Caribbean New Orleans

Caribbean New Orleans is a monumental study of French colonial New Orleans. With more than five hundred pages, it is monumental in size but also in scientific depth, aiming to show how the Atlantic and Caribbean spaces shaped race in New Orleans and how, in turn, the city's specific conditions shaped Caribbean and Atlantic conception of race. While practicing a situated Atlantic history, Cécile Vidal develops a microhistory of race in New Orleans. Her work demonstrates that racial prejudice evolved throughout the French colonial period because of both local and Atlantic circumstances. The first notable quality of the book is the author's extensive research conducted over many years on all the sources relating to French colonial Louisiana. Its second merit is the originality of the perspective and conclusions that place New Orleans within the Caribbean area of influence from the city's founding and show its interconnections with the Atlantic space from the early years, while other scholars highlight this connection most often in later periods. Vidal's work does not invalidate the research that shows how New Orleans was Caribbeanized (or perhaps re-Caribbeanized) in the nineteenth century, but it convincingly defends the thesis that the city's inclusion in the Caribbean space started earlier than generally believed. The book's third merit is its original organization, what the author calls a “zoom in and zoom out”: concentric circles extending from the Atlantic to the Caribbean, to the peri-urban and then urban spaces, to residential institutions (such as hospitals and convents) and households, and then, in four chapters exactly symmetrical to the first four, back from the intimate sphere to the Caribbean and Atlantic (p. 41). Each chapter starts with anecdotes drawn from innumerable, often-underexplored, primary sources (all from the Records of the Superior Council, but also sets of correspondence, travel accounts, and church records); the chapter then uses the detailed analysis made of the opening anecdote to expand into a new, larger space. The book's fourth merit is the author's excellent propensity to analyze testimonies from the period's actors to show what they reveal about racialization in the city and beyond

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic World · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Microhistory · Race (biology · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History

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