NUEVOS FLUJOS MIGRATORIOS, NUEVAS FORMAS DE ENCUENTRO Y DE DESENCUENTRO

In 1888, an article entitled “The New Birth of the Sugar Industry in Louisiana” appeared in the fourth issue of the weekly publication The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer. In the piece, an unnamed contributor reflects on the history and future of the sugar industry in the South. The author illustrates the effects of the Civil War on this industry with a striking image: after “the destruction of slavery, the dispersal of the laborers, the burning of the buildings and the conversion of hundreds of sugar plantations into semi-tropical wildernesses,” the author writes, little remains to suggest its recent presence. In fact, he writes that now only “an occasional chimney or brick wall discovered among the enormous growth of weeds, willows and

cottonwood…could suggest to an uninformed traveler the existence there of former civilization and activity” (35).11 _{The author’s description of dilapidated sugar-houses overgrown with foliage} conveys an image of a decayed southern agrarian ideal, a broken industry in the process of fading from relevance and memory.

However, after lingering momentarily on this image, the author contradicts it, calling the postbellum sugar industry “live and progressive” despite appearances. He writes, “We are today on a better footing than ever before, because we have been taught by the errors of the past, and every step we take seems to be a sure one” (35). He further insists that the journal’s creators and promoters aim to develop the industry by establishing dialogue among “the whole planting

11 _{While we have no way of knowing the author’s gender, the overwhelming preponderance of men working at all} levels of both the sugar industry and the journalism industry (from field worker and chemist to writer and editor) during this period means we might hazard a guess that this writer is male.

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fraternity” (35). The Louisiana Planter author thus acknowledges the economic and geographical ruptures caused by the Civil War, yet also insists on the continuation of industrial progress and improvement in the years afterward. This tension between regression and progress is central to literary depictions of sugar production in postbellum fiction of Louisiana; authors from George Washington Cable to the anonymous poets whose work would appear in the Louisiana Planter over the next few decades articulate nostalgia for antebellum sugar plantations in order to reflect on the uncertain futures of white southerners in a transforming industrial world. As the sugar industry in the South—and especially in Louisiana, the largest sugar-producing state in the South before the Civil War—struggled to regain its footing and advance technologically in the years after the war, writers mirrored this struggle by exploring the challenge of reconstructing southern identity after a period of social, political, and economic upheaval.

In this chapter, I examine the ethical problems that arise when these writers romanticize the history of a place in the service of imagining its future, and how southern writers negotiate these issues in representations of the sugar industry in and around New Orleans. New Orleans regionalism is preoccupied with images of the transformation of sugar cane into more potent and refined forms via the language of taste and sight. Moreover, many post-war representations of New Orleans exhibit a commitment to consolidating a prevailing narrative of white southerners’ loss of wealth and power after the war. In this sense, white writers who lamented that the South had lost economic ground strove to compensate for this sense of loss by recovering ground literarily: though they narrate the economic disempowerment of southern whites, their works of fiction highlight white writers’ enduring control over fables of southern industry. Even as white writers narrate the obstacles preventing white southerners from producing sugar after the war, they figure themselves as producers of stories about sugar, capable of rehabilitating the South’s

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place on a national stage through the written word. Both the content and form of New Orleans regionalism demonstrate fascination with processes of refinement: How is sugar made from cane? How is story made from history? What kinds of pleasure do these products offer to consumers? What are the political motivations that drive this pleasure, and what are its ethical implications?

I thus explore the relationship, in New Orleans regionalism, between two kinds of sweetness: the images of sugar that these texts contain, and, at a meta-narrative level, figuratively sweet, consumable, and pleasurable stories themselves. Sugar historian April

Merleaux refers to “cultures of craving” that emerged in the U.S. with a rise in the availability of sugar at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries (8). I suggest that, along with a culture of craving for sugar, a corresponding craving for stories about sugar

emerged during this period. The implications of this analogy between the sweetness of sugar and the sweetness of story are far-ranging: writers during this period perceive a contested zone where white southerners, having lost control over the means of producing sugar, confront the region’s vulnerability by trying to recuperate this control both economically and ideologically for middle- class readers through narrative. Literary formulations of sweetness thus stand at the center of a late nineteenth-century conceptual apparatus that promises a new future of empowerment to southern whites.

This study is invested in exploring the variety of significations that the status of whiteness carries in the literature of this period, as well as the forms of cultural and economic currency that whiteness affords writers and characters who possess it. I argue that writers

mobilize the language of sweetness in the service of a racial hierarchy in which whiteness figures as a refined counterpoint to the exotic appeal of darkness: in making a case for the symbolic

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function of refined sugar as an indicator of racial purity, I characterize whiteness as a visual signifier of this purity. Whiteness and sweetness, then, figure as interconnected agents of the pleasures afforded by observing racial difference. Writing about the ways in which images of sugar refinement have been mobilized to signify racial hierarchy, Merleaux writes, “As the twentieth century progressed, many people in the United States understood that while sugar might appear pleasingly white in seaboard cities, it linked them to global racial impurities that were best excluded, segregated, or cleansed” (55). Meanwhile, on the flip-side, “African Americans and residents of the island territories were commonly associated with less-refined forms of sweetness” (57), including brown molasses. Building on Merleaux’s analysis, I make the case for reading representations of sugar as coded forms of commentary on racial relations, in a post-Civil War New Orleans literary culture seeking white uplift.

