Antebellum Fantasies and Southern Legacies: Memory and Sex in Turn of the Century New Orleans

At the turn of the twentieth century, “there was at least one red-light district in virtually every American city with a population over 100,000”—and New Orleans was no different. However, neither New Orleans, nor its vice, was a typical American establishment, as Emily Landau’s study on New Orleans’ mixed-race prostitution in Storyville, the emergent red-light district that encompassed it, argues. Like the city itself—with a long history of colonialism and racial intermixing that “made New Orleans resemble a Caribbean enclave more than a Deep South city”—Storyville was a melting pot. The district was an interracial sexual laboratory that bred whiteness as Southern white men satisfied sexual fantasies of racial domination and exoticism, while Jim Crow segregationists and Progressive moral reformers fought to restrict the “racially inferior” and rid the United States of moral depravity outside of its confines. But Storyville was not an exception from larger social processes, and it was certainly not a throwback to an era of ethical laxity in New Orleans. Instead, the district was representative of the historical processes that constituted, and altered, American racial, gendered, and sexual identities at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...