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Mardi Gras functions as the city’s principle synecdoche; yet, the holiday can also serve as a barometer or indicator of fluctuating civic tensions, as Carnival has remained fluid and changeable, sensitive to the altering complexions of the city—its demographics, politics, economics, and social organization.

This chapter lays out several different narratives about the origins of Mardi Gras Indians. Some are based on oral histories shared among Mardi Gras Indians themselves, while others are based on various archives and newspaper accounts. The emergence of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition is set against the backdrop of the evolution of Mardi Gras as celebrated during the colonial period and beyond, after Louisiana had become part of the United States. The struggle for African American political power and social equality is another parallel thread for this narrative, especially as Mardi Gras Indian practices overlapped with other masking traditions and institutions in the Black community. The earliest known account of Mardi Gras Indians, identified as such, is analysed and the personal histories of the first known Mardi Gras Indians reveal connections to Black participation in the Civil War and continuing struggles during Reconstruction and through the early twentieth century.

This chapter focuses on a new parade, a new surrogation, that has assumed an empty spot in the Carnival calendar, Lundi Gras, the Monday before Fat Tuesday. This chapter explores the Krewe of Red Beans and the ways that this new parade draws on New Orleans culture, from its signature red beans and rice dish, to the Mardi Gras Indians’ costumes, to the second-line tradition. Like the other new Downtown parades, the Red Beans fosters artistic expression (and competition); displays whimsical and political humor based on local culture; and valorizes the domestic (a common meal and food stuff), and thus the feminine. And like the other new Mardi Gras parades, Red Beans wrestles with an evolving New Orleans and the role transplants play in precipitating change.

This chapter illustrates the US Navy Steel Band's musical and cultural influence throughout New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. By the late 1960s, the US Navy Steel Band moved past its high-profile early years of chasing stardom and settled into a new phase that saw the band become a fixture of the US Navy's recruitment and goodwill outreach program on a national level. Examining the US Navy Steel Band's transition from San Juan to New Orleans is essential for understanding the band's musical and cultural influence throughout New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region during the 1970s. This is particularly the case when exploring the band's seamless integration into the New Orleans Mardi Gras tradition as well as ways in which the US Navy Steel Band infused elements of the Caribbean Carnival into their adopted cultural home.

This chapter explores how black girls found pleasure in Jim Crow New Orleans. It mainly highlights three “pleasure cultures” on a black girl's life during the period of segregation: the reading and writing culture of romance stories, the dance culture as evidenced at the local “colored” Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), and the pleasure cultures of the festival of Mardi Gras. These pleasure cultures illustrate “make-believe worlds” that the black youth created to forge moments of intimacy away from the violence of state-sponsored racism. The chapter describes two principal components that made up the ideological systems that defined black women's sexuality. First, the silence stemmed from the overarticulation of black women's sexuality by racist ideologies. Black women and girls were defined as promiscuous, as an “Other,” and as always an object of someone else's pleasure. Second, the silence is also caused by a self-imposed culture of dissemblance, which afforded them privacy.

This chapter defines Mardi Gras Baby Dolls of the Seventh Ward. It begins with a definition of the Seventh Ward and its geographical location. It then touches on the epitome of a Baby Doll, who they were as people, as well their alter ego when they masked. These women were regular New Orleanians who defied gender norms and tested boundaries of the time. These women were both liked and disliked by many throughout the city. This chapter also highlights the Mardi Gras Skeletons and their significance. Also included is a host of interviews of New Orleanians and their variety of perceptions of these colorful women.

This chapter examines Aliite engagement with surveillance, from public performances of Aliite nationality through garb and parades to Aliite responses to the constant accusation that such performance of identity is, in fact, a masquerade. Examining Aliite claims about and performance of true identity, this chapter draws a parallel between Aliite visual display and the practice of “masking” engaged in by Mardi Gras Indians before turning to Aliite understandings of and responses to the gaze of the state, from MSTA responses to investigations by federal law enforcement to Yamassee emphasis on use of public media to Washitaw faith in FBI surveillance as a path to state recognition. The chapter concludes with a note on Aliite investment in self-surveillance, on the use of cell phone cameras both to document displays of identity and as protection against state violence.

Conceived as a companion to Chapter 3, this chapter also examines movement in public spaces in two creole cities, but this time emphasizing an approach grounded in ethnography and focusing upon two relatively contemporary dance-based social communities: the rará performers of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans. It finds well-known historical and ethnographic parallels between these two social organizations within their respective urban-Caribbean contexts but also teases out more sophisticated and less familiar understandings of raráistes’ and Indians’ political intentionality--the parallel ways in which their costume, movement, and sound enables temporary, but potent, subaltern resistance to dominant culture’s control of public spaces.

