'Then I Started for the Mountains’: Retracing Louisiana’s Human Geographies across Five Remarkable Biographies

Abstract

This article explores the Louisiana Territory’s biographical corpus by unpacking the dynamic tensions that informed the region’s human geographies and its diachronic diversity of placemaking processes and spatial imaginations. In four case studies, it explores the utopian visions of French entrepreneur Pierre-Charles Le Sueur, the new gender norms of fille du roi Catherine Guichelin, John Law’s utopian economic schemes, and the capital-mover movement promoted by Logan Uriah Reavis. The findings demonstrate that spatialization processes regularly unfold simultaneously and on various scales that connect individual biographies, regional traditions, as well as national, imperial, and global visions—therefore underlining Andrew Herod’s suggestion “that multiscalar analysis is crucial for understanding the complexities of human and natural systems” (Scale: Routledge, 2011, p. 7). Instead of reducing Louisiana to a springboard for continental expansion and national mythmaking, the article suggests that America’s mythologized hero quests of exploration and political organization prove insufficient to capture the region’s multiscalar human and cultural geographies, and vice versa.

Biographical Note

Steffen Wöll (SFB 1199, Leipzig University Germany)

Employed at SFB 1199 since October 2016, Steffen has contributed his American Studies background to a sub-project, finishing with a dissertation titled “The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse.” Starting in 2020, he is employed as a postdoctoral researcher in the follow-up project that involves the study of US transoceanic expansion between 1880-1940 and its representation and construction in literature and other cultural texts. These studies bring to the fore discursive dynamics and intersections between spatial imaginations of the transpacific and circum-caribbean spaces, as well as their connections at geo-strategic junctions such as the Panama Canal. Next to the analysis of spatial imaginations, formats, and orders, he is interested in representations of agency, race, and otherness in US literature and culture. Articles about these and other subjects have appeared in several journals and volumes.