Wetland Americas: Mapping a Literary History of New Orleans and Louisiana

My dissertation begins as a response to the socio-economic and environmental crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina. Inspired by a call for “nonsovereign” histories of the storm, I view these twinned crises through a postcolonial lens and consider the category of the nation inadequate to the task of accounting for what happened in New Orleans. With firm roots in Literature, my method is informed by the hemispheric school of American Studies, which pushes the city beyond its regional confines in the U.S. South and reframes it in relation to a number of different scales: the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, Latin(a) America, the Global South. While these frames capture a fuller portion of New Orleans’s complex history, they tend to focus on the city’s vital relationship to other places, what geographers call its “situation,” and to overlook its “site,” the actual wetlands terrain it occupies. Because such approaches foreground social and economic concerns, the environment remains an abstract landscape: culture is separated from nature, and the historical connection between the two falls out of the picture. As sites of cultural contact in tension with the nation, as well as these other geopolitical scales, wetlands merge this separation and bring an ecocritical dimension to the hemispheric studies project. While tracing an ongoing entanglement of nature and culture, I argue for the historical place of wetlands in understanding the racial and economic disparity revealed in the flood caused by Katrina. My project centers on New Orleans, but the settlement of Louisiana and the lower Mississippi River Valley offers a broader case study for mapping the diverse and overlapping literatures that shaped this history. Within these real and imagined American geographies, I examine the material and discursive practices through which swamps and other wetlands landscapes became entangled with concepts of race as part of the same colonial processes. My study begins at the end of the nineteenth century, in the New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable. As I explore the place of environment in their works, set amid the culture clash following the Louisiana Purchase, I argue that the wetlands and the tropics, as postcolonial creole spaces, reemerge periodically to disrupt the inevitable progress of the nation. Returning to colonial Louisiana, I then trace the emergence of the wetlands as a category of knowledge through a series of encounters with ciénagas, swamps, and marais. In a network of early American texts and translations, including El Inca Garcilaso, William Bartram, and Chateaubriand, I consider how discourses of race and landscape coincided across a range of narrative forms. With attention to the structural endurance of Louisiana’s plantation system and a reconsideration of the figure of the slave in the swamp, I conclude in the nineteenth-century U.S. with the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Solomon Northup, and Martin Delany. In the light of this long view, the post-Katrina present does not represent a rupture of the U.S. national narrative. Rather, when embedded within the life of the wetlands, marked by periodic returns to mud and water, it is a moment continuous with an uneven, hemispheric history of the Americas