In sticking to the well-trod, tourist-friendly enclaves of Orleans Parish such as the French Quarter and Garden District, much of the classic literature set in New Orleans presents a narrow view of the city, both geographically and racially. It seems that when it comes to representing New Orleans, literature has only had so many seats at the table that is the New Orleans Novel.

This panel thus seeks to explore new New Orleans novels—those that investigate neglected identities and neighborhoods of the Big Easy. This new NOLA novel, too, explores how marginalized histories (the construction of the Clairborne Overpass, Vietnamese immigration, the War on Drugs, among many others) affect the city and its residents. In keeping with the convention theme of Visibility, these papers aim to make known the other histories that lend New Orleans its distinct cultural identity.

The panel kicks off with Arin Keeble’s exploration of genre. This paper addresses two related questions. First, whether the New Orleans novel – or any cluster of novels brought together by a shared city setting – might be usefully understood as a ‘genre’ in its own right. The New Orleans novel, Keeble argues, is a fertile object of study and we might understand a formally diverse set of texts that share affective qualities and thematic preoccupations: these are sweaty, liquid, vivid, and hybrid fictions that deal with death and desire in unique ways. Second, given that New Orleans fiction has well-known genre associations (particularly crime, gothic and various subgenres) that have sometimes reinforced racist stereotypes, but elsewhere have meaningfully engaged with systemic malaise, and given that it is also a city associated with a set of canonical ‘literary’ texts and authors, the New Orleans novel is also a rich body of work in the context of persistent debates about the relations between popular genres and ‘the literary’. Drawing on Theodore Martin’s intervention in the study of genre and ‘the contemporary’, Keeble close reads James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown (2007), Margeret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom (2017), and Jami Attenberg’s All This Could be Yours (2019) to shed light on the drift of the contemporary, aiding consideration of relations between past and present.

Mike Miley’s paper examines how E. M. Tran’s 2022 novel Daughters of the New Year pushes against the conventions of the New Orleans Novel to depict an exclusive city preoccupied with preserving its geographic and cultural identity and dedicated to carefully vetting who deserves to be included at its center. To dramatize New Orleans and the United States as a cosmopolitan pot that refuses to melt, Tran turns to reality competition game shows in which contestants humiliate themselves for a few moments in the spotlight. By making a spectacle of themselves, the generations of Vietnamese American women in the novel encounter the double bind of New Orleans and the American Dream writ large: it’s a place to stand out, but never fit in, a place where one can be the center of attention but never feel centered. In laying this dynamic bare, Tran gestures toward a new New Orleans Novel that engages with the city’s diversity authentically and broadens the cultural map beyond with the dominant cultural forces are willing to see.

Finally, Jay Shelat’s paper examines how this diversity works in recent fiction such as Things We Lost to the Fire by Eric Nguyen and A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. More specifically, the multi-generational novel offers a glimpse into how the history of a place shapes the history of a family. These distinctly post-Hurricane Katrina novels of sprawling families speak to what Alexander Manshel has deemed “American literature’s turn toward the historical past ... to amplify the historically voiceless.” Shelat claims that this revision of the New Orleans novel organizes itself around the systematic failures that emerge from racialization and that continue to detrimentally infringe on the most sidelined of the city’s residents.

This panel emphasizes the complex recent novels that emerge from the sidelines of New Orleans. In telling previously unheard histories of one of America’s most diverse cities, these works inaugurate a new era of American literature that urges radical revisions to historical fiction.