RESONANT BOUNDARIES: RACE, RELIGION, AND THE POLITICS OF SOUND IN COLONIAL AND ANTEBELLUM NEW ORLEANS

This dissertation examines how sound structured religious life and racial order in New Orleans through a series of episodes spanning Spain’s assumption of control in 1763 and the antebellum period. Rather than treating religion primarily as doctrine or belief, it approaches religion as a public, embodied, and audible practice that unfolded within a varied and contested urban soundscape. Under successive French, Spanish, and American regimes, authorities in New Orleans sought to regulate what could be heard, by whom, and where, using sound as a means of governing religious difference and racial hierarchy. Bells, sermons, processions, funerals, chants, and prohibitions on noise functioned not merely as expressions of devotion but as techniques for producing social order.Drawing on archival sources including parish records, funeral registers, notarial documents, colonial correspondence, and municipal ordinances, the dissertation traces how Catholicism established sonic dominance through public ritual while Protestant, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic religious practices were managed through regimes of silence, containment, or conditional audibility. The project shows that religious toleration in New Orleans was frequently articulated in acoustic terms: groups could exist and even flourish so long as their worship did not enter the public auditory field.Across three chapters, the dissertation argues that sound operated as a racialized medium through which power was negotiated and contested. Catholic bells and processions marked authority and territorial control; Protestant preaching was constrained by enforced quiet; Afro-diasporic practices, including funerary rites and communal gatherings, generated alternative sonic orders that both unsettled and adapted to colonial listening regimes. Funerals emerge as a particularly revealing site where race, religion, and sound intersected, as the management of burial rituals exposed anxieties about visibility, audibility, and social hierarchy.By centering sound as a historical analytic, this study contributes to scholarship in religious studies, sound studies, and the history of race in the Atlantic world. It demonstrates that listening was a form of governance in early New Orleans and that the struggle over who could sound publicly was inseparable from the formation of racial and religious identities in the city.