Creole Drama

Creole Drama showcases the vibrant and internationally connected world of New Orleans spoken-drama theater from the end of the eighteenth century to the Civil War. Impressively rich historical context enlivens the neighborhoods, populations, and venues that helped sustain a lively and contentious theater scene. Sustaining the rivalries between Anglophone and Francophone populations was a shifting desire to preserve the French language and colonial cultures and to increase pressure on developing American and Louisianan identities. In Creole Drama Juliane Braun successfully demonstrates that her study “reintegrates non-English-speaking societies and their cultural production into the field of American literary and cultural studies” (p. 7). In this endeavor she aligns herself with scholars such as Lawrence A. Rosenwald and Werner Sollors while also providing a bridge between the scholarship on New Orleans and early American theater by scholars including Shirley Thompson, Jeffrey Richards, and Heather S. Nathans. The book begins by highlighting the deep connections between New Orleans and the French Caribbean. Spanish colonial officials noticed the strong community created by the movement of actors, singers, musicians, and dramatic productions to New Orleans. As a result, the Spanish colonial administration censored the Francophone New Orleans theater because it fostered revolutionary ideas and celebrated French empirical bonds. When Anglophone theaters later competed for dominance in the Crescent City, Francophone theater's references to French empirical cultures became one strategy for cultural survival. Black theater later survived by sidestepping an 1830 censorship law and staged plays that likely critiqued the system of plaçage and the leadership of Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer, though stronger evidence would prove this. Braun's analysis of the Crescent City's free black population's engagement with Latin American emigration is convincing. The vivid context that surveys the effects of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the changing New Orleans neighborhoods shines in the book. The fourth, and perhaps strongest, chapter examines French speakers’ claims to American national identity as the U.S. government pushed for war with Mexico. The theater, Braun argues, became a site to claim American belonging and renounce the history and alleged threat of monarchy. Here, theater's engagement with struggles between groups from different linguistic, cultural, racial, and birthplace backgrounds coalesce skillfully. The book ends with the playwright Victor Séjour's engagement in debates over slavery, emancipation, and the status of free black people in the Atlantic world. This adds to the book's theme of cultural exchange and intervention by showing that he “evaluated the lessons [of] prior emancipations in Haiti, France, and the British West Indies” in his cultural production (p. 153

Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Creole language · Drama · French · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

• Afterword

  R Dominguez, Virginia R Dominguez•Quebec Studies•2021

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• Introduction

  Jay Gitlin, Ryan André Brasseaux•Quebec Studies•2021

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• Re-Visiting the Creole Myth

  Juliane Braun•Quebec Studies•2021

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