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  • Re-Visiting the Creole Myth: Race and Ethnicity on the New Orleans Stage

    Author(s):
    Juliane Braun (see profile)
    Date:
    2021
    Group(s):
    GS Drama and Performance, LLC 19th-Century American, LLC 19th-Century French, LLC Francophone, LLC Literatures of the United States in Languages Other Than English
    Subject(s):
    Louisiana, Theater, History, Race, Ethnicity, African Americans--Social life and customs
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    definition of creole, Nineteenth-Century African American, race and ethnicity, New Orleans, French Creole, Theater history, Race/ethnicity, African American culture
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/1dnv-j528
    Abstract:
    Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on a newspaper article and two case studies related to the New Orleans theatre, this essay proposes a new periodization for the emergence of the “Creole myth” and a re-evaluation of the cultural and political work it was doing. I want to suggest that conceiving of the Creole myth as an antebellum phenomenon (rather than examining it in the context of the postbellum era) allows us to see that its creation was not just motivated by French Louisianian concerns about cultural integrity and ethnic survival but also by this population’s anxiety about race and the status and mobility of free people of color. As a rhetorical tool that gained traction in the 1830s, the strategic redefinition of “creole” to exclude all people of African descent operated in tandem with other attempts to curtail the rights of free people of color, preventing their social, economic, and political ascent during the antebellum period.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.3828/qs.2021.5
    Publisher:
    Liverpool University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2021
    Journal:
    Quebec Studies
    Volume:
    71
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    41 - 60
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    2 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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    Item Name: pdf 2021_qs_braun.pdf
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