Black Women Activists In Nineteenth Century New Orleans

The names Marie Laveaux and Henriette Delille have become synonymous with Vodou and Catholic charity respectively in scholarship. Laveaux and Delille were born femmes de couleur libres, or free women of color, a social class that enabled them to overcome barriers that limited black women activism in nineteenth-century New Orleans. These women were quadroons or octoroons who were expected to engage in placage unions with wealthy, white European men, which had been a matrilineal custom for generations. However, Laveaux and Delille chose a life of service to others rather than a life of privilege. This book explores how Laveaux and Delille used their faith-based practices to address the needs of the city’s poor, enslaved, and disenfranchised populations. It provides readers with an interest in cultural studies, religious and spiritual studies, and gender studies with an introduction to Laveaux and Delille as black women activists in nineteenth-century New Orleans.

Modern American Spiritualism blossomed in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Creole Faubourgs of Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. Melissa Daggett focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey (1831-1894), a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has so far remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans history, partly due to a language barrier. Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans focuses on the turbulent years between the late antebellum period and the end of Reconstruction. Translating and interpreting numerous primary sources and one of the only surviving registers of séance proceedings, Daggett has opened a window into a fascinating life as well as a period of tumult and change. She provides unparalleled insights into the history of the Creoles of color and renders a better understanding of New Orleans's complex history. The author weaves an intriguing tale of the supernatural, of chaotic post-bellum politics, of transatlantic linkages, and of the personal triumphs and tragedies of Rey as a notable citizen and medium. Wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs, many of which have never before appeared in published form, accompany this study of Rey and his world.

Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture sheds light on women's rights advancements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century through explorations of literature and culture from this time period. With an international emphasis, contributors illuminate the range and diversity of women’s work as novelists, journalists, and short story writers and analyze the New Woman phenomenon, feminist impulse, and the diversity of the women writers. Studying writing by authors such as Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Netta Syrett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, and Jean Rhys, the contributors analyze women’s voices and works on the subject of women’s rights and the representation of the New Woman.

This four-volume set examines every social movement in American history - from the great struggles for abolition, civil rights, and women's equality to the more specific quests for prohibition, consumer safety, unemployment insurance, and global justice.

The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender identifies, defines, and interrogates the construct of gender in all forms of jazz, jazz culture, and education, shaping and transforming the conversation in response to changing cultural and societal norms across the globe. Such interrogation requires consideration of gender from multiple viewpoints, from scholars and artists at various points in their careers. This edited collection of 38 essays gathers the diverse perspectives of contributors from four continents, exploring the nuanced (and at times controversial) construct of gender as it relates to jazz music, in the past and present, in four parts: Historical Perspectives Identity and Culture Society and Education Policy and Advocacy Acknowledging the art form’s troubled relationship with gender, contributors seek to define the construct to include all possible definitions—not only female and male—without binary limitations, contextualizing gender and jazz in both place and time. As gender identity becomes an increasingly important consideration in both education and scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender provides a broad and inclusive resource of research for the academic community, addressing an urgent need to reconcile the construct of gender in jazz in all its forms.

While paratexts – among them headnotes, footnotes, or endnotes – have never been absent from American literature, the last two decades have seen an explosion of the phenomenon, including (mock) scholarly footnotes, to an extent that they seem to take over the text itself. In this Special Focus we shall attempt to find the reasons for this astonishing development. In our first (diachronic) section we shall explore such texts as might have fostered the present boom, from fictions by Edgar Allan Poe to Vladimir Nabokov to Mark Z. Danielewski. The second (synchronic) section, will concentrate on paratexts by David Foster Wallace, perhaps the “father” of the post-postmodern footnote, as well as those to be found in novels by Bennett Sims, Jennifer Egan and Junot Diaz, among others. It appears that, while paratexts definitely point to a high degree of self-reflexivity in the author, they equally draw attention to the textual and authorial functions of the works in which they exist. They can thus cause a reflection on the boundaries between genres like fiction, faction, and autobiography, as well as serving to highlight a host of pedagogical and social concerns that exist in the interstices between fiction and reality.

Theories of Race and Racismis an important and innovative collection that brings together the work of scholars who have helped to shape the study of race and racism as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. The Reader'scontributons have been chosen to reflect the different theoretical perspectives and to help readers gain a feel for the changing terms of the race and racism debate over time. Theories of Race and Racismis divided into the following main sections: Origins and Transformations Sociology, Race and Social Theory Racism and Anti-Semetism Colonialism, Race and the Other Feminism, Difference and Identity Changing Boundaries and Spaces The editors go futher to shed light on the relatively new areas of interest that are likely to attract attention in years to come. Contributors include; Theodor Adorno, K. Anthony Appiah, Michael Banton, Zygmunt Bauman, Ruth Benedict , Homi Bhabha, Chetan Bhatt, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Avtar Brah, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Oliver C. Cox, Richard Dyer, Frantz Fanon, Ruth Frankenberg, Sander Gilman, Paul Gilroy, David T. Goldberg, Stuart Hall, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Max Horkheimer, Winthrop Jordan, Michael Keith, Anne McClintock, Kobena Mercer, Robert Miles, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, George Mosse, Gunnar Myrda, Robert Park, John Rex, John Solomos, Stephen Steinberg, Ann Laura Stoler, Tzvetan Todorov, Russo and Lourdes Torres, Patrica Williams, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Howard Winant, Lola Young, Slavoj Zizek.

The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.