My book, Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans, shows how New Orleans’s francophone population used the theatre to maintain their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty in the face of growing Anglo-American dominance.
Follow this link to buy a copy: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5146
The francophone battle for cultural survival unfolded not only on the local stages, but connected people and places in the early United States, across the American hemisphere, and in the Atlantic world. Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. In doing so, my book draws upon the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of documents from both sides of the Atlantic, teasing out how the members of Louisiana’s French-speaking community intervened in current debates about political representation, slavery, US expansion, and the place of ethnic and racial minorities in the early Americas. Creole Drama offers not only a detailed history of francophone theatre in New Orleans, but also an account of the surprising ways in which multilingualism and early transnational networks helped create the American nation. More…
My new project, tentatively titled Translating the Pacific: Nature Writing, Print Culture and the Making of Transoceanic Empire explores how imperial incursions into the Pacific during the long eighteenth century shaped conceptions of nature and the environment in the Atlantic world. Drawing upon a wide range of sources from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, I investigate how early naturalists from England, France, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States described and catalogued the plants, animals, and peoples they encountered in the Pacific. Once on the page, these descriptions were modified through translation and re-publication in ways that served specific political and commercial agendas in Europe and the early United States. Such modifications, I argue, profoundly influenced prevailing understandings of nature and its uses, creating new epistemologies which inspired and supported the transoceanic ambitions of early American empire. Anchored in transnational American studies, my project brings together theories and methods from translation studies, the environmental humanities, book history, and print culture studies. Adopting a hemispheric view of the early Americas, I explore not only writings emerging from and focusing on the British colonies in North America and the United States, but also works that engage with Latin America and the Caribbean. My project thus emphasizes the interplay between different American spaces while foregrounding the key role that the Pacific played in creating such connections. More…