In order to explore the linguistic strategies by which writers essentialize racial difference through language of taste, color, and refinement, I investigate a legacy of racial injustice

facilitating the advancement of the sugar industry—a legacy that endures today. In his seminal work Sweetness and Power (1985), Sidney Mintz links the sugar trade to the slave trade, implicating the sugar industry in the sustained enslavement of human beings beginning with colonization and never truly ending. Though Mintz discusses the effects of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and the U.S. over the course of the nineteenth century (68-70), he also acknowledges the enduring legacy of the slave trade on today’s sugar economy: “The track sugar has left in modern history is one involving masses of people and resources, thrown into

productive combination by social, economic, and political forces that were actively remaking the entire world” (211). Indeed, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the flowering of what Merleaux calls the “U.S. sugar empire” (14), a sprawling economic network of sites—within the

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U.S., in its colonies, and in countries with whom the U.S. traded—where sugar destined to be consumed by Americans was produced. By the end of the century, this network most

prominently included the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and Louisiana (Merleaux 14- 15). My aim is to consider the Louisiana literature that is the subject of this chapter in light of the global economy that informed this body of work. Most noteworthy are the United States’s trade relations in the West Indies, given the proximity of sugar-producing countries like Cuba to the U.S., and to New Orleans ports in particular.

Indeed, the aim of this chapter is not only to tease out the cultural conditions responsible for the prevalence of metaphors of sweetness in turn-of-the-century literature of Louisiana, but also to situate this Louisiana context within a larger, globalizing nation. The immense human rights violations that characterized the sugar industry in Louisiana during the nineteenth century also characterized sugar plantation life for many workers in the Caribbean, Polynesia, and elsewhere. As Richard Follett has written in his history of antebellum cane country in the U.S. South, “The grueling rigors of the sugar industry placed an unfathomable strain on the human body”; Follett cites a “punishing labor regime,” malaria, cholera, intestinal worms, summer heat, yellow fever, and infection as major sources of physical, psychological, and emotional pain (Follett 78). Notably, conditions similar to these continue to afflict workers to this day in parts of the world, an extreme example being the Dominican Republic: a majority of plantation workers in the D.R. today are Haitians laboring under conditions of “semicoerced exploitation” (Martinez 57). These conditions parallel those under which southern American enslaved people worked during the nineteenth century—and just as the human rights violations in the Dominican

Republic remain unknown to the vast majority of Americans who regularly consume Dominican sugar, the violations endured by nineteenth-century enslaved laborers in Louisiana are

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conspicuously absent from a body of literature that often seeks to revel in the sweetness and whiteness of a product while turning a blind eye to the suffering of the black bodies responsible for its production.

Whiteness and blackness are therefore not only visual signifiers, though a focus on the gradations of sugar’s color in Louisiana regional literature does suggest the importance of visual culture. Additionally, I argue that whiteness at the turn of the century functioned as an ethos— the essentialist stance that the superiority of whiteness and all its cultural signifiers, from skin color to clothing and accent, is a foregone fact. In this chapter, I investigate several works that reinforce this notion to different degrees. These works are not all written by racially “white” authors, but all of the texts are in some way invested in producing whiteness at a conceptual level.12 While authors’ racial identities are not irrelevant to my readings, I am more interested in the ways that these authors reinforce (and sometimes also resist) whiteness as a value system.

Beginning with Grace King’s short story “La Grande Demoiselle” and then taking up two anonymously written poems that appeared in an 1889 issue of The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, I argue that these writers dramatize white southerners’ abrupt loss of social and economic power during the late nineteenth century through images of sugar production. In these works, white bodies become subject to the same industrial processes as white sugar. By

conflating disempowered people with mass-produced goods, King and the Louisiana Planter poet articulate a myth of white victimization at the hands of African American laborers as well as the more abstract figure of the modern factory. I argue that we might read these representations of victimization as ironic: by virtue of their publication and distribution to white, well-to-do

12 _{For example, I discuss two poems written by an anonymous author whose race cannot be confirmed but who is} committed to bolstering and reinforcing white experience.

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audiences (King published in The Century), these texts undermine their own pretense to white disenfranchisement.

