Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans

By Juliane Braun

The stages of antebellum New Orleans did more than entertain. In the city’s early years, French-speaking residents used the theatre to assert their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty in the face of growing Anglo-American dominance. Beyond local stages, the francophone struggle for cultural survival connected people and places in the early United States, across the American hemisphere, and in the Atlantic world.

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. Juliane Braun draws on the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of documents from both sides of the Atlantic, to explore the ways in which theatre and drama shaped debates about ethnic identity and transnational belonging in the city. Francophone identity united citizens of different social and racial backgrounds, and debates about political representation, slavery, and territorial expansion often played out on stage.

Recognizing theatres as sites of cultural exchange that could cross oceans and borders, Creole Drama offers not only a detailed history of francophone theatre in New Orleans but also an account of the surprising ways in which multilingualism and early transnational networks helped create the American nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813942322

Book preview

Creole Drama

Writing the Early Americas

Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Editors

Creole Drama

Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans

Juliane Braun

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2019

ISBN 978-0-8139-4231-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4233-9 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4232-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Théâtre de la Rue St. Philippe and First Théâtre d’Orléans, details from Plan of the City and Suburbs of New Orleans (Historic New Orleans Collection, 1971.4); detail from The City of New Orleans, published by Currier & Ives (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Meinen Eltern

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Texts and Translations

Introduction

1. Circum-Atlantic Theatrical Relations: The Emergence of the Francophone Stage in a Spanish City

2. Local Struggles Past and Present: Creoles, Americans, and the Battle for Cultural Sovereignty

3. New Orleans’s Free Black Theatres: The Performance of Hemispheric Community

4. Negotiating Creole Identity: Citizenship, Belonging, and the American Nation

5. Transatlantic Vistas: Changing Alliances at Home and Abroad

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

Théâtre de Port-au-Prince, Plan Mesplès, 1782

Théâtre de Saint-Pierre, Martinique, 1786

Théâtre de la Rue St. Philippe, 1810

First Théâtre d’Orléans, 1815

Second Théâtre d’Orléans and adjoining ballroom, 1838

Théâtre de l’Opéra, or French Opera House, c. 1859–73

Camp Street Theatre, or American Theatre, c. 1830

St. Charles Theatre, 1838

Norman’s Plan of New Orleans and Environs, 1845

Louis Placide Canonge, 1864

Victor Séjour, 1874

Illustration from the title page of Séjour’s Le Martyre du cœur, 1858

Acknowledgments

As I was researching and writing this book, I have received support, guidance, and encouragement from many individuals and institutions, and I am grateful for the opportunity to name and thank them here. In the earlier stages of this project, I received generous advice from Jochen Achilles, Alfred Hornung, Brigitte Burrichter, Oliver Scheiding, and Winfried Herget. As the work developed, the guidance and insights of many colleagues and friends have helped me shape my argument. I am especially indebted to Catrin Gersdorf, Elizabeth Duquette, Werner Sollors, Lawrence Rosenwald, and Nicole Waller, who took the time to comment on portions of my manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions. Nassim Balestrini’s enthusiasm for all things theatrical and her continuous interest in my work have encouraged and motivated me when progress was slow. I am also very grateful for the conversations and friendship with John Barnard, Ulrike Blank, Anne Beer, Paul Erickson, Katharina Fackler, Annabella Fick, Julia Gold, Robert Gunn, Mathilde Köstler, Sabrina Minelli, Anja Lehmann, Susanne Leikam, Leo Lippert, Margit Peterfy, Brian Russell Roberts, Andrea Stiebritz, and Pia Wiegmink, all of whom have contributed to this project in various ways and have made ploughing through seventy years of theatre history just that much easier.

Fellowships and grants from the Graduate School for the Humanities at the University of Würzburg, the German Academic Exchange Service, the European Association for American Studies, the Bavarian American Academy, and the American Antiquarian Society allowed me to conduct essential research while providing welcome assistance with travel and living expenses. Without these opportunities, I would never have discovered the joys of archival work. At the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, I would like to especially thank Rolf Kentner, Tobias Endler, and the prize committee for honoring my work and for giving me an unforgettable evening of French opera and good conversations. While completing the manuscript, I was a visiting researcher at Auburn University, and I am very grateful to the Auburn Department of English for providing me with this opportunity.

