The Veiled Woman in Antebellum America: Nuns and Quadroons

Emily Clark is the Clement Chambers Benenson Professor in American Colonial History at Tulane University. She specializes in early American and Atlantic world history, and is particularly interested in the ways that the Francophone Atlantic can illuminate the development of racial, ethnic, and national identities in other parts of colonial and early national America. Her most recent book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, historicizes the figures of the quadroon and the "tragic mulatta," their links with Haiti and New Orleans, and the role they have played in shaping national American identity. Building on that book, Clark¿s Anne Scott lecture will explore how nuns (who were literally veiled) and quadroons (imagined in popular literature as veiled versions of oriental harem girls) provided useful foils against which the ideals of American womanhood and, more broadly, American identity, were forged. "Veiling" thus has a double meaning, referencing the veils worn by these women as well as the veiling of them that renders them less visible in the most familiar versions of the American historical narrative.