Mixed Race Studies

Critical Legal Theorizing, Rhetorical Intersectionalities, and the Multiple Transgressions of the “Tragic Mulatta,” Anastasie Desarzant

Women’s Studies in Communication
Volume 27, Issue 2, 2004
pages 119-148
DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2004.10162470

Marouf Hasian Jr., Professor of Communation
University of Utah

This essay provides a critical legal analysis of Anastasie Desarzant’s defamation case. The author argues that the use of an intersectional approach to legal discourse allows scholars to see how race, class, and gender issues influenced the social construction of the “tragic mulatta” in key Louisiana judicial contests. While the essay acknowledges that many contemporary and historical audiences have remembered “Toucoutou’s” (Desarzant’s) racial transgressions, they have forgotten about how some of her neighbors rallied to her cause in the late 1850s.

In recent years, a number of communication scholars have been interested in explicating some of the rhetorical strategies that have been used by feminists and other social agents who have resisted multiple forms of societal oppression (Demo, 2000; Dow, 1997; Shome, 2000; Squires & Brouwer, 2002). I would like to extend these insights by looking at how some women of color and their allies dealt with complexities of Louisiana slavery laws in the antebellum South. By looking at some of the textual arguments and public performances that appeared in Desarzant cases of the late 1850s, I hope to show how racialized subjects dealt with some of the regulatory powers of a judiciary that was dedicated to the preservation of the powers of whiteness. At the same time, I want to illustrate some of the rhetorical strategies that were used in these legal contests, so that we can see how “racial passing” was “both a social enterprise and a subject of cultural representation” (Wald, 2000, p. II).

Today we are used to thinking of racial identities in homogenous terms such as whiteness or blackness (Bonnett, 1999), but there have been times when racial identities had more fluidity and heterogeneity. For many years, scholars (Blassingame, 1973; Dominguez. 1986; Foner, 1970; Lachance, 1994; Omi & Winant, 1994) have been intrigued by the particularities of…

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The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
November 2005
288 pages
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4229-0

John Bailey

It is a bright, spring morning in New Orleans, 1843. In the Spanish Quarter, on a street lined with flophouses and gambling dens, Madame Carl Rouff recognizes a face from her past. It is the face of Salomé Müller, her best friend’s daughter who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. But the young olive-skinned woman claims her name is Mary Miller—she is the property of a Frenchman who owns a nearby cabaret. She is a slave, with no memory of a “white” past, or of the Müller family’s perilous journey from its German village to New Orleans. And yet her resemblance to her mother is striking, and she bears two telltale birthmarks. Had a defenseless European orphan been callously and illegally enslaved, or was she an imposter? So began one of the most celebrated and sensational trials of nineteenth-century America.

In brilliant novelistic detail, award-winning historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, an “infernal motley crew” of cotton kings, decadent river workers, immigrants, and slaves. Miller’s dramatic trial offers an eye into the fascinating laws and customs surrounding slavery, immigration, and racial mixing. Did Miller, as her relatives sought to prove, arrive from Germany under perilous circumstances as an indentured servant or was she, as her master claimed, part African and a slave for life? The trial pits a humble community of German immigrants against Mary’s previous owner, John Fitz Miller, a hardened capitalist who is as respected by the community for his wealth and power as he is feared and distrusted, and his attorney, John Randolph Grymes, one of the brashest and most flamboyant lawyers of his time. Was Sally Miller’s licentious lifestyle proof that she was part African, as the defense argued? Or was she the victim of a terrible injustice? Bailey follows the case’s incredible twists and turns all the way to the Supreme Court, and comes to a shocking conclusion.

A tour de force of investigative history that reads like a suspense novel, The Lost German Slave Girl is a fascinating exploration of slavery and its laws, a brilliant reconstruction of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, and a riveting courtroom drama. It is also an unforgettable portrait of a young woman in pursuit of freedom.

