Staging the Racialized Body: Victor Séjour, Nineteenth-century Louisiana Playwright of Colour in Paris

Born in New Orleans in 1817 to parents who were both free people of colour, Victor Séjour moved to Paris around 1836 and wrote a total of 22 plays. This article focuses on two of these plays— Diégarias (1844) and La Tireuse de cartes (1859)—both of which feature Jewish characters. The former’s eponymous character is passing for Christian in the fifteenth-century Spanish court during a period of civil unrest. The latter openly presents itself as a reflection on the real-life “Mortara affair”, which occurred in 1858 when the Inquisitor of Bologna removed six-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish family because the Mortaras’ Christian servant had previously baptized him during a potentially deadly illness. In her introduction to the English translation, M. Lynn Weiss argues that Diégarias may be read as an allegory of race in Louisiana: in part, Diégarias performs the identity of a free man of colour capable of passing as white in Louisiana, and the anti-Semitism he must negotiate provides a way of considering racism in Louisiana. Through an engagement with critical race studies, queer theory and queer of colour critique, this article considers Weiss’s reading’s full implications with regard to both plays to argue that they stage racialized characters in a context in which racial differences are not necessarily visible. More generally, it argues that they thereby challenge the Anglo-American notion that racial differences should be visible and that we can or should always see them.