The Strange History of the American Quadroon
Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a "quadroon," she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans's free women of color.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her lively, comprehensive book, Clark (Masterless Mistresses) broaches society's historical fascination with quadroons officially, people whose racial make-up is one-quarter African. Setting out to illuminate the amorphous station of quadroons in American society, the author follows the relationship between immigrants from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) and two maritime cities, Philadelphia and New Orleans. In one of many astute observations, Clark suggests that the country's fixation on quadroons in the early 19th Century constituted a psychological safety net of sorts, staving off contemplation of the assumed-fearsome black males in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Overviewing Noel Carriere's extensive influence on the partnering practices of free blacks in New Orleans, Clark then outlines the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of a marriage explosion within marginalized communities. In consolidating and quoting from literary stories that popularized the "tragic mulatto", she demonstrates a broad familiarity with the artistic and social responses to the fabled quadroon. The bounty of historical case studies offered is impressive in and of itself. Clark weaves real-life examples with an encyclopedic overview of the widespread effects both the American and Haitian Revolutions had on cultural perceptions of a nebulous social class.
