Buried Traces of Jim Crow’s Refusal: Archives of the Racial-Spatial Restructuring of Louisiana

Keywords: archives, methods, race, Louisiana
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

The restructuring of race and space in the United States proceeds alongside the restructuring of regimes of capitalist accumulation and modes of social regulation (Wilson 2002). In Jim Crow Louisiana, this racial-spatial restructuring was shaped principally by limitations to industrialization and by transformations of the dominating plantation sugar economy, which hardened categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’. The former, broadly, were forced into the ranks of the property-less and the most shiftless ranks of laborers; the latter were enticed into the propertied and the relatively ‘labor aristocracy’. Such a narrative, though, can feel overly pat and narrowly mechanical. What about those who refused, resisted, or evaded Jim Crow racial-spatial restructuring? In practice, the consolidation of Jim Crow space required a range of documentary practices that today reside in all manner of archives, traditional and otherwise. In this paper I explore examples of three types of such archival sources in which the ‘traces’ of refusal of Jim Crow space can be found: (a) the regulation of labor and property, in travel writing and promotional real estate literature; (b) the biopolitical, in the manuscript census records; and (c) the narration of everyday life, in contemporaneous fiction and the WPA’s ‘ex-slave narratives’ project. While a principle function of each of these types of sources is to regularize and entrench Jim Crow racial-spatial categories, there is buried in these examples the trace of Jim Crow’s refusal in the action, words, or mere presence of those documented, if only briefly.