My ability to find the materials on which this book is based depended on the skills, insights, and generosity of many librarians and archivists at Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, the University of New Orleans’s Earl K. Long Library, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Public Library, the Edith Garland Dupré Library at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library, the Library of Congress, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library, and the American Antiquarian Society. At Tulane’s Louisiana Research Collection, Kenneth Owen, Wilbur Meneray, and Leon Miller pointed me towards invaluable sources at critical junctures of my project, and I am grateful for their guidance and support. Lisa Hooper from the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library located and scanned important theatre ads when I could not access them myself, and Irene Wainwright of the New Orleans Public Library’s Louisiana Division patiently steered me through the City Council minutes and the library’s holdings on the French-language press. At the American Antiquarian Society, I am indebted to Vincent Golden, Thomas Knoles, and Caroline Sloat, all of whom offered generous advice on important sources while helping me to stay focused on the materials I really needed.

I am deeply grateful to series editors Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz for trusting me with this book and for all the encouragement they have offered along the way. Two anonymous readers for the University of Virginia Press provided indispensable feedback and helped me improve my argument. They made this book a much better work. Many thanks are also due to University of Virginia Press editor Eric Brandt, as well as to Helen Marie Chandler and Morgan Myers for shepherding this book through production. I would also like to thank Leslie Tingle for her careful copyediting and Beatrice Burton for her wonderful work with the index.

An earlier version of chapter 2 first appeared in Early American Literature 50.3 (2015): 763–95, and portions of chapter 3 were initially published in Jochen Achilles’s and Brigitte Burrichter’s essay collection Liminale Anthropologien (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012, 161–81) and in the Heidelberg Center for American Studies’ Annual Report 2013–14 (2014): 168–82. I would like to thank the University of North Carolina Press, Königshausen & Neumann, and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies for permission to publish revised versions of these essays here. I am also grateful to the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Louisiana State Museum for allowing me to include images from their collections.

For opening their houses to me and for giving me a Louisiana home away from home, I would like to sincerely thank Jennifer Lanasa Evans and Kurt Evans, as well as May and Roger Waggoner. I fondly remember our conversations over many delicious dinners, and I am so grateful for their efforts to balance my book-learning on Louisiana with countless wonderful real-life experiences. Thank you also to Anne Brabandt, Debra Garrot, and Eddie Gonzales for putting me in touch with Jennifer and May after all my attempts to find a place to stay had gone nowhere.

This book would not have been possible without my parents Peter and Marie-Luise Braun and my sister Annette, who have always supported my scholarly endeavors and enthusiastically participated in my Louisianian adventure. Their love, encouragement, and pride have carried me a long way. Finally, my biggest debt is to my partner Benjamin Fagan. He provided unwavering support when I was wavering and changed my world in so many ways.

A Note on Texts and Translations

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own. Within the text I quote non-English sources in their English translation and include the original in an endnote. In quoting from French, English, and Spanish sources, I have regularized the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orthography unless such an alteration predicated a change in meaning. Many of my sources are contemporary nineteenth-century newspapers that appeared in bilingual editions but offered separate content in each section. When I quote from the English section, I give the English title of the periodical (e.g., New Orleans Bee). When I quote from the French section, I give the French title (e.g. L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans).

Because the printed editions of the dramatic works cited in this volume do not include line numbers, I cite excerpts from plays either by page number alone or by act, scene, and page number, separated by periods. For example, 2.9.524–25 indicates act 2, scene 9, pages 524–25.