A Free Man of Color

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
October 2011
112 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4566-6

John Guare

John Guare’s new play is astonishing, raucous, and panoramic. A Free Man of Color is set in boisterous New Orleans prior to the historic Louisiana Purchase. Before law and order took hold and class, racial, and political lines were drawn, New Orleans was a carnival of beautiful women, flowing wine, and pleasure for the taking. At the center of this Dionysian world is the mulatto Jacques Cornet, who commands men, seduces women, and preens like a peacock. But it is 1801 and the map of New Orleans is about to be redrawn. The Louisiana Purchase brings American rule and racial segregation to the chaotic, colorful world of Jacques Cornet and all that he represents, turning the tables on freedom and liberty.

Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana

Lousiana State University Press
2004-10-30
344 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches / 8 halftones, 3 maps
ISBN-10: 0807130265; ISBN-13: 978-0807130261

Caryn Cossé Bell, Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Jules and Frances Landry Award

With the Federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Afro-Creole leaders in that city, along with their white allies, seized upon the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and images of revolutionary events in the French Caribbean and demanded Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Their republican idealism produced the postwar South’s most progressive vision of the future. Caryn Cossé Bell, in her impressive, sweeping study, traces the eighteenth-century origins of this Afro-Creole political and intellectual heritage, its evolution in antebellum New Orleans, and its impact on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Revolution and the Origins of Dissent
• 2. The Republican Cause and the Afro-Creole Militia
• 3. The New American Racial Order
• 4. Romanticism, Social Protest, and Reform
• 5. French Freemasonry and the Republican Heritage
• 6. Spiritualism’s Dissident Visionaries
• 7. War, Reconstruction, and the Politics of Radicalism
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Membership in Two Masonic Lodges and Biographical Information
• Bibliography
• Index

I Am What I Say I Am: Racial and Cultural Identity among Creoles of Color in New Orleans

University of New Orleans
2009-05-15
62 pages

Nikki Dugar

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

This paper examines the generational changes in the culture and racial self-identification of Creoles of Color of New Orleans. This study argues that the key to understanding Creole culture is the role that isolationism has played in its history. While White ethnics pursued a path of assimilation, Creoles of Color pursued a path of isolationism. This path served them well during the Jim Crow era, but it suddenly became undesirable during the Black Power era. Now, however, new values of multiculturalism have resurrected Creole identity as a cultural asset.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Historiography
• Early Debate
• Distinctly Creole
• Passing
• Light Skin With Good Hair
• Civil Rights Creoles
• Contemporary Creoles
• American Racial Policy and Ideology
• Multiracial Chic
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Vita

List of Figures

• Figure 1. Map depicting the proximity of traditional Creole institutions to each other
• Figure 2. Plan of New Orleans, 1872
• Figure 3. Geographic Distributions and Shifts of the Creole Population in New Orleans, 1800-2000
• Figure 4. North Claiborne Avenue before the construction of Interstate Highway 10, 1966
• Figure 5. North Claiborne Avenue after the construction of Interstate Highway 10, 2009

Introduction

“I‟m too white to be black and too black to be white,” remarked Ronald Ricard, a New Orleans Creole of Color, in an interview in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1977. Ricard was expressing a sentiment that many Creoles of Color continue to have about themselves. The feeling of not quite belonging to one race or the other has been an issue for many since the antebellum period. Since that time, the Creole community has gone through many political and social changes, which have affected not only the community‟s structure but also ideas about its racial identity. This study will focus particularly on three generations of Creoles: those who came of age before World War II, here called “Traditional Creoles” (born during the colonial period up to the 1930s); those who matured in the post war years, designated “Civil Rights Creoles” (born between 1940s and 1960s); and “Contemporary Creoles” (born in the 1970s to present day). In comparing these pre- and post-war groups, this study will explore how generational differences exist in how Creoles racially identify themselves.

To complicate matters further, Contemporary Creoles do not share a monolithic racial identity, for older and younger members of this category view certain issues very differently. This is to be expected, because identity is a constantly evolving phenomenon influenced by many external factors. Rather than gloss over their differences, this study will examine them closely in search of trends and patterns that will illuminate the entire history of Creoles of Color in New Orleans.

