Embodied Violence: Slavery and Settler Colonialism on America's Third Coast

This dissertation examines the intertwined histories of slavery and settler colonialism in Louisiana and the greater Gulf South from the Mississippian era through the early American republic, centering the violences that structured imperial expansion, racial capitalism, and territorial conquest. Rather than treating African enslavement and Indigenous elimination as parallel but distinct processes, this dissertation employs a synthetic framework that reveals their deep structural entanglements across French, Spanish, and Anglo-American regimes, foregrounding the centrality of Indigenous enslavement alongside African chattel slavery and their disproportional impacts on women and children. It demonstrates how settler colonial logics have been enacted through various legal and spatial regimes, but also through forms of ongoing structural violence, which have been embodied and are still experienced today. It further argues that the rise of the U.S. South and the consolidation of American empire were built on these interlocking systems of violence against Black and Indigenous peoples; slavery transformed the Gulf South and Lower Mississippi Valley from a richly networked Indigenous world to a racialized geography of elimination, enslavement, and extraction, practices which are foundational—not peripheral—to American settler colonialism. Using a place-based multi-sited historical methodology, this dissertation illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous people have experienced and resisted such embodied violence, including reproductive control, forced displacement and diaspora, legal erasure, and intergenerational trauma. The epilogue brings this history into the present, examining how former Native American villages and cultural sites were turned into plantations and then petrochemical-industrial sites, perpetuating cycles of disease, disaster, and death against descendant communities and tribal nations for profit. By combining archival and decolonial methods, this dissertation reorients U.S. history from the margins, insisting on the Gulf South—the Third Coast—as central to the making, and unmaking, of American empire.