Introduction

Nineteenth-century visitors habitually described New Orleans as a hotbed of crime, violence, gambling, drinking, and prostitution—a town altogether devoid of morals. Its climate and swamp location, the poorly developed infrastructure, and the latent danger of yellow fever led many to depict the Crescent City as a place where illness and death lurked on every corner. Others more favorably inclined remarked on the city’s bustling commerce, its various amusements, and the beauty of the Creole women. Some also commented on the heterogeneity of the local population and the multiplicity of languages spoken in the streets. Truly does New-Orleans represent every other city and nation upon earth. I know of none where is congregated so great a variety of human species, of every language and colour, the New Englander Joseph Holt Ingraham observed, while one of New Orleans’s own newspapers proudly stated: New Orleans is a world in miniature, subdivided into smaller commonwealths, [in which] distinctive traits of national character are to be seen, and the peculiar language of its people is to be heard spoken.¹ In this environment the theatre emerged as one of the city’s most important political, social, and cultural institutions. It united in one place people from multiple origins and different social classes, provided distraction from the hardships of everyday life, and advanced, in the words of a local theatre director, the best interests of society by instructing its patrons in the great and permanent cause of morals.²

New Orleans’s French and Spanish colonial heritage, its relatively large number of black residents, and its history as a former Native American trading post did indeed make for an unusual blend. After the Louisiana Purchase the Crescent City accepted a constant flow of newcomers from France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Britain and gradually emerged as the second-busiest immigration port in the United States. Migrants from Saint-Domingue, Cuba, Latin America, and the northern parts of the United States also made their home in New Orleans, turning the city into a place that displayed an astonishing ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity. Recent scholars have therefore described the Crescent City as America’s first genuinely multicultural metropolis and a distinctive cultural entrepôt, where peoples from Europe and Africa initially intertwined their lives and customs with those of the native inhabitants of New Orleans.³ But as they analyze the social and cultural makeup of the city and explore its connections to Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the northern United States, a growing number of scholars no longer view New Orleans as an exotic town at the periphery of the United States, exceptional in its development and foreign in its outlook. Rather, they define the city as a key locale in alternative geographies—such as the French Atlantic, the circum-Caribbean, the American Mediterranean, and the American hemisphere—and acknowledge that, as a nexus of the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi River trade and communication systems, New Orleans was not only an important site of circum-Atlantic cultural and commercial exchange but also functioned as a gateway to and from the American West and Midwest.⁴

New Orleans’s vibrant theatre scene registered these myriad influences. It reflected the city’s diverse population, multifaceted past, and rapidly changing present. Founded by two French immigrants at a time when New Orleans was under Spanish rule, the city’s theatre culture was shaped by Caribbean influences, transatlantic exchanges, North American connections, and Latin American outlooks. For more than a hundred years the theatres in New Orleans provided a steady focal point for people from all social and ethnic walks of life. Theatres served as social centers, helped manage the city’s heterogeneous population, showcased local dramatic literature, and contributed significantly to the city’s economy. At a time of growing Anglo-American dominance, however, the theatres also represented sites of struggle over cultural sovereignty, ethnic identity, and national belonging.

In Creole Drama I follow the people who created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the Civil War. Exploring the history of the city’s various francophone stages, I examine how Louisiana’s French-speaking community defined, defended, and disseminated its French identity while simultaneously negotiating its place in the American nation, the circum-Atlantic world, and the American hemisphere.⁵ In doing so, I investigate the ways in which well-known French Louisianians such as the exiled free black dramatist Victor Séjour—as well as the lesser-known playwrights Louis Placide Canonge, Auguste Lussan, and P. E. Perénnes—intervened in current debates about political representation, slavery, US expansion, and the place of ethnic, racial, and linguistic minorities in the early United States.⁶ Although the works of these writers were favorably reviewed by the local press and in most cases also were published, these native pieces were marginalized in the repertoires of New Orleans’s French-language playhouses.⁷ Creole Drama therefore also examines portions of the imported repertoire and explains the relevance of these French plays for an audience far removed from its former mother country.⁸ By looking through the lens of theatre to analyze social, political, and cultural developments in antebellum New Orleans, I hope to provide not only a detailed history of francophone theatre in New Orleans but also an account of the surprising ways in which multilingualism and early transnational networks informed the creation of the American nation.

