This panel's four presenters will each speak for no more than twelve minutes, their short papers on these themes grounded in two recent books from Cambridge University Press that offer comprehensive, inclusive discussion of the city’s literary legacy - a collection of essays edited by T. R. Johnson called New Orleans: A Literary History (2019) and a monograph, also by Johnson, called New Orleans: A Writer’s City (2023). The more recent of those two books, in particular, is organized around five major streets in the city to accent the theme of movement across different neighborhoods that foster, in turn, sometimes surprising encounters between historical forces, cultural traditions, and literary figures not regularly visible to each other, if ever.
Our first presenter – Marguerite Nguyen -- will consider a collection of newly-acquired, under-examined photographs depicting the Vietnamese refugee community of New Orleans from the late-1970s onward. Thousands of images taken by local photographers Harold Baquet and Mark Sindler offer a thick archive of Vietnamese American political and cultural practice in New Orleans. Key to the community’s adaptation, she argues, is the coastal knowledge suggested in these photos that show how refugees’ experiences of multiple Gulf Coast catastrophes—including Hurricanes Katrina and Ida, as well as the BP Horizon oil spill—relate to longer historical processes of upheaval and dislocation.
The second presenter – T. R. Johnson – will suggest that New Orleans, as the central hub of the interstate traffic in the enslaved and thus ground-zero for generations of collective trauma, became an inevitable focal point for Black poetry as a practice of memory-work and place-making - as resistance, that is, to the broader riptide of erasure. Johnson illustrates his point through the work of Brenda Marie Osbey and Natasha Trethewey and by glossing a long New Orleans literary history associated with African-descended people, from the lyrics of antebellum spirituals to post-Katina hip-hop; and from the much-neglected 1937 volume by Charles B. Rousseve’s The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of his History and his Literature to a brief overview of some city’s leading Black poets since World War II.
Our third speaker, Matt Smith, will extend the historical framework of our panel by reaching back to the eighteenth century to consider the relevance of the environmental challenges of those periods to the present. His work traces the ways anxieties about dislocation are often intertwined with passionate claims for the city’s exceptionalism as a stable locus for cultural and intergenerational continuity. He focuses in particular on Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731), wherein the newly-arrived Chevalier des Grieux finds the city a terrible, muddy disappointment and his own unappealing housing “une misérable cabane, composée de planches et de boue” [a wretched hut, consisting of planks and mud]. Yet only a few lines later he proclaims that New Orleans stands out as a city where one can truly live and love “sans intérêt, sans jalousie, sans inconstance” [without self-interest, without jealousy, without inconstancy]. This pivot will structure, as Smith shows, a number of texts by authors as different as Abbé Prevost and Marc Antoine Caillot, among others.
The fourth speaker – Frederick Staidum – examines Ludwig von Reizenstein’s The Mysteries of New Orleans and Jean-Charles Houzeau’s My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune as nineteenth-century European travelogues of the US grand tour mixed with fragments of Atlantic revolutionary discourse (e.g. the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the Revolutions of 1848). Staidum builds on established understandings of these works as anti-slavery literature to elucidate the “racial capitalism” that shapes Atlantic liberalism and, in particular, New Orleans itself as an important (and not incidental) transnational incubator for literary and philosophic reflections on political economy during the Age of Revolution and its afterlife.