Humanities Book of the Year
2022
Great Reads from Great Places,
Library of Congress, National Book Festival 2022
%20-%20Copy.jpg)
.jpg){kind=logo}
"Shaik blows the dust off the ancient records of an African American society...A lively, readable story." Kirkus Starred Review
4 Books to read for Black History Month: Kirkus Perspectives
“A most remarkable book built upon extraordinary research, beautiful writing, and devotion to telling the truth about the outstanding elite free colored community in New Orleans and its multi-generational battles for equal rights and against deeply entrenched, growing violent racism in their beloved home.”
--GWENDOLYN MIDLOW HALL,PhD
Creator, Louisiana Slave Database and Author, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the 18th Century.
Washington Independent Review of Books:
"prodigious and fascinating research"
The Christian Science Monitor:
"Shaik painstakingly recounts Economie meetings, translating the society’s minutes from the original French....In its final days, Economy Hall, the group’s headquarters, became an indispensable part of the city’s cultural legacy."
"Economy Hall's hidden history is revealed in rescued journals from a turbulent time"
New Orleans Advocate
"Economy Hall: Fatima Shaik Explores the Hidden History of Black New Orleans" New Orleans Tribune
"With a fiction writer’s verve for detail and a historian’s gusto for the whole story, Fatima Shaik presents a meaty and very readable history of a mutual aid association that thrived among New Orleans’ Black Creole population from before the Civil War until Shaik’s own childhood."Country Roads Magazine
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ECONOMY HALL
“Fatima Shaik brings the 19th century members of the Economie society to life with compelling details and sensitive, heart-felt writing ....She interlaces quotes from the Economie’s never-before-seen journals with snippets from newspapers, property and census records, travelers’ memoirs, and even séances to create a rich non-fiction narrative that reads like a novel.”
"Afro-Creole writer and activist Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes first offered a glimpse into the Société d’Economie’s early history in Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire....Now, Shaik, a twenty-first century heir to the Desdunes’s legacy, proposes to open an exciting new window onto the city’s rich multiethnic, multiracial history. As her eloquent 'Prologue' indicates, she is ideally suited for the task."
This is wonderful work...In Economy Hall, Fatima Shaik has taken mere stick figures of American history and brought them to life as wise, vulnerable, determined men. For more than a century, the Creoles of New Orleans sought to introduce democracy to America, which was hardly democratic. Shaik has resurrected their struggles and brought them into sharper focus."
NANCY MILFORD,
author, Zelda and
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna
St. Vincent Millay
CARYN COSSE BELL,
Pulitzer nominated author of Revolution, Romanticism and the
Afro-Creole Protest Tradition,
1718-1868
LOLIS ERIC ELIE,
Producer of "Faubourg Tremé" and writer for the HBO series "Tremé"
PRAISE FOR ECONOMY HALL
“Fatima Shaik brings the 19th century members of the Economie society to life with compelling details and sensitive, heart-felt writing ....She interlaces quotes from the Economie’s never-before-seen journals with snippets from newspapers, property and census records, travelers’ memoirs, and even séances to create a rich non-fiction narrative that reads like a novel.”
"Afro-Creole writer and activist Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes first offered a glimpse into the Société d’Economie’s early history in Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire....Now, Shaik, a twenty-first century heir to the Desdunes’s legacy, proposes to open an exciting new window onto the city’s rich multiethnic, multiracial history. As her eloquent 'Prologue' indicates, she is ideally suited for the task."
This is wonderful work...In Economy Hall, Fatima Shaik has taken mere stick figures of American history and brought them to life as wise, vulnerable, determined men. For more than a century, the Creoles of New Orleans sought to introduce democracy to America, which was hardly democratic. Shaik has resurrected their struggles and brought them into sharper focus."
NANCY MILFORD,
author, Zelda and
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna
St. Vincent Millay
CARYN COSSE BELL,
Pulitzer nominated author of Revolution, Romanticism and the
Afro-Creole Protest Tradition,
1718-1868
LOLIS ERIC ELIE,
Producer of "Faubourg Tremé" and writer for the HBO series "Tremé"
“I found it exhilarating to step through the doors of the Eocnomy Hall as the society's members refuted the claims of scientific racism; assembled...their collection of books...fostered the emergence of jazz...rovided the means for spiritualism to thrive; and so on throughout the manuscript...Shaik maps a complex historical, geographical, and emotional terrain characterized by complex (an often misunderstood) distinctions of culture, color, class, and manners....She makes a convincing argument that the origins of Creole community...reside in the founding of the Société in 1836."
