Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans
eBook - ePub

Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

About this book

Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association

A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer M. Spear's examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city's construction of race during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Spear brings together archival evidence from three different languages and the most recent and respected scholarship on racial formation and interracial sex to explain why free people of color became a significant population in the early days of New Orleans and to show how authorities attempted to use concepts of race and social hierarchy to impose order on a decidedly disorderly society. She recounts and analyzes the major conflicts that influenced New Orleanian culture: legal attempts to impose racial barriers and social order, political battles over propriety and freedom, and cultural clashes over place and progress. At each turn, Spear's narrative challenges the prevailing academic assumptions and supports her efforts to move exploration of racial formation away from cultural and political discourses and toward social histories.

Strikingly argued, richly researched, and methodologically sound, this wide-ranging look at how choices about sex triumphed over established class systems and artificial racial boundaries supplies a refreshing contribution to the history of early Louisiana.

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Yes, you can access Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans by Jennifer M. Spear in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. 1 Indian Women, French Women, and the Regulation of Sex
  9. 2 Legislating Slavery in French New Orleans
  10. 3 Affranchis and Sang-Mêlé
  11. 4 Slavery and Freedom in Spanish New Orleans
  12. 5 Limpieza de Sangre and Family Formation
  13. 6 Negotiating Racial Identities in the 1790s
  14. 7 Codification of a Tripartite Racial System in Anglo-Louisiana
  15. Epilogue
  16. Notes
  17. Glossary
  18. Essay on Sources
  19. Index