Topographical Ghosts: The Archival Architecture of Old New Orleans

Topographical Ghosts: The Archival Architecture of Old New Orleans

Sarah Hirsch (IHC Research Fellow)
Wednesday, May 16 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In Cities of the Dead (1996), Joseph Roach observes that New Orleans is a place “where the dead remain more gregariously present to the living, materially, and spiritually, than they do anywhere else.” No one understood this more than George Washington Cable who invoked the city’s haunting past in his fiction. Serving as an archivist and cultural historian, Cable utilizes detailed accounts of New Orleans’ topography and architecture in his novel The Grandissimes (1880) to articulate the secrets of what he calls the “semi-submerged” city.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Research Fellows Program.