Section 2 examines how people of various inclinations and backgrounds have engaged in antiviolence work in New Orleans through parade practices, while simultaneously addressing larger questions regarding the right to residency in the city, the ownership of its culture, and the use of public space. I see these parade practices, as have others, as mobile public spheres, constituted in real time, but also as events that open up a broader, ongoing space for reflection on key issues pertaining to the future of New Orleans. This is possible in part because of the ways that the state has failed so miserably in defining the future and because of the ways local musical cultures have been given such prominence in post-Katrina conversations about the future.

This chapter examines Women of the Storm’s activities six months after Katrina, a moment that coincided with the 2006 Carnival season. The focus on the six-month mark allowed the group, as well as residents, media, and politicians, to take stock of the ongoing recovery. Members Cecile Tebo and Madeline West discuss the work that remained to be done and Women of the Storm’s continued efforts to bring lawmakers to New Orleans. The latter half of the chapter focuses on a thirty-four-member bipartisan visit by House Representatives led by Dennis Hastert and Nancy Pelosi, and the co-delegation’s interactions with Women of the Storm members. The chapter concludes with a discussion by participants, including Jeanette Bell, during a panel at Newcomb College.

This Chapter is about the aggressive female sexuality and defiance of restrictions and values demonstrated by the feminist performativity of the New Orleans Baby Dolls and the contemporary art that references this performance. Utilizing criticism from scholars such as LuceIrigay, Judith Butler, and Mikhail Bakhtin the ways that, for women, artifice and display have come to represent the “real” in gendered performance is discussed. The specific contemporary art works discussed in this chapter posit the Baby Dolls as bodies of political action and criticism in both their traditional and contemporary manifestations and demonstrates how the Baby Doll continues to be a figure of political agency that in the process of her revelry, offers us a paradoxical performance which combines issues of age, sexuality, innocence, vulgarity, and the commodification, objectification and fetishization of the Black female body.

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, killing over 1,000 people and displacing over 1 million. As the rebuilding process began, musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and Social Aid and Pleasure Club members began trickling back. Culture prevailed as politics failed. The life force of music and memory, determined to survive, came back to the shattered city. The hurricane wasn’t the only devastating force: the city had undertaken many urban development projects in Tremé throughout the second half of the 20^th century, demolishing historical areas and displacing people. New Orleans has also long suffered from government corruption, and several politicians were arrested throughout the 2000s. Yet hope and vibrancy abound. The 2014 funeral for Larry Bannock, Big Chief of the Golden Starhunters, drew a large gathering of black Indians in a magnificent cultural spectacle. Amidst much political and social controversy, Mayor Mitch Landrieu removed the Robert E. Lee statue from the city in 2017. As New Orleans begins its fourth century, it faces issues of gun violence, poverty, and gentrification, but opportunities from a flourishing digital economy, resurgent music scene, and cultural mecca as well. It is still the vibrant, diverse society composed of people whose roots lie across the world, whose resilience has been a rudder through the storms and violent upheavals throughout the centuries.

Klan attacks took on distinct cultural forms. Ku-Klux borrowed their costume and violent performance not only from local culture, but also from popular cultural tropes in national circulation and heavily featured in minstrelsy, burlesque, circus, and carnivals. In deliberately mimicking these cultural forms, they put themselves in conversation with the northern, urban centers where so much of the naturally circulating popular culture was produced. Many of the images Ku-Klux borrowed were already weighted with a host of meanings about race, gender, and social order. Ku-Klux imported these meanings into their attacks, which they frequently used to reinforce racist cultural narratives: depicting black victims as comically overembodied and lacking in integrity. Klan victims responded not only to the violence of their attacks but also to the cultural meanings embedded in them. Depending on their circumstances and strategy, they could try to save themselves suffering by performing the minstrel roles they understood to be expected. Or they could refuse to inhabit those roles, and instead use the attack itself, and their later narration of it, to challenge the assumptions inherent in the popular cultural tropes the Ku-Klux were mobilizing.

In this prologue, Berry describes how the jazz funeral of black musician and composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments. Through this lens, Berry examines how the events surrounding the Toussaint burial pageant magnified the roiling debate over myth, memory, and politics, as well as how the beguiling image of New Orleans grew from a culture of spectacle in tension with a city of laws, an official city the popular culture challenged. Through his descriptions of the Toussaint funeral, his own conversations with Toussaint prior to his death, and an examination of race, history, Mardi Gras, and identity in New Orleans, Berry examines how the city opened into a series of adventures in which its identity kept shifting, becoming a crossroads of humanity that forged a Creole culture rich in foodways, music, tradition, and more.

Long famed as a mecca of African-American culture, New Orleans occupies a special place in studies of African diasporic music and dance. By outlining the historical and social factors that shaped unique expressions of African American cultural identity, Ausetta Amenkum provides an experiential account of the formation of the Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective, not only as a performance troupe, but also as a community institution. Utilizing poetry and an engaging tone, Amenkum situates the emergence of African dance companies founded by African Americans in the local cultural trajectory of New Orleans mid-20th century. She, then, chronicles her work and the use of African dance as a holistic approach, as she addresses a specific example: women’s incarceration issues in Louisiana.