Even though New Orleans’s francophone residents outnumbered any other ethnic group in the city until the 1830s, their importance started to decline with the growing influx of Anglo-American migrants after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. From the 1820s onwards, an intense rivalry between the anglophone and francophone populations dominated New Orleans’s political, economic, and social life.⁹ In this context the theatre assumed for the francophone population the roles of sanctuary of good traditions, barrier, and safest bulwark against the invasion of which our language is threatened.¹⁰ Newspaper writers and local residents viewed the theatre as the most powerful weapon in the ongoing battle to preserve the French language in Louisiana and saw a clear connection between the success of the theatre and the viability of the francophone community. Whenever the Théâtre d’Orléans, the city’s most important francophone playhouse, was struggling financially, the press appealed to the French-speaking residents of New Orleans to attend the performances because that meant that they simultaneously professed their love for French Louisiana and the old mother country. Let us never abandon the Théâtre d’Orléans, this old guardian of the language of our fathers. For this is an act of patriotism, and we are holding [everyone] to it, one newspaper declared when it was uncertain if the Théâtre d’Orléans would survive for another season.¹¹ Another newspaper described the Théâtre d’Orléans as a patriotic institution and demanded that the local French-speaking population attend the performances on a regular basis.¹² Supporting the theatre, then, was an act of patriotic duty for the francophone population and helped them to ward off what they viewed as harmful Anglo-American influence.¹³

While on the one hand preserving the linguistic heritage of Louisiana’s francophone population, the very Frenchness of the Théâtre d’Orléans paradoxically also helped them bridge the cultural gap to their English-speaking neighbors. Its high-quality performances and elegant venue attracted patrons from both factions who sat side by side watching the spectacles presented on its stage. During the intermission they shared in conversations about the performance and began, according to one francophone newspaper, to see each other in a different light. From this came an exchange of good sentiments that taught both groups to appreciate what the other valued, ultimately leading them to realize that each had its good side making it worthy of affection and esteem from the other.¹⁴ Newspaper writers and theatre directors consequently cast the Théâtre d’Orléans as a place that strips the [anglophone population] of its prejudices, makes them acknowledge the elegance and urbanity of [French] habits, and educates US Americans in French customs and traditions.¹⁵ The Théâtre d’Orléans, one newspaper concluded, was the hyphen that unit[ed] the old and new population and constituted a political necessity, for without it, the division that exist[ed] already between the two populations would become deeper.¹⁶

In 1845 the introduction of bilingual programs made French theatricals more accessible to nonfrancophone audiences not only from New Orleans but from across the United States. Such performances gave the Théâtre d’Orléans, as one local newspaper writer put it, a more national physiognomy.¹⁷ Known for its grand productions, superior performances, elegant venue, and the decorum exhibited in the auditorium, the Théâtre d’Orléans had long attracted visitors from across the American continent and Europe. Many had seen theatrical productions in other American cities and most agreed with visiting actor Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro, who judged that our American theatres are a thousand miles behind the little French theatre in New Orleans.¹⁸ Even the critical New Englander Joseph Holt Ingraham, who visited the Théâtre d’Orléans on one of its weaker nights in the 1830s, was forced to admit that "in general, strangers consider the tout ensemble of [the Théâtre d’Orléans] on Sabbath evenings, and on others when the élite of the New Orleans society is collected there, decidedly superior to that of any other in the United States."¹⁹ By maintaining high standards and consistency throughout the antebellum period, the theatre’s directors succeeded in establishing the Théâtre d’Orléans as an institution of national relevance and international renown.

