Social Lives: Nineteenth-Century New Orleans in Literature

Open Access
- Author:
- Stevens, Erica Diane
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 26, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Sean X. Goudie, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Christopher Castiglia, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Hester Maureen Blum, Committee Member
Christopher Castiglia, Committee Member
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Outside Member - Keywords:
- New Orleans
sociality
social life
regionalism
Reconstruction
African-American literature
nineteenth century
nineteenth-century literature
American literature - Abstract:
- Social Lives: Nineteenth-Century New Orleans in Literature is about two major subjects: the idea of the social in the nineteenth century and New Orleans in literary imagination. These two subjects intersect for both obvious and less-obvious reasons. New Orleans is, of course, the nation’s depository and hub for fun, freedom, and cultural exchange. I argue that connotations of celebration, as in a “social event,” are not divorced from what we see as sociological interaction. Thus, many of my readings of texts emphasize moments of excessive pleasure and desire, or meditations on collectivities in carnivalesque action. I pair a desire for Otherness in local-color writing with the discourse of “social equality,” or, for another example, antebellum quadroon balls with postbellum prognostications of large-scale racial “miscegenation.” In other words, I argue that New Orleans shows us how social order and sociality’s affects overlap and influence one another throughout the nineteenth century. Social Lives contributes to the fields of aesthetics, transnationalism, and African-American literature especially where they intersect with notions of publicity or collectivity. A large body of scholarship posits a pure form of (social) interaction as prior to and more real than any recognizable or named social order. My intervention involves exploring the way that nineteenth-century texts theorize the idea of the social before the professionalization of sociology. My dissertation finds that there are many more ways that the social takes formal shape at different scales of the local, regional, and global. Moreover, part of my interest is to emphasize New Orleans’s importance to African-American literature—not a surprising claim but one, I argue, that has not been examined as a distinctly social issue, as opposed to the many studies of cultural traditions in the city. This new understanding of New Orleans’s social lives engages issues surrounding slavery and the “Negro Problem” in the nineteenth century, showing how New Orleans helped writers to understand their aesthetic and political projects. The “social” looks different in each of the project’s chapters in order to capture its mobility and ambiguity in reference to structure, relation, interaction, or entertainment. My archive challenges the narrative of “Americanization” as a contested and teleological process in the nineteenth century.