Mixed Race Studies

A Creole melting pot: the politics of language, race, and identity in southwest Louisiana, 1918-45

University of Sussex
September 2015
353 pages

Christophe Landry

Doctorate of Philosophy in History

Southwest Louisiana Creoles underwent great change between World Wars I and II as they confronted American culture, people, and norms. This work examines that cultural transformation, paying particular attention to the processes of cultural assimilation and resistance to the introduction and imposition of American social values and its southern racial corollary: Jim Crow. As this work makes clear, the transition to American identity transmuted the cultural foundations of French- and Creole-speaking Creole communities. World War I signalled early transformative changes and over the next three decades, the region saw the introduction of English language, new industries, an increasing number of Protestant denominations, and the forceful imposition of racialized identities and racial segregation. Assimilation and cultural resistance characterized the Creole response, but by 1945, southwest Louisiana more closely resembled much of the American South. Creole leaders in churches, schools, and the tourism industry offered divergent reactions; some elite Creoles began looking to Francophone Canada for whitened ethnic identity support while others turned toward the Catholic establishment in Baltimore, Maryland to bolster their faith. Creoles were not the only distinct community to undergo Americanization, but Louisiana Creoles were singular in their response. As this study makes clear – in ways no historian has previously documented – Louisiana Creoles bifurcated as a result of Americanization. This study also contributes to, and broadens, the literature on Acadian identity. Previously, scholars simply assumed that whitened Latins in Louisiana had always identified with Acadia and their black-racialized brethren with Haiti. This thesis, however, suggests that Cajun and Creole are not opposites. Rather, they derive from the same people and culture, and their perceived and articulated difference emerged in response to Americanization. Through a critical analysis of that bifurcation process, this thesis demonstrates how Acadianized identity and culture emerged in the first half of the 20th century.

Read the entire dissertation here.

News Alert | Four new theses in Europe explore Louisiana history

Louisiana Historic and Cultural Vistas
2016-06-17

Christophe Landry

For immediate release

European theses explore Louisiana history

In 2015 and 2016, students in England and the Netherlands finalized research on Louisiana history, culminating in dissertations (called theses in the United Kingdom and Holland). It probably will sound far-fetched, but there’s good reason behind it. The University of Sussex in Brighton, England, has a scholar named Richard Follett. Richard conducted his doctoral research at LSU in Bâton Rouge and has written and spoken extensively on the sugarcane industry in Louisiana, especially on race and emancipation in Louisiana’s sugarcane-growing parishes. The University of Leiden, in Leiden, Holland, has Adam Fairclough. Adam’s career also hinges on US history, specifically on race, racism and the African American experiences in the US South.

Richard supervised 3 theses on Louisiana. Carin Peller-Semmens’s thesis discusses issues preventing Reconstruction from materializing its intended goals on a longterm basis in Louisiana’s Anglo Red River valley (northwest Louisiana). Darryl Barthé and I both wrote on 20th century transformations in the Creole community of New Orleans and southwest Louisiana.

Mark Leon de Vries, like Carin, explored Reconstruction in Louisiana’s Red River valley.

Below is a summary of each of those theses, as well as a URL where they can be downloaded free of charge. I’ve grouped them in Creole and Red River, since they present different periods, cultural milieux, ethnic groups, realities and experiences in Louisiana’s Latin and Anglo communities…

Read about the four theses here.

Creole Culture: Identity and Race in the Bayou Country

Kreol Magazine
October-December 2013, Issue 7
pages 42-45

Christophe Landry

Louisiana is what many have come to refer to as the northern-most point of Latin America, where créolité, a Latin-based people, culture and consciousness, emerged early in the 1700s. From its earliest stages, the international melting pot of cultures that came to simmer along Louisiana’s bayous linked Louisiana Creoles with three continents in a global market economy including the Indian Ocean.

When the French crown ceded Louisiana to the Company of the Indies in 1717, Nantes (France), Goree (Senegal), Port-Louis (Mauritius), Saint-Denis (La Reunion) and New Orleans, became intimately related. For instance, between 1721 and 1745, 3,818 slaves were transported from Senegambia to Louisiana with roughly equal numbers destined for the Mascareigne Islands. In addition, Bretons, Picards and Normands came to represent the largest Francophone elements in early French Louisiana and in the French Indian Ocean islands. Not surprisingly, in Louisiana and in the Mascareignes, virtually the same Creole language developed, the first lengthy written examples of which date back to 1745 in Mauritius and 1748 in Louisiana.

As early as 1710, native-born Louisianians of Latin culture self-identified as Créole. Slave and free, tan, brown, yellow and fair have used Creole to differentiate themselves from Anglophones in North America. Where Spanish, Creole, and French languages were spoken and Catholicism practiced in Colonial Louisiana, people were sure to define themselves as Creole. This distinction between Américain and Créole became more pronounced after 1812 when Louisiana officially became an American state, and continued after the Civil War when Anglophone America’s binary racial system came to play a more immediate role in the socioeconomic destiny of Louisianians…

Read the entire article here or here.