Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Time, Place, & Purpose: The Performance Of Creole Identity In Louisiana, Rachel N. Aker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Though much of the early development of Louisiana Creole culture can be found in New Orleans, the culture spread and continued to grow throughout the rest of South Louisiana in both similar and different ways. Expanding beyond Joseph Roach’s treatment of Creole cultural performances in New Orleans in Cities of the Dead (1996) and journeying across land and water, this project identifies more Creole cultural performance as they emerge across place and time. I present Louisiana and the Gulf South as a kind of inland archipelago, with the currents of culture-creation moving in and around distinct community enclaves. The flow …

Free People Of Color In West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, Evelyn Lenora Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Free People of Color in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana” documents the presence, land ownership, business development, and personal relationships of free people of color in a rural Louisiana parish. Beginning with how free people of color came to be in the parish, it shows an absence of segregation by skin color in home ownership, business relationships, and friendships. Free people of color found themselves accepted in a community that valued their talents and skills and disregarded the color of their skin.

Free people of color bought and sold homes in whatever part of the parish suited them. Most lived surrounded …

Women Of The Edward J. Gay Family As Textile And Dress Consumers In Louisiana, 1849-1899, Lindsay Danielle Reaves

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Economic, social, and cultural historians have studied and analyzed consumption behaviors throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st century. Decorative household textiles and dress items are two product categories that follow the consumption process. American consumption behaviors during the introduction of mass-produced textiles and dress items throughout the 19^th century have not been well documented.

The purpose of this research is to expand the knowledge of Southern planter-class women’s consumer behavior in relation to decorative household textiles and dress items. Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) Consumer Culture Theory and Belk’s (1988) research into possessions and the extended …

Francolouisianais In The 21st Century: Redrawing Identity Lines In A Community Experiencing Language Shift, Marguerite L. Perkins

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The francophonie of south Louisiana today is characterized by a great deal of diversity - in terms of ethnicity, language practices, cultural practices, geography, and experience. The academic literature does not always reflect this diversity, however. Some ethnic groups are overshadowed by others in academic study, and the lines between them are often uncritically blurred. Discussions of language shift are regularly mired in assumptions of individuals’ complete linguistic and cultural assimilation based solely on their native use of English.

In this dissertation, I seek to problematize traditional accounts of assimilation and collective ethnic identity by highlighting the ways in which …

A Vast Injustice: The Public Debate And Legislative Battle Over Compulsory Eugenic Sterilization In Louisiana, 1924 -- 1932, Adelaide Hair Barr

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

From 1924 to 1932, Louisiana lawmakers considered five bills that would have granted superintendents of state institutions and some private hospitals the authority to forcibly sterilize their patients. Based on similar legislation passed in thirty-six other states, the bills cited eugenics as evidence that stripping these patients of their ability to reproduce would prevent the conditions such as feeblemindedness from passing on to the next generation. Although none of the bills passed both houses of the Louisiana legislature, a couple of them came dangerously close to becoming law. The debate among legislators, professionals, and social reformers provides a greater understanding …

Re-Examining And Redefining The Concepts Of Community, Justice, And Masculinity In The Works Of René Depestre, Carlos Fuentes, And Ernest Gaines, Jacqueline Nicole Zimmer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In La Communauté desoeuvrée (1983) French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes how a community is creating by bringing its members together under a collective identity. The invention of myths, such as the myth of racial superiority and the mythic revolutionary community, functions to sustain the hegemonic dominance wielded in Haiti by the United States and later by François Duvalier, the Porfiriato and its aftermath in Mexico, and white society in the United States Deep South. These myths often engender policies founded in the inhospitable treatment of those who are deemed lesser or ‘other’. Nancy’s conception of being singular plural posits that …

