Four-term former Louisiana Governor graciously accepted an invitation to serve as Honorary Chair of the Eighteenth-Century Louisiana panel at the recent Enlightenment Conference in Montreal, Canada, October 15-18, 2014. Governor Edwards highlighted the three-hundred year history of French intellectual contributions of Louisiana, once a part of New France when Canada and Louisiana were joined, to the political, economic and social history of the United States, preceding even the Boston Tea Party, the shot heard round the world, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Gov. Edwards points out, however, the concomitant shortcomings, that the authors and writers of the Enlightenment were invoked to preserve--and to expand--enslavement of African, Caribbean and Native American individuals. The former governor also points out the necessary and valuable critical space in education occupied by teaching the humanities at a time when so much attention and funding is directed to STEM, i.e., the curriculum of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Acknowledging the importance of STEM, Edwards stresses the need for teaching the humanities, in order to train individuals in the methodology of robust intellectual debate as to how to best put the fruits of STEM to use to best serve the race of homo sapiens. Panelist Jari Honora was invited to present a paper on Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes 1911 publication in French, in Montreal, of Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, his history of the Creoles of New Orleans and Louisiana and their contributions to that same shared United States history. Desdunes had been schooled in the work of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and other writers of the Enlightenment era when most of his race kinsmen were still bound by chattel slavery. In his younger life, he pursued the law and sought legal recourse from the pains of Jim Crow segregation. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Desdunes had shifted his activism and literary interests to history – writing of his own cultural background. Panelist Fernin Eaton was invited to present a paper on the clothing practice of saggin, as a continuation of the Afro-Creole protest movement in Louisiana against :sumptuary or clothing laws intended to mark a subservient social and legal position in society, and its basis in Enlightenment thought and practice. That initial protest against the 1786 tignon edict of Spanish Governor Estevan Miro was one of the continents earliest womens protest movements, as his edict was aimed at women of color, both enslaved and the femmes de couleur libre, or free women of color. Whether we disapprove saggin or not, we can better understand it if we view it from the vantage of Enlightenment thought and the
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:30:52 +0000
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