Once viewed with mere curiosity as a regionalist relic of a vanished ethnolinguistic minority, Louisiana’s Francophone literature has enjoyed a surge of scholarly interest over the past few decades. Before the Civil War, the literary production of French-language writers based in New Orleans, whether native Creoles and European immigrants, outpaced that of both Québec and Haiti. As recognized by critics like Werner Sollors and Henry Louis Gates Jr., these works included both the first African American short story (Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre,” 1837) and the first anthology of Black poetry (Les Cenelles, edited by Armand Lanusse, 1845). Subsequently, the abolition of slavery and the sociopolitical transformations of the Reconstruction period opened new possibilities for literary explorations into the ongoing effects of Creole Louisiana’s racial hierarchy, a ternary system in conflict with the dominant black-white binary of the mainstream United States. From the 1860s to the turn of the twentieth century, the overlaying of these two systems created a “racial palimpsest,” to use a concept defined by Angel Adams Parham. Their coexistence generated significant social anxiety, often centered on matters of sexuality and corporeality more generally. Our proposed session takes an explicitly intersectional approach by examining works in which issues of gender and racial identity lie at the heart of narrative accounts of social change in Francophone Louisiana.

Writing in the 1880s and 1890s, Sidonie de La Houssaye (1820-1894) stands out as Louisiana’s most prolific author in French, even being nicknamed “Louisiana’s Balzac.” Her tetralogy Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans (1894-98) drew from the “quadroon legend” surrounding free women of color who (supposedly) seduced white men, to scandal and sometimes peril. Though derided by fellow novelist George Washington Cable in a letter penned to Charles Scribner in 1885, Les Quarteronnes’s literary value no longer lies in doubt. In her paper entitled “Trifling Matters: Small Clues and Grand Narratives in Sidonie de La Houssaye’s Octavia la quarteronne and the Question of the New Orleans Quadroon,” Robin White will address gaps discerned within the historical scholarly discourses surrounding so-called quadroons. Specifically, she juxtaposes La Houssaye’s fictional narrative with archival sources pertaining to the socio-historical phenomenon of such interracial relationships in the early 1800s, associated with the storied “quadroon balls” and the purported institution of plaçage.

Andia Augustin Billy’s paper, “White Women, Black Men: Interracial Intimacy in Antebellum Louisiana,” will tackle similar themes, but in fiction published by former free men of color writing at the outset of Reconstruction. In 1865, Adolphe Duhart’s “Simple Histoire” and François-Michel-Samuel Snaër’s “Souvenirs de Bonfouca” appeared in La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans, a radical newspaper and America’s first Black daily. These two short stories offer a thematic thread in which childhood friendships between white girls and black boys flourish into love in adulthood. As Duhart and Snaër’s depictions of interracial intimacy call attention to the plight of those deemed “inferior beings” by the ideologies of the time, i.e. women and African-descended persons, Augustin-Billy argues that these inherently political texts fit into a wider frame in which emancipation and citizenship hold both individual and collective impulses. Exploring interracial desire thus alerts the reader to broader implications of nineteenth-century body politic in the way the larger political and social meanings are inscribed onto bodies.

Stepping out of the realm of fiction, Désirée Martin’s 1877 autobiographical essay Les Veillées d’une sœur, ou le destin de brin de mousse (Evening Visits with a Sister, or the Destiny of a Strand of Moss) weaves another ethnic group into the tapestry of Louisiana’s Francophone cultures by harking back to the arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana after their Deportation from eastern Canada by the British in the mid-eighteenth century. Though Acadians and their “Cajun” descendants are not usually associated with slaveholding and the plantation economy, Martin’s family did practice slavery after settlement in Louisiana, an injustice for which she expresses pointed regret. Moreover, Martin shares poignant memories of her childhood wetnurse Manon, one of the few persons quoted directly in Les Veillées. Clint Bruce will focus on these passages in his paper, “Hearing Manon, or the Enslaved Voice in a White Autobiography from Reconstruction-Era Francophone Louisiana.” His analysis demonstrates how Manon’s reported speech (in French) figures the authenticity—both cultural and emotional—longed for nostalgically by Martin, who left her home at age 16 to join a religious order.

This session aligns with the convention theme of “Visibility,” emphasizing marginalized literatures and cultures contributing to Louisiana's creolization, and this offering insights into the host region’s cultural dynamics.