METIS ON THE FRONTIER OF FRENCH COLONIAL LOUISIANA, AND THE INCEPTION OF NEW WORLD MODERNITY IN COLONIAL NEW ORLEANS ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Humanities ____________ by Dennis Bordelon, B.S.E.E., M.S.E.E. Fall 2018 Copyright by DENNIS BORDELON, B.S.E.E., M.S.E.E. 2018 All Rights Reserved This work is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Cajun-French and Scotch-Irish, New Orleaneans both. And to the City of New Orleans, on this three-hundredth year from her founding, beloved city of my birth, and the birthplace of America’s greatest contribution to modernity, jazz. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Lyle Smith, for his mentorship during my academic career at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and for his patience in seeing this thesis to its conclusion. I wish especially to thank my sister, Karen Bordelon Hartwell, for her intrepid assistance in hunting down books and articles without which my studies could not have been completed. It is her fate to have a scholar-brother who is “never satisfied.” iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE .......................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .....................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1. TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS ............................1 Katrina......................................................................................................................1 Histories of New Orleans.........................................................................................5 A Revisionist Approach and Viewpoint..................................................................9 Modernity and Double-Consciousness..................................................................16 Scope of Thesis......................................................................................................19 2. THE THINGS THEY CARRIED IN THEIR HEADS: EUROPEAN AND AFRICAN CONSCIOUSNESS...............................................21 Comparative Histories of French-English Social Ethos........................................22 French Social Consciousness in the Ancien Régime............................................26 Genealogy of French Thought and Discourse on Africa and Africans.................34 Collective Identity and Social Consciousness Brought from West Africa to America...............................................................45 3. INTERLUDE IN NEW FRANCE: METIS ON THE CANADIAN FRONTIER..........................................................................56 4. THEY COME INTO AMERICA: AFRICANS ON THE LOUISIANA FRONTIER........................................................................66 The Terror of the African Diaspora.......................................................................67 v CHAPTER PAGE Contingent Factors Influencing Metis in French Louisiana..................................73 The Louisiana Code Noir of 1724 and the Attempt to Control Slave Lives.............................................................77 5. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND PLAN FOR FURTHER STUDY...........................................................................100 WORKS CITED..............................................................................................................114 vi ABSTRACT In this tricentennial year of the founding of New Orleans, the city and its people of color deserve a revisionist meta-narrative of the Crescent City’s contribution to new world modernity. This thesis takes as its structure the three elements of Bernard Bailyn’s historical revisionism: new facts that change our story; other viewpoints from the marginalized; and other ways of understanding how we got to where we are. Interpreting the story of slavery from the viewpoint of the African leads to that revisionist history. Using the influential work of Paul Gilroy, two heuristic devices he employs, the African diaspora and double-consciousness, are applied to the process of metis in the frontier of the Lower Mississippi in the early French colony of Louisiana. These heuristics show how metis and creolization took place to form the celebrated New Orleans Creole culture. 1 CHAPTER 1 TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS To write history, is to narrate events, and to show their philosophy when they are susceptible to any such demonstration. When the subject is worthy of it, this is a kind of composition of the highest order. Charles Gayarré Katrina New Orleans, August 29, 2005–Millions of American television viewers, fascinated by natural disasters and human suffering, tune in as Hurricane Katrina, a category five storm, wreaks havoc on a city accustomed to hurricanes. This one is different. Birthed in the Caribbean, Katrina blows up “Hurricane Alley,” the man-made shipping channel cut out of the natural cypress swamp, directly into the heart of the city with unabated fury. The days after landfall, Katrina leaves in its wake massive tidal surges, inundating the streets of the city with waters from the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain, breaching the levees lining the canals crossing between river and lake and linking with the Gulf. Several areas of the city, home to both wealthy and poor, flood to the second stories and attics of houses. The combination of wind, water, poverty and panic result in the loss of nearly 1,800 lives, and more than $100 billion in property loss. The flooding displaces nearly 300,000 residents, mostly black, from their homes, dispersing them throughout the Southern states, the latest iteration of the African diaspora. The human misery revealed by television cameras is horrid, like images of war: 2 drowned corpses floating in city streets; survivors on roofs airlifted by helicopters; multitudes sheltered in the Superdome and Convention Center, suffering from a scarcity of floor space, bedding, clothing, food, and water. But worse than this reality is the fiction spread by excited, ratings-hungry cable news networks and mass media: accounts of widespread looting; robbery, murder, and rape; reporting that is inaccurate, exaggerated, and full of misleading accounts, rumors and outright lies from city and state officials. According to these sources, New Orleans is a site of anarchy and chaos. The police chief and mayor go on the air to describe the people they were sworn to represent, serve and protect, as “monsters.” The governor publicly suggests that troops should shoot to kill the “hoodlums” on the street. Police and vigilantes oblige by shooting in the back a dozen unarmed black people fleeing to safety and dry land. Anarchy and chaos prove to characterize the law-and-order element, not the supposed criminal element nor victims of Katrina. The two weeks following the storm see multiple violations of civil liberties: the pursuit and roundup of “terrorists”–a fantasy perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security; suspects imprisoned in makeshift, chain-link-fence outdoor detention facilities, like the barracoons holding African captives awaiting embarkation to America in the slave trade; suspension of rights of due process, evidential grounds for detention, representation by counsel, and arraignment before a judge. To add further insult to injury, state and federal government institutions, particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), show ineptitude and apathy about rebuilding and repopulating the city. As a result, waterlogged New Orleans lays fallow for a year while elites debate the city’s future complexion and priorities for its 3 redevelopment. The priorities are top-down, rather than bottom-up, for rebuilding a better, whiter New Orleans. Meanwhile, scores of residents are housed in the infamous FEMA trailers, which exude noxious formaldehyde fumes, while they await funds to rebuild their homes. It appears that the mass media, reflecting the opinions of the nation, are blaming the victims of Katrina, mostly poor and lower- to middle•class black residents, for their own distressed and depraved condition, a typically prejudiced opinion harking back to justifications for slavery three centuries ago. What is not reported, and thus not made known to the rest of the nation, is that decent, ordinary people in the affected neighborhoods and from outside the city save thousands of lives, rescuing residents from flooded homes and taking them to relief facilities. Ad hoc groups of volunteers and mutual-aid societies organize rescue and relief operations. One of these, the New Orleans Cajun Navy, launches hundreds of their members' private craft, from canoes to rowboats to fishing boats. These volunteers rescue twenty-one thousand people; the Lake Charles Cajun Navy rescues another thousand. Typical is the lone man responsible for saving three hundred victims. Another man is shot in the back by police in the midst of his hundredth rescue of residents from flooded homes and taking them to relief facilities.