audiobook Five Classic Muslim Slave Narratives (American Islamic Heritage) by Muhammad A Al-Ahari; Omar ibn Said; Abu Bakr Sadiq; Selim Aga; Nicholas Said; Job ben Sulaiman in History

Description

Exotic; seductive; and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a "quadroon;" she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However; as Emily Clark shows; the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage; not concubinage; was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon; Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope; persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory; she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans's free women of color.