging in "global" cities. While meditating on the cultural and social dynamism produced by transnationalism, they resist the impulse to idealize its effects. In song and nonfi ctional narrative, they refl ect also on the ways that historical and structural violence shape the lives of Haitian migrants in creolized cities.

Vernacular Kinship, the Creole City, and Faulkner’s “New Orleans”

Vernacular Kinship, the Creole City, and Faulkner’s “New Orleans”

Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (review)

Reviewed by: Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul Perry Kasprzak (bio) Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul. By Roger D. Abrahams, with Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, and Robert Farris Thompson University of Pennsylvania Press 112 pp. Cloth, $22.50 Unlike the many books already published about the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans, Blues for [End Page 93] New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul is a study of the city's character pre-disaster, bracketed by post-flood observations and questions concerning the future of a city that nearly drowned due to a "confederacy of failures." The authors' observation of New Orleans as a city that "came into being with a kind of antic doom embedded into it," founded as it was in a hostile New World swamp, is brought into bright focus by Nature's recent, temporary, reclaiming of the land, and Man's persistent desire to rebuild the city. The City That Care Forgot, that ambiguous moniker coined to describe New Orleans as a carefree city, continues to describe a city often forgotten and uncared-for. For some, New Orleans has always been too black, too French, too sexy, too liberated; for the authors (and, I confess, myself ), these are the very elements that make New Orleans "the crown of the Caribbean," America's "soul counterpoint," a place to celebrate and rebuild because it is "not really an American city," but is a "Creole city." Statements like these are like the many contradictions, inversions, comminglings, and stark divisions that make New Orleans so complex, beautiful, and tragic, and they are discussed succinctly in this thin and potent volume by analyzing the symbol of the city's spirit: Mardi Gras. Carnival time in New Orleans has always been a festival of contrast, a time for decadence between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, a ritual celebration with roots in pre-Roman Rites of Spring such as the Bacchanalia, yet it is still a festival that always feels fresh, if only because the costume and parade themes continually satirize current events. The authors reduce this bubbling roux down to New Orleans's "creole" nature, a word that originally meant a person born in the French and Spanish New World, then became a definition for the offspring of French planters, as well as children of slaves. I have heard African Americans use "Creole" to describe ancestors as gens de couleur libre, "free people of color," as descendants of freed slaves were called. The slippery word has also been put to use to describe "something entirely new" or a "surprising mix of ingredients," such as in music, cuisine, fashion, languages, and ethnicities. The authors call New Orleans's tendency to merge disparate elements "creolization," a process that "extends to virtually all aspects" of the city's culture. Creolization, they state, "suggests a comprehensive and dynamic phenomenon of cultural give and take, invention and reinvention, of dialogue and disagreement." The authors provide abundant details on the subject of creolization, New Orleans history, and the roots of Mardi Gras, but keep the subject moving swiftly enough to make the book more than academic. We hear how Carnival's central elements of parading, costuming, and dancing are American customs drawn primarily from European settlers' pageantry displays and festival elements derived from slave holidays, such as those held in Congo Square, where slaves in New Orleans were allowed a day of freedom to sing, dance, socialize, worship, mourn, etc. Throughout the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast, slave holidays were often [End Page 94] "flashpoints of revolt," gatherings formed to maintain African customs as well as occasions to protest the repressive regimes denying slaves from participation in the larger festivals. Even after Emancipation, African Americans were denied access to certain white Mardi Gras events, even up until the mid-twentieth century. In response to the discrimination, counter parades—second-lines—formed, events where the line between spectator and participant was erased, a striking departure from the standard Mardi Gras parades (or any modern-day parade). The jazz funeral, derived from the traditional slave funeral of earlier eras...

Occupational representation by race, ethnicity, and residence in turn-of-the-century New Orleans

In this article we expand Gilmore's 1944 study of New Orleans by investigating the manner in which cultural and developmental factors affected competition for residential location. The analysis of ethnic and spatial variations in occupational structure underscores the utility of considering traditional and modern aspects of spatial differentiation within a single city. A sample of male household heads drawn from enumerator's books of the 1900 Federal Census reflected differing occupational structures according to the race, nativity, and residence of the incumbents. The residential patterns of employed male household heads generally supported the view that the emerging capitalistic economy was spatially segregated from the traditional craft-guild economy. Self-employed craftsmen predominated in the Creole city, while skilled wage-workers were overrepresented in the Anglo-American sector. Race and ethnicity combined with sector to affect the occupational structure. In the Creole sector, blacks maintained the traditional dominance of craft occupations. Entrepreneurial positions were opening up in the commercially expanding Anglo sector for some groups—notably the foreign-born—but not for blacks. Skills and cultural preferences of the immigrants were clearly evident in their overrepresentation in both the craft and entrepreneurial occupations. In the Creole sector, the foreign-born were more likely to take advantage of the availability of traditional craft occupations. The extent of modernization combined with cultural factors in creating and maintaining occupational niches.

Creole City: Its Past and Its People

Creole City: Its Past and Its People