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

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.

The History of French in Louisiana

This chapter introduces the reader to Louisiana French. Four varieties of French are generally recognized by linguists: Colonial French, Plantation Society French, Louisiana Creole, and Louisiana Regional French (most commonly called Cajun French). The French of the Lafourche Basin is classified as Louisiana Regional French. The chapter outlines the similarities and differences between the three, and then focuses in particular on Louisiana Regional French, providing a historical outline of its development and a brief description of its features in comparison to Standard French. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the variation found in Louisiana French across the state. This sets the scene for the detailed description of the language as it is spoken in the Lafourche country, the language at the center of place-based identity in Terrebonne-Lafourche.