In addition to providing spaces for diverse audiences to come together to witness New Orleans’s superior productions, the city’s francophone theatre also emerged as a key economic engine. During the theatrical season New Orleans exuded a sensual splendor, and the city bustled with commercial activity.²⁰ All the states of the Union . . . send us their most beautiful ladies, their most fashionable begloved, all longing for entertainment and novelty, a reporter for Le Courrier observed. This moneyed crowd, the reporter continued, lets the sidewalks of the city quaver during the day, . . . animating the shops, and boutiques . . . [and] when the evening comes, the streets cede the crowds to the theatre.²¹ Every grand production at the Théâtre d’Orléans generated immense sums as theatre patrons raided local shops for appropriate attire and jewelry, dined in the restaurants of the city, and spent their money in the local hotels and gambling and drinking establishments.²² These pre- and post-theatrical activities contributed to the economy of the entire city, but they were especially important for the economy of the old French Quarter. In the 1820s and 1830s the Quarter’s commerce had lost ground, and by the mid-1840s its businesses had been supplanted by new ventures in the American sections of the city. For the French-speaking community, then, the Théâtre d’Orléans constituted not only a cultural institution but also an economic stronghold. The existence of the Théâtre d’Orléans brings prosperity to [the French part of town], one newspaper stated in 1849, while another newspaper writer expressed his conviction that, should the Théâtre d’Orléans ever be shut down, its closure would deliver the final blow to numerous businesses that only survived because of the wealth [the theatre] attracted.²³ Without the theatre, this writer concluded, the French Quarter would be deserted and its businesses doomed.

In addition to bringing much-needed money to the city in general and to its francophone areas in particular, the French-language theatre in New Orleans also became an important site for showcasing francophone literature written by Louisianian writers. Almost immediately after Louisiana’s transfer to the United States, the local francophone press began to lament the impending decline of the French-speaking population. By the 1830s a discourse emerged in the French-language press that connected the cultural survival of the French-speaking community to the creation of a local, francophone body of literature. Such a literature was initially imagined to closely identify with that of France, but newspaper writers and community leaders soon began to argue for a Louisianian literature that distinguished itself sharply from that of the French mother country.²⁴ The literature of Louisiana must emit an indigenous scent; it must have entirely local characteristics, bear the imprint of our ideas, be shaped by the influence of our climate, one periodical stated.²⁵ And for the writers of another local newspaper the creation of a francophone literary tradition native to Louisiana signified the region’s last step in a long process of shedding its colonial past. We believe, they declared, that Louisiana must have . . . its own literature, its own poets, its own novelists, its own historians, its own playwrights . . . born on this soil because the culture of the arts has always been one of the last words in all civilizations.²⁶ With a literary tradition of its own, these writers hoped, Louisiana would finally be able to overcome its reputation as a backward and disease-ridden colony and be recognized as a civilized and progressive state.

The theatre became the focal point of a campaign that promoted the creation of a francophone literary tradition native to Louisiana.²⁷ The Théâtre d’Orléans, one newspaper reported, generously opened its doors [to Louisianian literature and art] and provided an arena in which Louisiana’s numerous poets and musicians could exhibit their work and establish themselves.²⁸ Theatre managers considered incentives for imported actors so that they would settle permanently in Louisiana, . . . founding acting dynasties [that] would [then] interpret . . . indigenous poetry.²⁹ Despite these declarations, however, local writers struggled to have their works produced on the stages of New Orleans’s francophone theatres. The call for the creation of a native Louisianian literature had generated an impressive body of works, but theatre managers continued to rely mostly on imported pieces.³⁰ In some cases they complained about the quality of the local works and rejected them outright. In other cases they only scheduled them for a few nights or listed them as benefit performances. New Orleans managers ran their theatres with a keen eye on their pocketbooks, and imported pieces seemed to have attracted larger audiences. The works that did make it onto the local stages, however, can tell us much about the sensibilities and concerns of Louisiana’s francophone population. Creole Drama recovers these pieces and reads them in the context of New Orleans’s theatre history and the francophone community’s struggle to maintain their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty in the face of growing Anglo-American dominance.