The Mnemonic Maid: Joan Of Arc In Public Memory, Tara Beth Smithson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between Joan of Arc, postcolonial identity, and public memory. Since her repopularization in the nineteenth century, Joan of Arc has become one of the most emblematic figures of French history. Commemorated in public statuary, celebrated by writers, and championed by politicians, la Pucelle’s story is tantamount to national myth. While Joan of Arc’s centrality to France’s iconic imagining of itself during the spread of its empire has received much critical attention, her postcolonial afterlife remains understudied. This project offers a counterpoint to the prevailing assumption that Joan of Arc has few implications for postcolonial studies …

Policies Of Loss: Coastal Erosion And The Struggle To Save Louisiana's Wetlands, Rebecca B. Costa

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost approximately 1,800 square miles of land due to the subsidence of the state’s coastal wetlands. By the early 1970s, public officials and private citizens were starting to become aware of the crisis on the coast, and a broad agreement developed among state and federal representatives that action was needed to address the problem. Over the course of nearly forty years, policymakers in Louisiana and Washington, D.C., implemented a series of laws and regulations meant to protect vulnerable ecosystems like the state’s wetlands. In the 1980s, officials also started crafting policies to help restore Louisiana’s …

White Manhood In Louisiana During Reconstruction, 1865-1877, Arthur Wendel Stout

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Economic, political, and social landscapes changed for white men in Louisiana after the Civil War. Suffering displacement, business interruption, property confiscation, and lower social and political standing vis-à-vis the former slaves, white men’s standing in every realm seemed diminished, including their core identity as men. It was important to them and to their families for white men to regain a sense of competence as men. Using letters, diaries, and court cases involving white people with strong connections to Louisiana during the Reconstruction era, this dissertation analyzes the gendered problems that white men and their families sought to resolve. Newspaper articles, …

Two Histories, One Future : Louisiana Sugar Planters, Their Slaves, And The Anglo-Creole Schism, 1815-1865, Nathan Buman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

During the five decades between the War of 1812 and the end of the Civil War, southern Louisianans developed a society unlike any other region. The vibrant traditional image of moonlight and magnolias, the notion that King Cotton dominated the South’s economy as Anglo-Saxon masters lorded over their enslaves African-American workers still dominates the image of the American South. This image of a monolithic South, however, does not give a clear indication of the many sub-regional distinctions that both challenged and rewarded the inhabitants of those areas and provides exciting ways to understand slaveholding society culturally. Louisiana’s slaveholding class consisted …

Wedding Belles And Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings In Fact, Fiction And Folklore, Cherry Lynne Levin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Wedding Belles and Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings in Fact, Fiction and Folklore Dissertation directed by Professor John Wharton Lowe, Robert Penn Warren Professor of English Pages in dissertation, 380, Words in Abstract, 234 Abstract Along with rites of passage marking birth and death, wedding rituals played an important role in ordering social life on antebellum Louisiana plantations, not only for elite white families but also for the enslaved. Louisiana women's autobiographical accounts of plantation weddings yield considerable insights on the importance of weddings for Louisiana plantation women before, and especially during, the Civil War. Moreover, information contained within the …

Literary Expressions Of Creole Identity In Alfred Mercier's L'Habitation Saint-Ybars And Johnelle, Mary Florence Cashell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century Louisianan author Alfred Mercier’s novels and their roles as emblems of Francophone Creole cultural identity. During the nineteenth century following the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent anglophone influx, the French-speaking Creole population faced a cultural upheaval. Unable to completely identify as either French or American, Creoles occupied an uncertain space. This study demonstrates that Alfred Mercier’s works articulate a hybrid identity that is neither French nor American but rather a multicultural construct. The first chapter examines the nineteenth-century Creole community’s problematic positioning between French and American cultures. Chapters two, three, and four center on two of Mercier’s …

Shades Of Grey: Slaveholding Free Women Of Color In Antebellum New Orleans, 1800-1840, Anne Ulentin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the economic opportunities that free women of color could derive from slaveholding, their motivations, and their impact on New Orleans’ antebellum society and economy. Another aim is to find out the role and impact of free women of color from Saint Domingue (later Haiti), whose arrival in New Orleans doubled the number of free women of color in the city. Finally, the analysis of relationships between free women of color and their slaves and with the diverse population of New Orleans plays an important part in this study. Notarial deeds (sales and purchases of slaves, mortgages of …

