People of color in Louisiana - Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson -- - Marcus Christian's treatment of Les gens de couleur libre - Violet Harrington Bryan -- - Plaçage and the Louisiana Gens de couleur libre : how race and sex defined the lifestyles of free women of color - Joan M. Martin -- - Composers of color of nineteenth-century New Orleans : the history behind the music - Lester Sullivan -- - Yankee hugging the Creole : reading Dion Boucicault's The octoroon - Jennifer DeVere Brody -- - Use of Louisiana Creole in Southern literature - Sybil Kein -- - Marie Laveau : the voodoo queen repossessed - Barbara Rosendale Duggal -- - New Orleans Creole expatriates in France : romance and reality - Michel Fabre -- - Visible means of support : businesses, professions, and trades of free people of color - Mary Gehman -- - Origin of Louisiana Creole - Fehintola Mosadomi -- - Louisiana Creole food culture : Afro-Caribbean links - Sybil Kein -- - Light, bright, and damn near white : race, the politics of genealogy, and the strange case of Susie Guillory - Anthony G. Barthelemy -- - Creole poets on the verge of a nation - Caroline Senter -- - "Lost boundaries" : racial passing and poverty in segregated New Orleans - Arthé A. Anthony -- - Creole culture in the poetry of Sybil Kein /r Mary L. Morton
"In her introduction, Sybil Kein immediately addresses perhaps the book's most important - and controversial - question: who are the Creoles? The answer is not clear-cut. Of European, African, or Caribbean mixed descent, they are a people of color and Francophone dialect native to south Lousiana; and though their history dates from the late 1600s, they have been neglected in the literature. Creole is a project that both defines and celebrates this ethnic identity. In fifteen essays, writers intimately involved with their subject explore the vibrant yet marginalized culture of the Creole people across time - their language, literature, religion, art, food, music, folklore, professions, customs, and social barriers."--Jacket