SOURCE: Brooks, Kristina. “Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Local Colors of Ethnicity, Class, and Place.’” MELUS 23, no. 2 (summer 1998): 3-26.

In the following essay, Brooks examines the secret knowledge of ethnic identity and cultural boundaries that is communicated through coded relationships in Alice Dunbar-Nelson's local color fiction of New Orleans and its surrounding territories.

Pass Christian, the Bayou St. John, the Bayou Teche, Mandeville, and New Orleans's Third District are just a few of the particular locales in which Alice Dunbar-Nelson anchors her fictional characters' ethnic identities. Through direct addresses to the reader and notations of specific streets, neighborhoods, and local landmarks, Dunbar-Nelson continually puts the reader in his or her place, a place which may or may not be within the ethnic and geographical boundaries of Dunbar-Nelson's fiction. In the dynamic interactions among reader, author, and characters, such methods of reader and character placement simultaneously draw the reader's attention to his...