Revolutionary Republics: U.S. National Narratives And The Independence Of Latin America, 1810-1846, James Weldon Long

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Revolutionary Republics analyzes how U.S. literature depicted the independence of Latin America, focusing on the period from the beginning of the Spanish American revolutions in 1810 to the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1846. During this brief timespan, the nation’s literature featured a radical transition in which the independent republics of Latin America shifted from being viewed as “southern brethren” of the United States, a term used by such prominent public figures as Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams, to hostile enemies allegedly in need of assistance from their northern neighbor. This reversal exposes a contradiction between the imperialist …

Nonverbal Communication Among Pointe Coupee Creoles, Elsie Angelique Bergeron Gardner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Interactions are understood through the filter of language and culture. Because of this when people of different cultures interact, miscommunications often result. As both verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication are culturally specific, this paper examines trends in the nonverbal communication patterns of generations of Pointe Coupee Creoles undergoing language shift from Creole French in the older generation to English in the younger. The data demonstrate that nonverbal patterns are decoupled from verbal language to some extent in the degree to which they are maintained down the observable generations of Pointe Coupee Creole participants. This study analyzes videos of naturally …

"Teach Us Incessantly": Lessons And Learning In The Antebellum Gulf South, Sarah L. Hyde

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Before 1860 people in the Gulf South valued education and sought to extend schooling to residents across the region. Southerners learned in a variety of different settings – within their own homes taught by a family member or hired tutor, at private or parochial schools as well as in public free schools. Regardless of the venue, the ubiquity of learning in the region reveals the importance of education in Southern culture. In the 1820s and 1830s, legislators in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama sought to increase access to education by offering financial assistance to private schools in order to offset tuition …

The Virgin's Daughters: Catholic Traditions And The Post-Colonial South In Contemporary Women's Writing, Elizabeth M. Beard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the texts of contemporary women writers who consciously engage dominant Catholic, American, and southern ideologies in their narratives and who posit Louisiana as a liminal, hybrid space. Building upon postcolonial concepts of hybridity and performance of cultural memory, I trace a “pathway” to feminist recovery and reclamation of ancestral memory and spirituality in Valerie Martin’s A Recent Martyr, Rebecca Wells’ Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Brenda Marie Osbey’s All Saints, and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana. The authors enact spiritual and cultural reclamation through the written expression of key components of postcolonial reconstruction of …

Liminality In Gender, Race, And Nation In Les Quarteronnes De La Nouvelle-Orléans By Sidonie De La Houssaye, Christine Koch Harris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project examines themes of race, gender, and nation in a series of four novels by nineteenth-century Louisiana author Sidonie de la Houssaye. The series, called Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans (The Quadroons of New Orleans), is based on the system of plaçage. Plaçage, a system of concubinage in which white men took women of mixed racial heritage (such as “quadroons”) as mistresses, becomes a source of conflict and contradiction in the series. The author sees plaçage as a tragic necessity for some educated and morally “upright” quarteronnes. For others, those quarteronnes depicted as libidinous and avaricious, it is a …

Contesting For Power In Public Performance: Hegemonic Struggles In The Louisiana Shrimp And Petroleum Festival, Allen Alford

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study was undertaken to analyze the influence of hegemony on the creation of cultural identity-specifically the cultural identity of Morgan City, Louisiana-through the annual performance of the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival of that city. The information utilized in this study was assembled from a variety of sources: newspaper reporting from 1935 to 1999, chronicling the Festival and related subjects; works of several theorists in the area of ritual and performance studies; works that examine the concept of hegemony, principally from a Marxian perspective; anthropological studies of Gulf Coast commercial fishing cultures; reports by official State of Louisiana agencies, …