The Atlantic was, for centuries, crisscrossed by continuous fluxes of people moving either by choice or under pressure. These mobilities forged a complex web of relationships not only between the two shores of the Atlantic but also within the American space. Using a voluminous correspondence between two Saint-Domingue refugees, Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans from 1809 until his death in 1842, and Henri de Sainte-Gême, who lived in New Orleans between 1809 and his relocation to France in 1818, this chapter examines the role played by the Saint-Domingue refugees in repositioning the city within the Atlantic and Greater Caribbean. It contends that by studying a group of people who migrated under pressure (the refugees from the Haitian Revolution), we can develop conceptual frameworks (in this case, the Greater Caribbean) and spur fertile historical reinterpretations (of, in the present case, New Orleans’s position in the Americas).

“Hurricane Alley” ponders what happens when we define the literature of the coastal American South (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas), as shaped by the paths, threats, and aftermaths of hurricanes. It explores what shifts in our understanding of the field if we consider Southern literature not solely in terms of plantation and Creolization, but also around a geography of vulnerability. It argues that coastal southern literature (and its resonances with the Caribbean) provides an apt example to reflect on the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental racism. With a nineteenth- to twenty-first-century corpus featuring fiction, poetry, theater, visual arts, and cinema by George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Edwidge Danticat, Spike Lee, Patricia Smith, Kara Walker, Benh Zeitlin, Natasha Trethewey, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jesmyn Ward, the chapter expands the limits – generic, geographical, ethnic, generational, gendered, sexualized -- of southern literature.