Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by Rien Fertel (review)

If the discussions in my class on New Orleans literature are any indication, who (or what) is considered “Creole” is still hotly contested. However, the students in these classes all seem to have a common sense that being Creole means being of Louisiana and that being a New Orleans Creole is a unique designation. The Creoles and the New Orleans literary culture profiled in Rien Fertel’s new book might have succeeded in leaving their imprint beyond print. Fertel’s study, like Catharine Savage Brosman’s Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study (Jackson, Miss., 2013), considers key figures who shaped, performed, and galvanized a notion of white francophone Creole identity in the long nineteenth century. Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, however, offers a more in-depth and critical perspective on how constructions of Creole subjectivity varied considerably from the era of Americanization following the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution, through Reconstruction, and into the decades of Jim Crow segregation.

In his introduction, Fertel asserts that recent studies have focused on Creoles of color and their cultural contributions to New Orleans’s early literary scene, while his study addresses a set of figures (and texts) previously neglected. Fertel rejects their diminished place in history and asserts their active production and consumption of print culture. Remaining attentive to the racial and ethnic politics of these writers, however, he maps a trajectory for how and why, in the era of Reconstruction and after, a “whole Creole literary circle … turned toward championing their whiteness rather than, as they had for the past four decades, their Frenchness” (p. 73). While he provides critical consideration of this mobilization of “Creoleness” in the service of white supremacist movements, he does not provide the same context for early-nineteenth-century Creole appropriations of “nativeness” in relation to the ongoing colonization of the indigenous tribes of the Gulf South region. For example, his portrayal of poet and priest Adrien Roquette, who lived full-time among the Choctaws for much of his life, does not address the colonial dynamics at play.

One of Fertel’s contributions is his portrayal of how white French Creoles imagined their relationship to the United States and France in more complex ways than previous studies have allowed, arguing that rather than impeding Americanization in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, French Creoles like Charles Gayarré proposed Creole identity as a kind of bridge between French culture and the newly arrived American culture in the service of a “‘most intimate union’” (p. 18). Representative of the transnational turn in the field, Fertel’s book suggests that white francophone Creole print culture ought not to be claimed as “French” or “American” but “as a product of transnational and multicultural, nationalizing and Americanizing processes” (p. 9). At the micro level, Fertel’s study includes intriguing and well-researched archival material detailing church feuds, Athénée Louisianais organizational dramas, and wars over words in the many city newspapers of the nineteenth century.

In understanding the multivalent legacies of the architects of Creole culture, Fertel’s interdisciplinary approach to historical narratives, poetry, political essays, and fiction is welcome and effective. Revealing the unreliability of constructions of Creole subjectivity and history, he carefully examines their mobilizing power in the service of divergent political investments. From the “suspect” mythical histories spun in Charles Gayarré’s lectures, to George Washington Cable’s barbed portrayals of the tangled branches of Creole family trees, to Grace King’s “beautifying” hagiographic history Creole Families of New Orleans (1921), Creoleness was always in dynamic relation to its moment (pp. 28, 101). And so, from this study, an important genealogy of New Orleans’s contentious print culture emerges.