Building the Devil's Empire
French Colonial New Orleans
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11787352 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richmond F Brown (University of Florida, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 752-753 |
| Publication date | 2009-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1086/ahr.114.3.752 |
| OpenAlex | W2794764100 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
In this remarkable book, Shannon Lee Dawdy constructs an evocative portrait of French colonial New Orleans (1718–1768). She excavates the city's reputation as a colonial failure and an exceptionally disorderly place and offers an on-the-ground view of the city's everyday reality as well as its evolution over five decades. In delightfully diverse ways she explores the themes of imperial design, creole improvisation, and rogue colonialism. Displaying dazzling erudition and astonishing range, Dawdy persistently drives home the central tenets of her tightly constructed argument. In this book she is ambitious to a degree that invites skepticism, but she pulls it off admirably. Like a great jazz artist (and unlike French colonial planners), she brilliantly manages the tensions of design and improvisation. Dawdy's book furnishes a model of interdisciplinary research, bringing to the task the tools of archeology, ethnography, literary analysis, and archival research, all the while vigorously engaging with the secondary and theoretical literature. The author conceives the book as a “picaresque history” and historical ethnography. She eschews a linear, narrative approach, which she finds too prone to teleology. Instead the presentation is episodic. Each chapter is self-contained but builds on previous chapters, reinforcing and presenting in new contexts the central arguments
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnography · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.23 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2015 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |