“There is magnificent play in New Orleans because there has also been magnificent devastation.' jmjafrx on the Black feminist history of New Orleans:
How would you describe your book, and what led to your research?My book is a Black feminist history of the founding of New Orleans.
Once I did the research, I realized this story is so much more complicated—as they always are. Our understanding of Black women’s experiences needs to be more complex. It needs to account for the messy ways that Black women have participated in slaveholding but also challenge the very notions of slaveholding at the same time. American history probably can do a better job of holding the complexity of gender, of Blackness, of sexuality in ways that show the full humanity of Black women.
I assert that we challenge this if we center Black women in these social spaces, who use play and pleasure as ways to recover from the devastation of slaveholding regimes. If we think of Black women as stewards of cultural and community formation, then we will see that play is not just play. It is actual work in creating New Orleans out of terrible circumstances.
Then we could understand that the kind of complexity and range of genders and sexualities we have now is. We just haven’t always had really good language for how to talk about it. I think we really still don’t have really good conversations about pleasure. I don’t think we have very good conversations about Black women’s agency, in the context of racialized sexual violence.
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