The 1845 publication of Les Cenelles: Choix de poesies indigenes marked a shift in creole literary production. Prior to this collection, writers in Louisiana appeared to define themselves in relation to their transatlantic contemporaries in terms of both style and subject. They emulated a primarily French literary tradition in an attempt to convince a global audience that they, too, were worthy of note, and their poetry employed revolutionary ideals imported from France and Haiti, where many of these writers originated. But Les Cenelles, a collection of short-form, francophone poetry edited by Armand Lanusse, illustrates a deviation in voice and tone from the previous work published by its seventeen free, black authors and, as the title would suggest, offers a uniquely louisianais perspective. Infused with subtlety and and a carefully constructed voice that is both collective and intimate, the predominantly amorous poems in the collection communicate a desire to connect with a space that is simultaneously foreign and their own.

The past decade has seen a remarkable attentiveness to Les Cenelles , primarily concerned with revising the claims made in the preface to the 1979 translation by Regine Latortue and Gleason R. W. Adams. The pair conceived of the collection as merely a failure of Romanticism, that the poetry's preoccupation with placage and lack of depth in comparison to the French poets they emulated gave it a "hollow ring." They deemed the work deserving of study for the purpose of discerning "the peculiar position of the Creole in New Orleans society," but not necessarily worthy of substantive analysis without comparison. Recent scholarship has placed Les Cenelles within a growing body of African-American and/or Creole canons. However, it was plucked out of the backdrop because it was the first collection of poetry released by African-American authors, and because those authors published widely in New Orleans outside of the collection. These critics have routinely employed the term "apolitical" to describe the work, just as Latortue, Adams, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have before them, reinscribing an assumption of what defines the political.

I contend that, as the United States attempted to formulate a definition of free black people as citizens-akin-to-slaves through a legal framework in the early nineteenth century, the poets of Les Cenelles resisted this move with work that transformed a traditionally white, hegemonic form into a means of asserting their personhood as a disidentificatory work. While not explicitly queer, the collection itself performs a politics of disidentification that allow for a more complete elucidation of the multiplicity of meaning contained within the work.