While the francophone theatres in New Orleans staged various kinds of productions, including opera, drama, and ballet, I concentrate exclusively on the production and reception of spoken drama. This narrow focus allows me to explore in depth the rich yet understudied body of dramatic literature native to Louisiana and to tease out how that literature reflected and engaged with questions and issues specific to New Orleans’s francophone community. I have also chosen to center my study around formally designated theatre buildings. To be sure, the Crescent City’s theatrical activities spread beyond the boundaries of such structures, as plays were performed in private homes and salons, circus tents and ballrooms, city streets and parks. Without discounting the importance of such performances and venues, I focus on the material conditions of designated playhouses, such as a building’s architecture, interior characteristics, admission policies, and seating arrangements in order to uncover how the theatre as a cultural institution and as a social and political space operated.³¹ In doing so, I trace the crucial ways in which playhouses and the performances that occurred within them worked to maintain the relevance of New Orleans’s francophone community in the antebellum city, while I also demonstrate how they connected that community to a variety of local, national, and transnational networks.

In analyzing the French-language theatre in New Orleans, this book joins a growing body of scholarship that reintegrates non-English-speaking societies and their cultural productions into the field of American literary and cultural studies.³² Even though the number of critical studies on theatre and drama has grown considerably since Susan Harris Smith’s famous denunciation of American drama as the bastard art, the non-English-language theatre, especially in its early incarnations, has received little critical attention.³³ The few existing scholarly works on American theatre and drama in languages other than English largely treat the non-English-language theatre as a transient and isolated phenomenon emerging from minority groups, rather than a valuable contribution to the larger trajectory of American theatre and drama.³⁴ Such an approach, however, marginalizes early ethnic theatre and drama and foregrounds resistance and the desire for cultural survival, rather than emphasizing the role of minority groups in the formation of other cultural entities and communities beyond the nation-state. In Minor Transnationalism Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih challenge this tendency to examine minority cultures solely within the binary of assimilation and resistance; instead they explore the complexity inherent to minority cultures, emerging networks between different minority communities, and productive minority-majority relationships. Building on these powerful insights, Creole Drama focuses on processes of cultural exchange that cross artificially drawn borders, circumnavigate oceans, and integrate alternative geographic spaces.

During the antebellum era, New Orleans’s francophone theatres emerged as key venues for the creation of such cultural exchanges. Following Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s conception of the early American playhouse as a cultural site at which the dynamics of political belonging, modern sovereignty, and aesthetics [were] coarticulated, I consider how drama performed at local theatres both reflected and helped negotiate continuing tensions between the city’s multiple linguistic communities.³⁵ Following the work of Jeffrey D. Mason, I see theatre as a product, an expression, and an integral constituent of its culture.³⁶ I also contend, along the lines of Jeffrey H. Richards’s influential work, that theatre functions as one of the registers and molders of identity.³⁷ Much of the scholarship on early American theatre specifically links the emergence of theatre as an institution to the formation of national identity. Heather S. Nathans, for example, explores the process of nation-building as it was played out via the construction of theaters.³⁸ Jason Shaffer, too, investigates the intimate relationship between stage and state, and S. E. Wilmer demonstrates the importance of drama and theatrical performance in . . . the process of representing and challenging notions of national identity.³⁹ In Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic, however, Richards departs from such correlations between theatre and national identity, arguing that plays reflected and shaped a host of identities, many of them having little directly to do with the political re-creation of the colonies as a distinct ‘nation.’⁴⁰ Foregrounding the multiplicity of social and cultural affiliation in early America, Richards contends that people in the United States would have found themselves allied to or rejected from a variety of communities within and beyond the nation.⁴¹

In my own investigation of antebellum theatre and drama, I seek to reconcile these seemingly opposing views. By examining the multiple ways in which the francophone population of New Orleans negotiated questions of belonging and citizenship in and through the theatre, I show how the city’s French-language playhouses registered and shaped the francophone population’s affiliations with local, national, and transnational communities in New Orleans, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. As an institution that both inhabited and transcended national identity, the francophone theatre in New Orleans reflected the ways in which the city’s French-speaking residents attempted to reconcile their desire to be full citizens in an increasingly anglophone United States with their unwillingness to abandon a culture rooted in the French Atlantic.

