From Field to Faubourg: Race, Labor, and Craft Economies in Nineteenth-Century Creole New Orleans

Summary

The effects of the Haitian Revolution on the city of New Orleans have been the subject of historical inquiry for several decades. Scholars have detailed the political and cultural transformations that were set into motion when some 10,000 refugees arrived in the port city from the Saint-Domingue. While it is acknowledged that they contributed heavily to everyday practices in New Orleans, the extent to which the refugees - and free people of color in particular - actively sought to preserve the lifestyle that had developed on Saint-Domingue’s plantations remains unknown. This paper asks, how did the refugees - and their physical and symbolic relationship to the plantation - shape the urban landscape of early New Orleans? Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the semi-autonomous Creole faubourgs fostered the development of nineteenth-century Creole aesthetic practices and livelihoods, enabling a critique of not only the plantation but the city’s racialized political economy as well.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017   •
• Afterlives of Slavery on the Post-Emancipation Caribbean Plantation

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 555