Next, I turn to George Washington Cable’s short story “Café des Exilés” (1876), which likewise focuses on white subjects and, with its publication in Scribner’s, reached an audience of primarily white readers. I argue that Cable offers a solution to the problems posed by King and the Louisiana Planter poet. While these writers dramatize white southerners’ loss of control over Marxian instruments of labor—the factories and slave labor that allowed for the production of wealth in the antebellum South—Cable redirects our focus. His story is less interested in the literal means by which sugar is produced than the figurative production of narratives about sugar. By exoticizing the sensory pleasures of New Orleans, the circum-atlantic sugar trade that makes these pleasures possible, and the black bodies with which he associates this trade, Cable suggests the power of white narrators to distill and preserve the city’s past. In this sense, he imagines a new economic role for white southerners, not as manual laborers nor as the objects of this labor, but as guardians and interpreters of pleasurable southern histories. In his post-war, post-industrial context, sugar-making becomes a metaphorical process rather than a literal one.

Finally, I turn to a work of short fiction by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Dunbar-Nelson’s contribution to narratives about the New Orleans sugar trade is fascinating and unusual for its self-conscious investigation of the biases and prejudices inherent in the act of storytelling. In “The Praline Woman” (1899), she complicates and resists the prevailing forms of white

storytelling that I document in the first two sections of this chapter. I make the case that Dunbar- Nelson is not only a historian but a historiographer; she theorizes the processes by which

regional writers instantiate their own status as guardians and champions of southern history. Further, she expresses ambivalence about her own ability to revise prevailing accounts of New

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Orleans’s sweet past by implicating the American publishing industry in her own and others’ romantic vision of New Orleans. Ultimately, she suggests that both the sugar and publishing industries in the U.S. are complicit in the ethically fraught representational matrix of

remembering sugar, using sugar to remember, and the pleasures of both.

Each of these writers thus establishes her- or himself as a producer of metaphorical sweetness, if not literal sugar. King, the Louisiana Planter poet, and Cable situate white southern subjectivities as the central lens through which southern history should be understood, and in this way they imagine a future for the white South in a changing America marked by drastic social, political, and economic inequalities.13 _{The aims of this chapter are three-fold. First, I unpack the} socioeconomic motivations mobilizing these writers. Second, I illustrate how several white writers instantiate their own status as curators of American regional history—in this case, the history of the South, and of Louisiana in particular—by rendering the labors of making, selling, buying, and eating sugar in nostalgic and appealing terms for their readerships. Finally, I highlight forms of skepticism and resistance to the primacy of these white subjectivities, exemplified by Dunbar-Nelson’s story. To be sure, in a post-Katrina world where New Orleans signifies a disorienting mixture of trauma and sensuality, the effects of these depictions are still with us today.

Grace King’s “Carte Blanche”

Grace King’s “La Grande Demoiselle,” a short story originally published in The Century Magazine in 1893, is about a French Creole woman named Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart Des Islets and her family’s sudden fall from stature after the Civil War. The Des Islets’ loss of wealth

13 _{I define “essentialism” as a trenchant, deeply-rooted cultural belief in the innate qualities of a particular} demographic. This chapter is especially interested in forms of racial essentialism.

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and status reflects the experience of many formerly wealthy southerners in postbellum Louisiana and the South more generally. The story’s focus on this loss suggests that it inhabits a mode of pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” literature.14 However, while King’s narrator seems to mourn the Des Islets’ loss of wealth and power, her grief is also a pretense for the story’s critique of southern aristocratic values and consumer practices. Ultimately, “La Grande Demoiselle” is an expression of apprehension about the future of a sugar industry borne from these values.

This critique takes the form of condemnation for practices of conspicuous display and consumption among the wives and daughters of the southern landholding elite. Idalie is the story’s focal character, and it is through her behavior that King’s narrator conveys the decadence and overconsumption of her aristocratic class. By identifying Idalie as a representative of this class and condemning her for its faults, the narrator suggests that white women’s transgressions signify, and even exceed, a trend of southern overindulgence before the war. This emphasis on female excess suggests that white, wealthy women’s insatiable capacity to consume is

responsible for the degeneracy of the southern aristocracy.

“La Grande Demoiselle” explores the consequences of this consumerism through symbolically laden images of sugar production and consumption. The lavish lifestyles and expensive dresses and finery that the Des Islets women import from Paris are funded by the production of sugar cane on the family’s plantation and the slave labor responsible for refining this cane into a sellable product. In their analysis of Kate Chopin’s representations of Louisiana’s Creole culture, Andrew Dix and Lorna Piatti identify a literary focus on sweet, European

delicacies. They argue that, in Chopin’s works, “luxurious desserts and confectionery imply Creole use of cane sugar at its whitest and purest.” Meanwhile, “abjected social groupings”

14 _{Famous contributors to this genre include Thomas Nelson Page and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom idealized} antebellum white southern aristocratic society.

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including African American and Cajun populations “turn to viscous, dirty-colored molasses” (62). According to Dix and Piatti, Chopin aligns an elite French Creole class with the purity of refined sugar; Chopin’s work foregrounds “the substance’s aesthetic and gustatory appeals but tend[s] to repress knowledge of the labor by which these are achieved” (60). King complicates this representation of white sugar by highlighting the transformations undergone by the

American sugar industry in the years after the Civil War. This becomes a story about the horrors of domestic sugar production, and the uncertain futures of members of a formerly elite class who not only lose control of the means of producing sugar, but themselves become metaphorical