(Mis) classification and Creole identity in Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 'The Goodness of St. Rocque'

This thesis deals with the New Orleans fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. In particular, it examines The Goodness of St. Rocque and New Orleans as a site of racial and ethnic confluence. Dunbar-Nelson deals closely with racial and ethnic identities of Creoles in New Orleans during the late nineteenth-century and attempts to show the ways in which markers of ethnicity and connections to other countries upset the black-white racial binary being forced upon residents of New Orleans by outside forces. Dunbar- Nelson uses spatial and sociocultural characteristics of space to comment on the ways in which classification is imposed upon her characters, but shows the disruptive and often dangerous consequences of this imposition. Through an examination of several short stories from Dunbar-Nelson's collection, I work to show the violence of classification present in The Goodness of St. Rocque and how categorization is something Dunbar-Nelson asks of the reader, only to then reveal the reasons these racial taxonomies are harmful. Classification is inescapable but Dunbar-Nelson presents way to expand upon the narrow views of racial and ethnic identities that were prevalent during the late nineteenth-century.