Louisiana Culture From the Colonial Era to Katrina (review)

It's easy to pick a piece of Louisiana culture—or anything in the South, for that matter—and reduce it to an easily consumable thing. Mardi Gras, music, religion, politics, architecture, race, food: the list goes on. Whatever the item, that thing is a unique and important piece, a part of something larger than the city of New Orleans, the Louisiana Purchase, and even America. In a time where contemporary notions of Louisiana center on seasonal events or catastrophes, Louisiana Culture From the Colonial Era to Katrina explores a more linear history that helps give understanding to the whys and hows of the more cyclical identities of Louisiana and Louisianans.

From the introduction of the five-part collection of essays (one edition in the Southern Literary Studies series), editor John Lowe posits the origin of the trajectory of this book in a study of place. Lowe leans on the words of Mississippi native Eudora Welty:

It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are. Place absorbs our earliest notice and attention, it bestows upon us our original awareness; and our critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth and experiences inside it.... One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives us equilibrium; extended, it is send of direction too.

(1)

Welty's words resonate primarily because the book provides a linear look that explains how such a truly diverse region of our country could produce all too often collective, simplistic, and tourist-ready pieces of identity.

Louisiana Culture digs deep to the bone in "Part 1: Indian, French, Spanish, African, German: The Early Origins of a Unique Culture." Spanning from Native Americans to slavery, the three essays that begin this collection—and the (re)examination of the region's identity—challenge the conventional epistemology too long ignored. With claims like Germain Bienvenu's assertion that "possibly no American colonial literature manifests as total and positive a consensus toward Native Americans as does the canon of writings from Louisiana's first French domination" (44), the essays in this part initiate a beginning to the goal laid out by Mr. Lowe in the introduction: "We also intend for this collection to inspire a new meditation on history" (16).

Part 2 explores the question of Creolization and juxtaposes two essays—the first with a broader lens on the issue, and the second with a more focused approach on the complications of race relations—that not only complement each other but illustrate the beautiful complexities of looking at Louisiana with a mixture of broad understanding and reconciling specific anecdotal evidence. The movement in the mind at this point in the book has the reader realizing he is heeding Lowe's call to action.

Peggy Whitman Prenshaw's Part 3 essay, "Louisiana and the American Literary Tradition," glosses over some of the more notable writers and instances in Louisiana literary history before reaching the summation—drawing from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces protagonist leaving Louisiana—that Louisiana "is a fascinating, sensuous place that galvanizes the imagination. It is a good place for writers—and readers" (158). Reading on to the next essay, Lowe's "The Carnival Voices of A Confederacy of Dunces," and through "Part 4: Louisiana Mythologies, from the Kingfish to the Peculiar Fascination with the Dead," Prenshaw's seemingly simple assertion holds up on its own. Together, with the book as a whole, Louisiana Culture's single essays weave a complex, accessible, and enjoyable readjusting of the reader's understanding of the region.

The book's final three essays incorporate another noted Louisiana trope: music. Brenda Marie Osbey's "One More Last Chance: Ritual and the Jazz Funeral" is a fitting penultimate essay. Miss Osbey provides a context that serves the entire volume, and perhaps due to its placement in the text seems a good place to bring the book home, though it could easily also be the...