Primary sources used in this study include newspaper and magazine articles, maps, census data, and interviews conducted by the author. The latter were comprised of written questionnaires and follow-up oral interviews administered between Spring 2008 and Spring 2009. The sixteen interviewees were Creoles of Color, meaning people of mixed French-, African-, Spanish-, and Native-American ancestry, most of whom reside in or have familial ties to Louisiana. On the questionnaires, respondents supplied background information on themselves and family members including name, age, gender, current and previous neighborhood residences, and schools attended. They were then asked their opinions regarding Creoles of Color in New Orleans: what traits define the group, what racial and cultural differences separate Creoles from other African Americans, and what racial identity they and their families claim. After completing the questionnaires, participants were invited to contribute additional details, stories, and comments. These interviews, combined with other primary materials noted above, constitute the core of this research endeavor.

An array of secondary sources also informs this study. Secondary sources include works that examine the development of Creole culture. Sources on New Orleans history are used to place the different generations of Creoles within a historical context. Sources on multiculturalism, American popular culture, and Whiteness studies were also used to discuss the generations of Contemporary Creoles.

On the basis of the aforementioned primary and secondary sources, this study argues that the key to understanding Creole culture is the role that isolationism has played in its history. While White ethnics pursued a path of assimilation, Creoles of Color pursued a path of isolationism. This path served them well during the Jim Crow era, but it suddenly became undesirable during the Black Power era. Now, however, new values of multiculturalism have resurrected Creole identity as a cultural asset…

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In search of the power of whiteness: A genealogical exploration of negotiated racial identities in America’s ethnic past

Communication Quarterly
Volume 50, Issue 3-4 (2002)
pages 391-409
DOI: 10.1080/01463370209385674

Roberto Avant‐Mier, Associate Professor of Communication
University of Texas, El Paso

Marouf Hasian Jr., Professor of Communation
University of Utah

In this essay, the authors explore some of the relational, intersectional, and contextual dimensions of negotiated racial identities. By employing a genealogical method of analysis that looks at three key cases (Anastasie Desarzant, Homer Plessy, and Suzie Phipps), they investigate how various historically‐situated communities in Louisiana have dealt with some of the contradictions, multiplicities and tensions of racial and ethnic identity formation. They then apply these insights in an analysis of issues relating to colorblindness versus color consciousness and commentaries on contemporary examples of how negotiated identities might affect various present‐day publics, debates, and politics.

Americans have always had ambivalent feelings regarding the question of what to do about the nation’s racial identities, and this was especially true when citizens had to deal with the ambiguities of the Enlightenment ideals. During the time of the Founders, civic leaders talked about the importance of the notion that “all men [sic] are created equal,” but when these ideals were put into practice, they had to compete with the economic and social hierarchies that were considered to be mirrors of natural inequalities. Given these normative expectations, it should come as no surprise that in 1790, the first Congress voted that a person must be “white” in order to be a citizen (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Omi & Winant, 1994; Roediger, 1994). Since that time, the very notion of what it means to have either a “racial” or an “ethnic” identity has gotten even more complicated, as layers of legal, political, and cultural meanings have pulled us in the competing directions of defending either color con-…

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Maroon – On the Trail of Creoles in North America

National Film Board of Canada
2005
Running Time: 01:15:08

André Gladu, Director

Colette Loumède, Producer

Louisiana’s Creole culture helped shape the New World and contributed to the emergence of jazz. But what remains of this unique, mixed-race society, with roots in France, Africa, the Caribbean, Spain and America? Maroon searches for the origins of this little-understood and endangered culture and show how it is doing today. In this second part of his La piste Amérique series, documentary filmmaker André Gladu continues his exploration of the Francophone presence in North America. Maroon is a vibrant travelogue that goes back into history in order to shed light on the present. In French with English subtitles.