Creole Drama shows how, within and around the playhouse, New Orleans’s francophone population engaged with questions of creolization, Americanization, and belonging. Chapter 1 offers an institutional history of the francophone theatre in New Orleans and examines its role in the city’s political and social fabric. By exploring how immigrants from France and refugees from the Haitian Revolution shaped the French-language theatre in New Orleans, I trace the processes of circum-Atlantic cultural exchange that led to the formation of a francophone theatrical culture that blended Old and New World influences. These processes of creolization initially produced a theatre culture that was able to thrive despite Spanish antitheatre legislation and American competition. The struggle of the city’s francophone theatres, I suggest, truly began when their directors renounced creolization and their theatres’ Caribbean roots in favor of bilateral transatlantic exchanges with France.

I turn to an analysis of Louisiana’s dramatic literature in chapter 2, which examines local battles for political and cultural sovereignty. The rivalry between the older Creole population and the Anglo-American newcomers not only manifested itself in the streets of New Orleans, in the pages of the local newspapers, and in heated debates in the city council; it also occurred in the city’s many playhouses. Focusing on Auguste Lussan’s Les Martyrs de la Louisiane (1839) and Louis Placide Canonge’s France et Espagne ou La Louisiane en 1768 et 1769 (1850), I analyze how these two dramatists recast the 1768 rebellion of French Louisianians against the Spanish colonial administration in order to comment on the marginalization of the francophone community in the first half of the nineteenth century. By juxtaposing their plays with Thomas Wharton Collens’s The Martyr Patriots (1836), an English-language piece on the same subject, I tease out how ethnic rivalries and the discussion over the creation of a literature native to Louisiana seeped into the writing of all three dramatists.

Chapter 3 investigates the theatrical traditions of New Orleans’s free people of color and their engagement with other communities in the American hemisphere. By analyzing theatre legislation, debates on urban development, and the discussions surrounding black theatre patrons, I recover the history of the Théâtre Marigny and the Théâtre de la Renaissance, two playhouses that were run by and for free people of color. I argue that, although the free black tradition emerged out of discontent with white theatre policies, the city’s two black theatres imagined themselves as sites of racial reconciliation. Through an analysis of seven of the most popular plays performed at these theatres, I show that the city’s black playhouses composed their repertoire in a way that responded to issues specifically relevant to the free black community: plaçage, Haiti, and Latin American emigration.

Chapter 4 returns to questions of creolization and Americanization by exploring the different ways in which the members of New Orleans’s French-speaking population attempted to formulate their own claim to an American national identity. I contend that in order to be able to participate in political processes, French Louisianians increasingly rejected their French heritage and championed American ideals and institutions. In La Famille créole (1837) Auguste Lussan foregrounded the specific qualities people born outside of the perimeters of the United States could contribute to the American nation, while Louis Placide Canonge’s version of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1846) sought to educate other francophone Louisianians in American patriotism as the country was preparing for war with Mexico.

Chapter 5 moves across the Atlantic to the free black community in Paris, offering one example of how Louisiana Creole identity was negotiated from abroad. In the metropolitan capital Victor Séjour, a free man of color from New Orleans, became one of the most celebrated dramatists of his day. Through his short story Le Mulâtre (1837) and his dramatic piece Le Martyre du cœur (1858), Séjour commented on the political situation of his native and adopted countries and intervened in current debates about slave emancipation and the status of free people of color in the Atlantic world. Through its analysis of Séjour’s works, this chapter not only reveals the international and multilingual reach of the antislavery campaign but also provides a transatlantic perspective on the disintegration of the American nation on the eve of the Civil War.

By devoting a chapter each to circum-Atlantic, local, hemispheric, national, and transatlantic relations, I engage with different scales of transnationalism. As I focus on these multiple, overlapping geographies, I address the range and diversity of Louisiana’s transnational connections and emphasize the many ways in which local formations generate and powerfully inflect national as well as transnational outlooks. By recovering the archive of the francophone drama of Louisiana, I also intervene in conventional narratives of American literary history that focus predominantly on English-language texts while casting a new light on processes of cultural exchange, struggles over political agency, and changing power relations. Ultimately,