{"id":21561,"date":"2012-03-18T19:58:21","date_gmt":"2012-03-18T19:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=21561"},"modified":"2012-03-24T18:49:05","modified_gmt":"2012-03-24T18:49:05","slug":"fashioning-and-refashioning-marie-laveau-in-american-memory-and-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=21561","title":{"rendered":"Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Florida State University
\n2009
\n201 pages<\/p>\n

Tatia Jacobson Jordan<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy<\/em><\/p>\n

Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination<\/em> follows the life and literary presence of the legendary figure, Marie Laveau<\/a>. This female spiritualist lived in antebellum Louisiana<\/a> from 1801-1881. After her death, her legend has continued to grow as evidenced by her presence in contemporary print and pop culture and the tens of thousands of visitors to her grave in New Orleans<\/a> every year. Here, I contextualize Laveau in a pre-Civil war America by looking at the African American female in print and visual culture. I trace the beginnings of several tropes in literature that ultimately affect the relevancy of the Laveau figure as she appears and reappears in literature beginning with Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s<\/a> inclusion of Laveau in Mules and Men<\/em>. I offer close readings of the appearance of these tropes in Hurston\u2019s Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em>, interrogate her connection to Caribbean lore in Tell My Horse<\/em>, and show the evolution of this figure in several of Hurston\u2019s short stories. I then offer close readings of the refiguring of Laveau in Robert Tallant\u2019s<\/a> works, Ishmael Reed\u2019s<\/a> novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red<\/em>, and Jewell Parker Rhodes\u2019s<\/a> Marie Laveau<\/em> trilogy. I intervene with contemporary scholarship by suggesting that novels like Corregidora<\/em> by Gayl Jones<\/a>, Mama Day<\/em> by Gloria Naylor<\/a>, and The Salt Eaters<\/em> by Toni Cade Bambara<\/a> draw not on a general conjure figure, as previously thought, but instead implicitly refashion feminist heroines that resemble Marie Laveau, characters with a circum-Atlantic consciousness that arise from Hurston\u2019s literary legacy.<\/p>\n

TABLE OF CONTENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n