archives@tulane.edu / New Orleans quadroons were desired by white men for their beauty and the combination of their almost white racial performance and the promise of sexual excess of their African blood as represented in nineteenth century Anglo-American travel accounts. This dissertation considers how nineteenth century Louisiana literary representations of quadroons, free mixed-race women, challenged racialized and gendered stereotypes. By putting the marginalized figures at the center of their narratives, Louisiana authors showed how the quadroons’ hybrid identity and status as free women of color allowed them to serve as a literary nexus for the continual redefinition of the increasingly marginalized francophone communities that, faced with the encroaching Americanization, would need to transcend race or cease to exist in Louisiana. Antebellum French collection of poetry Les Cenelles (1845) written by Creole free men of color responds to the extramarital interracial relationships that are now seen through the lens of the trope of plaçage. The poets present themselves as legitimate marriage partners for quadroons and combat stereotypes of free women of color by grounding their opposition to interracial relationships in moral rather than racial terms. Alfred Mercier’s L’Habitation Saint-Ybars (1881) and George Washington Cable’s stories “‘Tite Poulette” (1879) and “Madame Delphine” (1881) manipulate the American Tragic Mulatta trope to show that Louisiana Creoles need to confront myths of racial purity and look towards a community based on shared cultural heritage among Louisianans rather than one divided by the calculus of racial distinction. Sidonie de la Houssaye’s tetraology Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans (1894-98) confronts white men’s hypocritical behavior that punishes quadroons for their racial performance by staging those performances and punishing characters who engaged in them. The legacies of quadroons can be seen through cultural productions featuring the ongoing complexities of race relations today through Horace Jenkin’s film Cane River (1982) and Brit Bennett’s novel The Vanishing Half (2020). A renewed interest in free people of color in the nineteenth century has led to attempts to recognize their important place in American history and recent publications address how today’s rhetoric echoes that of Reconstruction era Louisiana discussions on racial justice. / 1 / Emily Hathaway

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My objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with ¼ African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large number of patrons. The existence of "white passing" black women complicated ideas about race and racial purity in the South. Race as a myth and social construct, or as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains in her essay, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race, a "metalanguage" exposes race not as a genetic fact, but rather a physical appearance through which power relations and status were to be conferred. My methodology uses race and gender theory to analyze primary and secondary sources to understand and contextualize how population demographics, myths, and liberal 18th century colonial laws contributed to the sale of black women's bodies. The works of Emily Clark, Walter Johnson, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and other historians who utilize Atlantic history have been paramount in my research. Emily Clark has transformed the "white-black" women from a tragic, sexualized trope into a fully actualized human being, while Hall has tackled the racist underpinnings inherent in the neglect of black women's history. The writings of bell hooks, particularly her essay Eating the Other, establishes the modern day commodification of black women vis-à -vis their representation in media, as well as through the fetishism of their bodies by a white patriarchal system. During slavery plantation owners could do virtually anything they wanted with their property, including engaging in sexual intercourse. By depicting black women as hypersexual jezebels, they could justify their rape, while establishing their dominance and place in the white male hegemony of that time period. For the right price a white male of a lesser class could achieve the same thing at a brothel down in Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century, for as Emily Clark argues in her book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, these brothels were a great equalizer, allowing all white men to experience "…sexual mastery enjoyed only by elite planters before the Civil War." By democratizing white supremacy, the quadroon and others like her forged solidarity that bridge across all classes, while upholding whiteness and oppressing people of color at the same time.