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In Degas’s representations of New Orleans, in-between, interstitial spaces like the veranda of his uncle’s rented Esplanade house, where he portrayed his cousin Mathilde Musson Bell, and the back steps, where he painted a scene of a black nanny and white children, not only visualize certain desired relations of race, class, and gender, but also indicate the instability at the heart of such fixed categories. His well-known painting of A Cotton Office also depicts a literal and metaphorical middle space that similarly alludes to and destabilizes social hierarchies of difference. Degas’s New Orleans paintings and drawings simultaneously expose and mask local anxieties about race and labor, as well as the ways social and spatial relations, whether public or private, were linked to broader historical forces of global capitalist exchange.

This essay uncovers the ways that Congo Square in New Orleans can be read as a lieu de souvenir: an interstitial space for remembering the rich, diverse strands of African diaspora identity and practice that are sometimes hidden beneath the overarching category of “Blackness” in the United States. The word “souvenir” comes from combining the Latin words “sub”—under—and “venire”—to come. To “souvenir” is, therefore, to invite issues, experiences or practices, to come up from under the place where they have been buried. This kind of disaggregating remembrance helps us to uncover and appreciate the complexity and hybridity that underlie many taken-for-granted identities and practices and is particularly important when it comes to the politics of race and place. The discussion examines cycles of oppression and resistance that that have occurred in Congo Square over the course of its history.

There has been a weekly Sunday African-American second-line parade for 150 years in New Orleans--a diffused democratic street ritual of performativity enacted through dance, music, and stylin'. The main action focuses on the sponsoring Social Aid and Pleasure Club, who parade between the ropes with their hired brass-band, on-stage and for public consumption. Yet the so-called second-liners rolling and dancing outside the ropes provide the peak moments of aesthetic excellence in their claiming of interstitial spaces: on the sidewalks between the street and house-lines; on church-steps, atop truck beds or along rooftops; on porches, stoops, and billboards. Drawing on a living tradition of New Orleans African-American expressive culture, individuals display creative style as both personal pleasure and social invigoration. The physical gestures and non-verbal messages of this vernacular dance are here analysed through a series of images by second-line photographer Pableaux Johnson.