Transnational Discourses of Masculinity and Desire in <i>Les Cenelles</i> , an Afro-Creole Anthology of Romantic Poetry in French

This article contextualizes Les Cenelles and its poets of French expression in the shifting historical landscape of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, examining the formative roles of gender-segregated Catholic education, patriarchal order, and racial discourses in the first known African American literary anthology. The author then provides close feminist readings of the anthology’s figurations of masculine desire in the cultural context of plaçage – diverse formations of extra-legal liaisons between Creole women of colour and white lovers or ‘protectors’. Through this detour, the poets ultimately express their layered spatialized desire for another mother – la mère France . The Catholic fraternity constituted in and through the poetic anthology as a communal literary object thus contests overlapping American socio-economic formations operating to the exclusion and oppression of its authors. It actualizes collective contention not only through textual performances of masculine rage and mourning, but also through transatlantic affiliation with French Romantic literary conventions and canon.