Political Landscapes and Rival Cultural Landscapes in Spanish Louisiana: Antoine Sarrasin and la Cyprière

This article examines the life of Antoine Sarrasin—an important yet understudied figure in early American history—and his role in organizing the 1795 Pointe Coupée rebellion to abolish slavery in Spanish Louisiana. Proposing the idea of rival cultural landscapes created by freed and enslaved people that deliberately challenged the political landscapes shaped by their Spanish rulers, this article traces the creation of a particular Black geographic experience and analyzes how Sarrasin creatively utilized a common feature of Spanish plantations—the cypress swamp ( la cyprière )—to secretly plan an elaborate, multiracial rebellion influenced by his knowledge of Atlantic revolutionary activity. His intimate understanding of the cypress swamps reveals a historical familiarity and mastery of the natural world that many enslaved and free people of African descent created during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article contributes to current interdisciplinary scholarship that maps Black geographic experiences throughout the diaspora and recovers routes and paths that enslaved and free people of African descent “invisibly” marked on the landscape to contest White geographic domination. Though many others acted similarly to Sarrasin, their stories have been lost to the modern archive. Finding ways to creatively and critically engage with the archive to recover the stories of those like Sarrasin is one way we can tell a more inclusive history of early America.