Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans by Juliane Braun (review)

Juliane Braun's Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans is an excellent and timely entry into an untreated area of theatre and antebellum history: francophone New Orleans examined through what Braun calls the "lens of theatre" (3). Braun's study follows renewed scholarly interest in theatre of the colonial and early national periods, with New Orleans serving as a key site to reconsider transnational geographies of early American history. Braun moves beyond a binary of assimilation and resistance to highlight the "often-conflicting strategies" whereby the city's diverse francophone communities positioned themselves in the national, regional, and Atlantic worlds. Theatre served as a vital touchstone for preservation of French language, even as the relationship between Creole and American identity shifted. If early New Orleans theatre helped nurture a Creole identity tied to the Caribbean and Louisiana's French and Spanish settlers, by midcentury the white francophone population came to embrace a Franco–American identity that redefined "Creole" characteristics around whiteness.

Creole Drama begins by charting the Caribbean roots of New Orleans theatre from 1792 on, as migrants from the French Atlantic, particularly during the Haitian Revolution, flocked to New Orleans, at the time a Spanish colonial possession but with a robust francophone community. The founding of the Théâtre d'Orlèans in the early 1800s strengthened cultural ties with France, from which it recruited performers and musicians, plays, and costumes, while also emerging as the center of economic and cultural life of the city's French Quarter. This was especially important in the 1830s when the city was divided into districts along ethnic lines. Braun speculates that the Théâtre d'Orlèans retained its vibrancy even while the French-speaking population dwindled because it served as a touchstone for the city's French culture. Theatre remained central in the struggle for "relevance" of the city's francophone community, while at different moments engaging particular conceptions of "belonging and citizenship" that drew on "local, national, and transnational networks" (7). Braun shows how, by midcentury, ties with France eclipsed French Caribbean origins, further helping to consolidate a white Creole Franco American identity aligned with the United States.

While imported repertoire came to dominate francophone theatre, Braun shows how local dramatists drew on Louisiana history or reinterpreted popular novels and plays in ways that spoke to pressing questions of francophone identity. She likewise considers how staging of imported dramas could speak to local struggles. Take Braun's treatment of three different plays about the Rebellion of 1768, situated in relation to shifting city politics. Braun contrasts English playwright Thomas Wharton Collens's 1836 treatment, which looks toward Louisiana's incorporation into the United States, with the very different francophone interpretations by Auguste Lusan (1839) and Louis Placide Canonge (1850). Lusan and Canonge each emphasize the city's French roots while grappling with the possibilities of cross-cultural cooperation. Braun reads Canonge's France et Espagne ou La Louisiane en 1768 et 1769 (France and Spain or Louisiana in 1768 and 1769) as expressing the growing disillusionment of the city's dwindling French-speaking community and declining commitment to French culture. Braun thus shows how treatments of local history mobilized contemporary questions about identity and belonging.

The growing importance of cultural ties with France coupled with white anglophone dominance of the city had implications for race and francophone identity as well. Canonge returns in a later chapter's treatment of his retelling of the Count de Monte-Christo, which exemplifies white francophone enthusiasm for American republicanism during the U.S.–Mexico War. Braun shows how, by midcentury, the Franco American identity further involved the exclusion of people of color from Creole identity coupled with an embrace of nativism. Earlier in 1837, Auguste Lusan sought to dramatize a vision of La Famille crèole (The Creole Family...