“But what sustained enslaved African people was a memory of freedom, dreams of seizing it, and conspiracies to enact it—fugitive planning, if you will. If we reduce the enslaved to mere fungible bodies, we cannot possibly understand how they created families, communities, sociality; how they fled and loved and worshiped and defended themselves; how they created the world’s first social democracy.”

Kelley, Robin D. G. “Black Study, Black Struggle.” Boston Review, March 7, 2016. http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle.

Texts We Study

Aubert, Guillaume. “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World.” The William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 439-78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3491805.

Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes and Rachel Breunlin, Le Ker Creole. New Orleans, LA: University of New Orleans Press, 2019.

—and Rachel Breunlin, eds., Talk That Music Talk: Passing On Brass Band Music In New Orleans “The Traditional Way.” New Orleans, LA: University of New Orleans Press, 2014.

Barthé, Darryl, Andrew Jolivétte, and Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, eds. Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity & Community. Seattle: University of Washington, 2022.

Becker, Cynthia J. “Confederate Soldiers, Voodoo Queens, and Black Indians: Monuments and Counter-Monuments in New Orleans.” De Arte 54, no. 2 (2019): 41-64.

Blackbird, Leila K. “‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769-1803,” The William & Mary Quarterly 80, no. 3 (July 2023): 525-58. https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903166.

—. “Entwined Threads of Red and Black: The Hidden History of Indigenous Enslavement in Louisiana, 1699-1824.” MA Thesis, University of New Orleans, 2018. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2559.

—, et al. “Climates of Inequality – Standing Up on River Road: Activism in South Louisiana.” The Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies and Rutgers Humanities Action Lab. https://climatesofinequality.org/story/standing-up-on-river-road-activism-in-south-louisiana/.

Bolton, Herbert Eugene, ed. and trans. Athanase de Mézières and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768-1780. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1914.

Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002.

Burton, Sophie and Todd Smith. “Slavery in the Colonial Louisiana Backcountry: Natchitoches, 1714-1803.” Louisiana History 52, no. 2 (2011): 133-88.https://www.jstor.org/stable/23074684.

Camp, Stephanie M.H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2004.

Campt, Tina. “The Loophole of Retreat: An Invitation.” E-Flux Journal 105 (2019): 1-3. First Accessed December 30, 2020. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/302556/the-loophole-of-retreat-an-invitation/.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review, 2001.

Clark, Emily. The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2013.

D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020.

Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2008.

Driscoll, Matthew J. and Elena Pierazzo, eds. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theory and Practices. Cambridge: Open Books, 2016.

Ellis, Elizabeth. “The Natchez War Revisited: Violence, Multinational Settlements, and Indigenous Diplomacy in the Lower Mississippi Valley.” The William & Mary Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2020): 441-72. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/761429.

—. The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.

Evans, Freddi Williams. Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans

– Hush Harbor: Praying in Secret

– The Battle of New Orleans: The Drummer’s Story

– A Bus of Our Own

Everett, Donald. “Free Persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana.” Louisiana History 7, no. 1 (1966): 21-50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4230881.

Fiehrer, Thomas Marc. “The African Presence in Colonial Louisiana: Essay on the Continuity of Caribbean Culture,” in Louisiana’s Black Heritage, Robert Macdonald, ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Museum, 1979.

Frazier D. The Nickel: A History of African-Descended People in Houston’s Fifth Ward. Genealogy. 2020; 4(1):33. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4010033

Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia, 2016.

Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York: Macmillan, 2006.

Garraway, Doris L. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham: Duke University, 2005.

Goffe, Tao Leigh. “Unmapping the Caribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding.” Archipelagos: A Journal of Caribbean Digital Praxis no. 5 (2020). http://archipelagosjournal.org/issue05/goffe-unmapping.html.

Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998.

Gray, D. Ryan. Uprooted: Race, Public Housing, and the Archaeology of Four Lost New Orleans Neighborhoods. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2020.

griffin, Shana M., Sooner of Later, Somebody’s Gonna Fight Back

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1995.

—. Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 1999.

Kathe Hambrich, Juke Joint Men

– Oh Say Can You See: Flag Paintings of Malaika Favorite

– Our Roots Run Deep

– Freedoms’ Journey: Understanding the Underground Railroad in South Louisiana

Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803. Durham: Duke University, 1997.

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006.

—. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University, 1997.

Hirsch, Arnold R. and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1992.

Holmes, Jack D.L. “The Abortive Slave Revolt at Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 1795.” Louisiana History 11, no. 4 (1970): 341-62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4231151.

Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon & Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1999.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658.

—. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2020.

Johnson, Rashauna. Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2016.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Boston: Harvard, 1999.

—. “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice.” Boston Review. February
20, 2018. https://bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world/.

Karp, Matthew. This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2016.

King, Tiffany Lethabo, ed. Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness. Durham: Duke University, 2020.

Klopotek, Brian. Recognition Odysseys: Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities. Durham: Duke University, 2011.

Lachance, Paul F. “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade, 1786-1809.” Plantation Society in the Americas Journal (1979): 162-197.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006.

—. “Mathematics Black Life.” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 16-28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0016.

—. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1-15. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/532740.

Miles, Tiya. “Beyond a Boundary: Black Lives and the Settler-Native Divide,” The William & Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2019): 417-26. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/730604.

Mills, Cynthia and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, And the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

Mitchell, Mary Niall. Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery. New York: New York University, 2010.

Mock, Brentin. “The Movement that Made New Orleans Take ‘em Down.” CityLab. May 29, 2017. First Accessed June 1, 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-29/how-activists-targeted-new-orleans-confederate-statues.

Morgan, Jennifer L. “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery.” Small Axe 22, no. 1 (2018): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4378888.

New Orleans African American Museum. “Creolizing Currents: Bambara History.” Accessed August 5, 2022. http://bambara-noaam.org/history/.

Pierce, Jason. “For Its Incorporation in Our Union: The Louisiana Territory and the Conundrum of Western Expansion”in Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West. Boulder: University of Colorado, 2016.

Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy. Chicago: Northwestern University, 2018.

Shearon Roberts, Media Discourse in Haiti

–, Post-Katrina Catharsis: The Mediated Rebirth of New Orleans

— Oil and Water: Media Lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster

– “Then and Now: Haitian Journalism as Resistance to US Occupation and US-Led Reconstruction.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 21 no. 2, 2016, p. 241-268. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/jhs.2016.0004.

Roberts, Richard L. Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Kristina Kay Robinson, Mixed Company

– and V. Mitch McEwen, “Rebellious Architecture: Bayou Reconstructed” in Architectural Design, Special Issue: Alt-Form: Interdeterminacy and Disorder vol. 92, no. 2 (March/April 2022): 104-113. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.2800.

Rodrigue, John C. “Slavery in French Colonial Louisiana.” 64 Parishes. The Historic New Orleans Collection, February 22, 2022. https://knowla-dev.tulane.edu/entry/ slavery-in-french-colonial-louisiana.

Mona Lisa Saloy, Red Beans & Ricely Yours (Black Bayou Press, 2021, orig. pub. 2005)

– Second Line Home (Black Bayou Press, 2021, orig. pub. 2014)

– Between Laughter and Tears: Black Mona Lisa Poems (Black Bayou Press, 1995)

– Black Creole Chronicles (University of New Orleans Press, 2023)

Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, New Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Ibrahima Seck, Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney PLantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860 (New Orleans: UNP Press, 2014)

– “Les Français et la traite des esclaves en Sénégambie.” Dix-huitième siècle 1 (2012): 49-60.

Scott, David. “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World.” Diaspora 1, no. 4 (1991): 261-84. doi:10.1353/dsp.1991.0023.

Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir, “‘Nothing Is To Be Feared’: Normal C. Francis, Civil RIghts Activism, and the Black Catholic Movement”

Smallwood, Stephanie. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2007.

Scott, Rebecca J. and Jean M. Hébrard. Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2014.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University, 2016.

Spear, Jennifer M. “Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana.” The William & Mary Quarterly 6, no. 1 (2003): 75-98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3491496.pdf.

—. Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009.

Sublette, Ned. The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. Chicago: Chicago Review, 2008.

Sweet, James H. “Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive: Method, Concept, Epistemology, Ontology.” Journal of African History 55, no. 2 (2014): 147-59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43305182

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. New York: Cambridge University, 1998.

Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2003.

Usner, Daniel H., Jr. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1992.

Vidal, Cécile. Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2019.

Vincent, Charles. “‘Of Such Historical Importance’: The African American Experience in Louisiana.” Louisiana History 50, no. 2 (2009): 133-58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 25478640.

Leon Waters, On To New Orleans: Louisiana’s Heroic 1811 Slave Revolt

White, Sophie. Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

—. Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2021.

Other Projects

Malik Bartholomew, Know NOLA blog
Freddi Evans, Congo Square Connections
Shana M. griffin, DISPLACED | Gestures of Refusal
Alex Lee, Alexgeneaology
Angela Proctor, Opinions Regarding Slavery: Slave Narratives