SHIRLEY THOMPSON, UT Austin
author, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in
Creole New Orleans
"This narrative describing the evolution of New Orleans' free colored community is beautifully written and accessible to a general reader. For historians and those who have some knowledge and interest in New Orleans and the Creole community, the Economie journals are a rare and very significant find. Shaik has tracked down the signatures of organization members who were involved in important historical developments. We will now have another view and fuller picture of the history of the people and the times."
MARY FRANCES BERRY,
Geraldine R. Segal Prof. of
American Social Thought, UPenn
former chair, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, former President of the Organization of American Historians
"Fatima Shaik has unconvered an important and overlooked chapter of our shared history and, as the opening pages of her book about the Société d'Economie reveal, she has done so with the touch of a gifted writer and the eye of an insightful journalist."
MITCHELL ZUCKOFF,
Redstone Prof of Narrative Studies, BU
author, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9-11
"Shaik's re-creation of these men and their milieur, along with the story of the journals themselves, is one of the most compelling pieces of creative non-fiction I've read."
DIANE SIMMONS,
author, Courtship of Eva Eldridge and several critical books on American writers.
BIO
Fatima Shaik is the author of Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free, Black Brotherhood (The Historic New Orleans Collection, February 2021). She was born in the historic Seventh Ward of New Orleans and bred on the oral histories of Black Creoles told by her family and neighbors. Only after she read the records of the Economie—3,000 pages of handwritten French stored in her family’s home—did she realize this community’s impact. She spent two decades reading the journals and documenting events with real estate records, legal cases, old monographs, and articles. A full-time journalist for more than a decade, Shaik founded the Communication Department at Saint Peter's University and taught as tenured faculty for 25 years. Her freelance articles appeared in Essence, Nikkei Architecture, L'Expansion, The New York Times, In These Times, and The Root. Shaik is a trustee of PEN America and former board member of The Writers Room in NYC. Economy Hall is her first work of nonfiction and her seventh book.
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY FRW Scholar in residence
LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES, Publishing Initiative Grant
PLATFORMS FUND, ANTENNA WORKS (Andy Warhol and Joan Mitchell foundations) Research and Development Grant
AFRICANA STUDIES PROGRAM NEW ORLEANS PUBLIC SCHOOLS, Literature residency
THE KITTREDGE FUND, Research and writing grant
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT OF THE HUMANITIES, Fellowship
B. S. Boston University, School of Public Communication
M.A. New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
UPCOMING FILM
Award-winning filmmaker Kavery Kaul’s upcoming documentary THE BENGALI takes Fatima Shaik on a remarkable journey from New Orleans, the city of her birth, to India where her grandfather came from --- the untold story of ties that link African-Americans and South Asians in the U.S.
Economy Hall exhibition
New Orleans Jazz Museum
400 Esplanade Avenue.
Open now.
Also visit EconomyHall.com
Previous Books by Fatima Shaik and Work in Anthologies
No events at the moment
Virtual, accessible, and each event promises NEW information!
Note the local time zones for each event.
For any media inquiries, please contact
Publicist
Scott Manning, 603-491-0995, scott@scottmanningpr.com
Publisher
504-598-7127
%20paint%20pink.jpg)
CONTACT
Follow me:
We don’t have any products to show here right now.
The Economy Society (Société d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle) began in 1836 and ended around the late 1940s. The organization counted as members many of the activists and entrepreneurs in a community termed colored, Black, and Negro over the century. My book, Economy Hall tells the enitre story of this community from the Haitian Revolution to the creation of jazz.
Economy members served in the Battle of New Orleans and Civil War, died in the New Orleans Massacre and "Battle of Liberty Place," worked in the Reconstruction government and post-Reconstruction politics and much more.
Below are the names of men who were members of the society in 1876 when the Economy re-incorporated to include Les Amis de l’Équité—the Friends of Equity.