Coercing the Delta. The French Grammar of Control in the African Landscape of Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1732

IF 0.3 Q4 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Global Environment Pub Date : 2021-09-01 DOI:10.3197/ge.2021.140305

Nicholas Paskert

引用次数: 1

Abstract

The long-term transformation of the Louisiana delta beginning in 1699 has been primarily understood as a French colonial struggle for the control of nature. Yet, in order for French colonisers to control nature, they first sought to control enslaved Africans. While slave coercion was a daily problem for French inhabitants, documentation of the 'routinized violence' of chattel slavery is predictably absent in records of the built environment. As a result, the building of colonial New Orleans, beginning in 1718, has become a story of French design, not of enslaved African labour. This paper examines the accounts and correspondence of French colonisers who veiled their own dependence on indigenous, indentured and enslaved people by adopting a performative language of mastery as they projected or described labour projects essential to the 'control of nature'. What colonisers could not master in person they performed on paper via pronouns, tenses, constructions and the passive voice. The 'French' Louisiana delta is better understood as an African-built landscape reinscribed on Indigenous territory under French coercion.

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胁迫三角洲。1699-1732年路易斯安那殖民地非洲景观中的法语控制语法

从1699年开始的路易斯安那三角洲的长期转变，主要被理解为法国为控制自然而进行的殖民斗争。然而，法国殖民者为了控制自然，他们首先试图控制被奴役的非洲人。虽然奴隶胁迫对法国居民来说是一个日常问题，但可以预见的是，在建筑环境的记录中，没有关于动产奴隶制“常规暴力”的记录。因此，从1718年开始的殖民时期新奥尔良的建筑，已经成为法国人设计的故事，而不是奴役非洲劳工的故事。本文考察了法国殖民者的描述和信件，他们在规划或描述对“控制自然”至关重要的劳动项目时，通过采用一种表现性的掌握语言，掩盖了自己对土著、契约和奴役人民的依赖。殖民者无法亲自掌握的东西，他们通过代词、时态、结构和被动语态在纸上表现出来。“法国的”路易斯安那三角洲最好被理解为在法国胁迫下在土著领土上重新划定的非洲人建造的景观。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Global Environment ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES-

CiteScore

0.50

自引率

25.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The half-yearly journal Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences acts as a forum and echo chamber for ongoing studies on the environment and world history, with special focus on modern and contemporary topics. Our intent is to gather and stimulate scholarship that, despite a diversity of approaches and themes, shares an environmental perspective on world history in its various facets, including economic development, social relations, production government, and international relations. One of the journal’s main commitments is to bring together different areas of expertise in both the natural and the social sciences to facilitate a common language and a common perspective in the study of history. This commitment is fulfilled by way of peer-reviewed research articles and also by interviews and other special features. Global Environment strives to transcend the western-centric and ‘developist’ bias that has dominated international environmental historiography so far and to favour the emergence of spatially and culturally diversified points of view. It seeks to replace the notion of ‘hierarchy’ with those of ‘relationship’ and ‘exchange’ – between continents, states, regions, cities, central zones and peripheral areas – in studying the construction or destruction of environments and ecosystems.