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White Skin, White Masks: The Creole Woman and the Narrative of Racial Passing in Martinique and Louisiana

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2006
83 pages

Michael James Rulon

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Curriculum of Comparative Literature

Through an examination of two Creole passing subjects from literary passing narratives of the twentieth century, this thesis simultaneously treats two problems that have been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship: the role of the Creole racial identity in the genre of the passing narrative, as well as the possibility of racial passing within the context of a Creole society. In Walter White’s 1926 novel, Flight, and Mayotte Capécia’s 1950 novel, La négresse blanche, the protagonists’ difficulties in negotiating a stable racial identity reveal the inherent weakness of the racial binary that is essential to the very notion of racial passing, and they also show that Creoleness has failed to establish itself as a stable racial identity in the societies represented in both novels.

Table of Contents

• 1. Pawòl Douvan/Some Opening Words
• 2. Nwè, Blan èk Kréyòl/Black, White, and Creole
• 3. Mimi èk Isaure/Mimi and Isaur
• 4. Pasé pou Blan, Pasé pou Nwè/Passing for White, Passing for Black
• 5. Ovwè tè kréyòl/Goodbye, Creole Land
• 6. Conclusion: Èk alòs… /And so
• WORKS CITED

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Les Cenelles

Centenary College of Louisiana Press / Editions Tintamarre
January 2003
208 pages
ISBN: 0-9723258-9-1

Armand Lanusse

The text is in French.

With few exceptions, the poets of Les Cenelles–the very first collection of poetry by Creoles of color–do not directly address their precarious situation in a South that was ever increasingly hostile to the racial caste to which they belonged. On the contrary, a naive reader might only discover the most pedestrian sorts of romantic subjects in these poems written by seventeen free men of color. However , why would Valcour B… refer to himself as an “unrecognized son of New Orleans?” What “cruel fate” might have forced P. Dalcour into exile? What is the source of the regret, the preoccupation with departure and the fear of betrayal that seeps from every line of these works?

However gifted and diligent they might have been, free people of color were forced to live within the constraints of their fate as second class citizens. May the modern reader delve into these “modest Cenelles” conscience of the troubling context that underpins their creation. Without this awareness, the profound depths of their melancholy spirit will escape him completely.

Plessy and Ferguson unveil plaque today marking their ancestors’ actions

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2009-02-11

Katy Reckdahl

Today, Plessy versus Ferguson becomes Plessy and Ferguson, when descendants of opposing parties in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court segregation case stand together to unveil a plaque at the former site of the Press Street Railroad Yards.

Standing behind Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson will be a large group of students, scholars, officials and activists who worked for years to honor the site where in 1892, Tremé shoemaker Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was arrested for sitting in a railway car reserved for white people.

People often think that his ancestor held some responsibility for the legalized segregation known as “separate but equal, ” said Keith Plessy, 52, a longtime New Orleans hotel bellman whose great-grandfather was Homer Plessy’s first cousin. In actuality, Homer Plessy boarded that train as part of a carefully orchestrated effort to create a civil-rights test case, to fight the proliferation of segregationist laws in the South…

…Plessy, born in 1863 on St. Patrick’s Day, grew up at a time when black people in New Orleans could marry whomever they chose, sit in any streetcar seat, and attend integrated schools, Medley said. But as an adult, those gains from the Reconstruction era eroded.
 
On any other day in 1892, Plessy could have ridden in the car restricted to white passengers without notice. According to the parlance of the time, he was classified “7/8 white.”
 
In order to pose a clear test to the state’s 1890 separate-car law, the Citizens’ Committee in advance notified the railroad—which had opposed the law because it required adding more cars to its trains.
 
On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket for the commuter train that ran to Covington, sat down in the car for white riders only and the conductor asked whether he was a colored man, Medley said. The committee also hired a private detective with arrest powers to take Plessy off the train at Press and Royal streets, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state’s separate-car law.
 
Everything the committee plotted went as planned—except for the final court decision, in 1896. By then the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court had gained a more segregationist tilt, and the committee knew it would likely lose. But it chose to press the cause anyway, Medley said. “It was a matter of honor for them, that they fight this to the very end.”…

…”You don’t know American history until you know Louisiana history, ” Plessy said…

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