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The Epistemology of the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans
Journal article   Peer reviewed

The Epistemology of the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans

Liz Polcha
American literature, v 97(2), pp 271-299
01 Jun 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11792395

Abstract

Arts & Humanities Literature Literature, American
The Ursuline convent in New Orleans is the oldest standing European-designed structure in the Mississippi Valley, a site of the plantationocene in the ongoing colonial project, within a global South landscape of wetlands and barrier islands that are rapidly becoming uninhabitable due to coastal land loss. This article considers the ecological and gendered history of the Ursuline convent as a case study in architectural epistemology. Each section analyzes a genre of architectural epistemology-a gridded map, colonial correspondence, an architectural schema, a watercolor illustration, and a travel narrative-to comprehend how the narrative and aesthetic forms of the built environment were designed to support settler colonialism. In reading the built environment as textual, this article elucidates how buildings never adhere solely to their colonial purposes, that there is always an outside to settler colonialism's walls. This way of reading thus locates anticolonial meaning in the discrepancies between the documents that speculatively visualized the convent and the convent's enduring physical edifice. Ultimately, this article argues that reading across these multifarious genres for contradictions and gaps can unfasten the epistemological framework of colonial architecture in the Atlantic world, as well as clarify the fragility of the French colonial project in Louisiana.

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