University of California Santa Cruz Wetland Americas
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ WETLAND AMERICAS: MAPPING A LITERARY HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS AND LOUISIANA A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE with an emphasis in AMERICAN STUDIES by Matthew E. Suazo June 2015 The Dissertation of Matthew E. Suazo is approved: _________________________________ Professor Kirsten Silva Gruesz, chair _________________________________ Professor Susan Gillman _________________________________ Professor Wlad Godzich _________________________________ Professor Eric Porter _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Matthew E. Suazo 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ....................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................... vi Introduction: In the Spatial Turn of American Studies: Siting New Orleans in the Wetlands .......... 1 Chapter One: Swamp Tropics: The Urban Nature of Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable’s New Orleans ................................................................................................. 30 Chapter Two: Marais Impraticable: Translating Colonial Louisiana in Chateaubriand’s Atala ..... 91 Chapter Three: Disputing American Degeneracy: New World Wetlands and the Print Culture of Atala’s Creole Translators ....................................................................................... 154 Chapter Four: Uneven Improvements: Swamplands, Slavery, and Writing Subjects in the Louisiana Narratives of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Solomon Northup, and Martin Delany ........ 223 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 301 iii ABSTRACT Matthew E. Suazo Wetland Americas: Mapping a Literary History of New Orleans and Louisiana My dissertation begins as a response to the socio-economic and environmental crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina. Inspired by a call for “nonsovereign” histories of the storm, I view these twinned crises through a postcolonial lens and consider the category of the nation inadequate to the task of accounting for what happened in New Orleans. With firm roots in Literature, my method is informed by the hemispheric school of American Studies, which pushes the city beyond its regional confines in the U.S. South and reframes it in relation to a number of different scales: the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, Latin(a) America, the Global South. While these frames capture a fuller portion of New Orleans’s complex history, they tend to focus on the city’s vital relationship to other places, what geographers call its “situation,” and to overlook its “site,” the actual wetlands terrain it occupies. Because such approaches foreground social and economic concerns, the environment remains an abstract landscape: culture is separated from nature, and the historical connection between the two falls out of the picture. As sites of cultural contact in tension with the nation, as well as these other geopolitical scales, wetlands merge this separation and bring an ecocritical dimension to the hemispheric studies project. While tracing an ongoing entanglement of nature and culture, I argue for the historical place of wetlands in understanding the racial and economic disparity revealed in the flood caused by Katrina. iv My project centers on New Orleans, but the settlement of Louisiana and the lower Mississippi River Valley offers a broader case study for mapping the diverse and overlapping literatures that shaped this history. Within these real and imagined American geographies, I examine the material and discursive practices through which swamps and other wetlands landscapes became entangled with concepts of race as part of the same colonial processes. My study begins at the end of the nineteenth century, in the New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable. As I explore the place of environment in their works, set amid the culture clash following the Louisiana Purchase, I argue that the wetlands and the tropics, as postcolonial creole spaces, reemerge periodically to disrupt the inevitable progress of the nation. Returning to colonial Louisiana, I then trace the emergence of the wetlands as a category of knowledge through a series of encounters with ciénagas, swamps, and marais. In a network of early American texts and translations, including El Inca Garcilaso, William Bartram, and Chateaubriand, I consider how discourses of race and landscape coincided across a range of narrative forms. With attention to the structural endurance of Louisiana’s plantation system and a reconsideration of the figure of the slave in the swamp, I conclude in the nineteenth-century U.S. with the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Solomon Northup, and Martin Delany. In the light of this long view, the post-Katrina present does not represent a rupture of the U.S. national narrative. Rather, when embedded within the life of the wetlands, marked by periodic returns to mud and water, it is a moment continuous with an uneven, hemispheric history of the Americas. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I must thank my adviser Kirsten Silva Gruesz, who has been a steadfast ally since our first telephone conversation in 2007. The members of my dissertation and exam committees have also been continuous sources of support and inspiration. I owe many thanks to Eric Porter, Susan Gillman, Wlad Godzich, and Norma Klahn for their generosity. In the humanities and beyond, the intellectual environment at UCSC created the conditions to imagine this project, and many faculty members have shaped my thinking in fundamental ways. Chris Connery, Loisa Nygaard, Jody Greene, Deanna Shemek, James Clifford, and Karen Barad deserve special recognition. More broadly, I appreciate all of my teachers and classmates, as well as all of my students and those I have taught with: there is a little bit of every one of our shared conversations in this dissertation. As an academic home, the Literature Department has provided material support in terms of numerous grants, fellowships, and teaching appointments, but has more importantly taken care of me as a member of the community. Here, I refer to past and present department chairs and graduate program directors, including Carla Freccero, Karen Bassi, and Sharon Kinoshita, as well as the department staff. I have also been fortunate to receive external funding for my project, and must acknowledge fellowships from UCSC’s Institute for Humanities Research, as well as the John Carter Brown and Newberry Libraries. For making the UC and the world a better place for graduate students, I also owe a debt of gratitude to my local union, UAW 2865. vi To my friends, old and new, it would be impossible to compile a list that would sufficiently convey your individual and collective support. Nevertheless, I would not be here without those I left in New Orleans, and I would not have survived without those I have met since Jarret Lofstead dropped me off in Santa Cruz. From the former, I have taken comfort in learning that we become more ourselves with every passing year, while the latter have taught me that the surprise of genuine friendship is something we never outgrow. In this last case, because of their direct contributions to my well being as I wrote the dissertation, special thanks are due to Sara Orning, Erica Smeltzer, Kendra Dority, Keegan Finberg, and the member of my writing group, Andy Hines. For their unqualified encouragement, I am truly grateful to the Suazo family—especially my MOM—now and in the past. In recent years, I have also had the pleasure of seeing that circle expand to include the Faber, Nault, Kershaw, and Umholtz families, which leads me, above all, to Rakia. I could not have done this without you. vii INTRODUCTION In the Spatial Turn of American Studies: Siting New Orleans in the Wetlands It was left to reporters embedded in the mayhem to let Americans know that a third world country had suddenly appeared on the Gulf Coast. — David Carr, New York Times, 5 September 2005 A heady confluence of the haughty European and the boisterous third- world, New Orleans is often referred to as the northernmost Caribbean city. Precious architecture stands alongside careening overloaded junk trucks, sumptuous delicacies tickle palates while offal in the streets offends the eyes. — Lonely Planet Online, 2009 For New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina revealed a crisis rooted in longstanding socioeconomic and environmental conditions: through the lens of a local catastrophe, the United States saw one of its cities come into a sharper global focus. As these multiple scales suggest, a post-storm critical approach to the city must accommodate and cut across a number of geopolitical units of measure. Likewise, because the event’s occurrence cannot be wholly bounded by human history—as hurricanes and floods belong to seasonal cycles—one must also account for these different temporalities. Reading the city from the present moment therefore requires a method attentive to layers of space and time. With these concerns in mind, this dissertation has been guided by the question of how to write literary history post-Katrina; and, given the scene in the city, how to write literary history in an age of ecological crisis. Though scholars across the disciplines have responded with care to each aspect