Voices and Visions
Voices and Visions
Essays on New Orleans's Literary History
Contributions by Ruth R. Caillouet, Mary C. Carruth, Nancy Dixon, Kathleen Downes, Edward J. Dupuy, Shari Evans, Paul Fess, Carina Evans Hoffpauir, Leslie Petty, Heidi Podlasi-Labrenz, Tierney S. Powell, Shanna M. Salinas, Matthew Teutsch, and Marcus Charles Tribbett
Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans’s Literary History examines a rich combination of writers and texts, from antebellum works like Martin R. Delany’s novel, Blake, and the poetry of Les Cenelles to Patricia Smith’s recent collection of poems, Blood Dazzler. The thirteen essays in Voices and Visions treat two hundred years of literature and include discussions on canonical, contemporary, and experimental writers. Authors often associated with New Orleans such as Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, and Walker Percy are treated in new ways, as are well-known writers who are not often thought of in relation to the city: Charles Chesnutt, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Joy Harjo.
Examining this wide array of voices demonstrates the myriad ways New Orleans’s storied past has affected its present. Scholars find enduring themes—race, gender, religion, disease, art—but do so in the context of emerging conversations. Essayists in the volume address such topics as New Orleans as part of the global South and the Black diaspora, the transformation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the recovery of previously lost voices, including those of Native Americans and immigrants. They also discuss the legacy of pandemics and racial violence that in more recent years has been manifest in the COVID-19 outbreak and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Nancy Dixon teaches English and chairs the English Program at Dillard University. She has edited several books about New Orleans, its literature, and history, and she served as executive editor of New Orleans & The World: 1718-2018Tricentennial Anthology. Leslie Petty is professor of English and the T.K. Young Chair of English Literature at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in journals such as Studies in the American Short Story and Legacy. She also serves as executive coordinator for the American Literature Association.
Introduction
Nancy Dixon and Leslie Petty
Part One: Prose
1. Blake in the Crescent City: Martin R. Delany Reimagines Antebellum Radicalism
Paul Fess
2. Moral Contagion: Yellow Fever and the Moral Character of New Orleans
Kathleen Downes
3. “The Voice of the Sea”: The Specter of Transatlantic Slavery in The Awakening
Carina Evans Hoffpauir
4. “Moving from the Inside Out”: Malwida von Meysenburg and the Portrayal of a New Feminine Experience in The Awakening”
Heidi Podlasli-Labrenz
5. “The Unjust Spirit of Caste” in Charles W. Chesnutt’s and George Washington Cable’s New Orleans Novels
Matthew Teutsch
6. More than One City of New Orleans: Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston’s Crescent City
Ruth R. Caillouet
7. New Orleans in Walker Percy’s Works: Place, Placement, Nonplacement, and Misplacement
Edward J. Dupuy
Part Two: Poetry
8. Les Cenelles and Censorship
Nancy Dixon
9. (Re)mapping the Colonial City: Joy Harjo’s Composite Poetic in “New Orleans”
Tierney S. Powell
10. A Cabdriver Sings the Blues: Mem Shannon’s Articulation of Urban Life and Working-Class Resistance in Late Twentieth-Century New Orleans
Marcus Charles Tribbett
11. Slave-Bricked Streets and Women’s Work: The Practiced Place of Brenda Marie Osbey’s New Orleans
Shari Evans
12. Demythologizing the New Orleans “Octoroon”: Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia
Mary C. Carruth
13. “Because We Need to Hurt in Public”: Embodying the Spectacle of Hurricane Katrina’s Black Suffering in Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler
Shanna M. Salinas
About the Contributors
Index
