Louisiana and the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

A Crossroads between Europe, Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America

Workshop organized by Cécile Vidal
for the Centre d'études nord-américaines (EHESS-CNRS)
and Tulane University

9-10 November 2007 in Paris, France
28-29 March 2008 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

for more info, please contact Sophie Grandsire-Rodriguez.

statement

For a very long time, the history of colonial Louisiana has been neglected by American and European historians. Nonetheless, from the beginning of the 1990s, works on this colony have multiplied. This new interest in Louisiana appears at a time when a new Atlantic history is also developing. This new historiographical current has enticed a process of decompartmentalization and reconfiguration of the colonial history of the New World, raising questions about the national and imperial perspectives that have structured it for too long.

Because of its position at a crossroads, the “Mississippi colony” constitutes a privileged place to follow this trend. Under the French Regime, Louisiana was located at the intersection of the two models of French colonization in America: a continental Franco-Indian model and an inland and slave Franco-African model. Thus, it linked the different societies of the “French Atlantic”. In the same way, during the Spanish period, it came within two kinds of peripheral spaces: the Hispano-Indian northern margins of New Spain (California, New Mexico, and Texas) and the littoral and island regions of plantations, exploited with a black slave workforce. Located on the Gulf of Mexico, it belonged to this cosmopolitan Caribbean world, characterized by dense relations between the various European powers’ colonies or former colonies. Moreover, situated at the margin of the three rival empires in North America, it successively came under French, Spanish, and then American sovereignty during the eighteenth century and at the outset of the nineteenth century.

However, despite the title of proceedings which have been recently published, the ²history of colonial and antebellum Louisiana has not yet been addressed from an Atlantic perspective. Hence, this workshop will aim at studying the way the relations that the colony and then the state maintained with the other regions of the Atlantic world, either in Europe, Africa or in the rest of the Americas, influenced the formation and evolution of its local society and culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This Atlantic perspective will intensify the debate that has already developed among historians about the specificity of social and interethnic relations in Louisiana in comparison with other regions of the New World.

This workshop will take place successively in two locations, first in Paris in November 2007, and then in New Orleans in March 2008. The Parisian session will last two days. Papers will be circulated in advance so that they can be read prior to the workshop. During the workshop, they will be summarized briefly: most of the time will be devoted to discussions. Five months later, the participants will gather again in New Orleans, where they will present a modified version of their papers, reflecting the Parisian discussions. The ultimate goal will be to publish a collective book. English will be the main language of the workshop.

program

Friday, November 09, 2007
Maison de l'Amérique latine, 217 bd Saint Germain, 75007 PARIS, Auditorium

09 h – 09 h 15: Opening: Cécile Vidal and François Weil, CENA, EHESS

09 h 15 – 12 h 15: Chair: Sylvia Frey, Tulane University

• Sophie White, University of Notre Dame: “Cultures of Consumption in French Colonial Louisiana: Slaves' Informal Economies in an Atlantic Context” (+1 image)
• Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, Dalhousie University: “'Un negre nommé Lubin ne connaissant pas Sa Nation': Africans, African Ethnicities, and 'Africanization'  in Saint Charles Parish, 1780-1820”