Excavating Historical Layers: From Slave Market to Omni Royal Hotel in New Orleans

Angel A. Parham, University of Virginia

“The old St. Louis is gone, in all its glory, with its busy crowd of merchants and planters. The great auctions of land and horses and negroes are heard no more, and in its place stands the great Hotel Royal…”. This wistful account of New Orleans’ Hotel Royal was penned in 1898. Today its most recent incarnation stands on the same ground in the French Quarter at the corner of St. Louis and Royal streets. This essay employs the concept of the “lieu de souvenir” as a way of making sense of the past and its multi-valent relations to the present. I define a “lieu de souvenir” as a history laden place of remembering, the excavation of which helps to connect social, cultural and political ties between past and present that have been buried over time. The “lieu de souvenir” is a conceptual cousin of Pierre Nora’s “lieu de mémoire”. Nora’s “lieux de mémoire” generally function as spaces created explicitly by cultural minorities to protect “a privileged memory…that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep away”. The goal of “lieux de mémoire”, then, is to bolster the cultural minority by helping to preserve the group’s memory and strengthen its sense of community. In contrast, “lieux de souvenir” are spaces whose complex histories have often been forgotten or submerged. When they are excavated, they invite critical—and sometimes unwelcomed— conversations about unequal geographies and histories and how the larger community should respond in light of what has been unearthed. This social excavation of the site at the old St. Louis Hotel forms part of a larger historical ethnography of New Orleans that is being constructed around several key “lieux de souvenir” across the city.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 220. Race, Region, Place,