in the city have presented to me a compelling and complicated set of aesthetics. In other words, I am drawn to New Orleans as a place that wears its past and present, as well as its heart, on its sleeve.
I was scheduled for a fall 2005 Artist in Residency at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina derailed these plans. I was able to get into the city six weeks later, with access to various parts of it made possible by being “embedded” with the National Guard. But most of the residents were still gone. I felt great loss entering the city after the storm because of that absence. I also grieved for the loss of access to the artistic and cultural life of the city that the residency would have provided. My loss, of course, was minuscule compared to what people who lived there were facing, and in the end, post-Katrina visits to the city exposed layers and complexity in New Orleans that were not available to me before. I have been able to see more clearly how much the people and culture functioned as the connecting tissue and activating agents for the visual elements that had originally drawn me to the place. Moreover, I have seen parallels between what the storm did to dislodge so many of New Orleans’s African American residents and the demographic changes wrought by urban renewal and gentrification in other places I have photographed and researched, like West Oakland, the Fillmore in San Francisco, and Harlem. The strong feelings that have emerged from making these connections have provided much of the inspiration for my contributions to this volume.
Also inspiring have been the attempts of New Orleanians to keep the “essence” of their city from disappearing in the wake of Katrina. That struggle has indeed been a central element of our observation of place. My research and photographs of New Orleans before and after the storm have yielded deep relationships with artists, curators, musicians, and other cultural practitioners, who have granted access to cultural practices, ritual, and physical parts of the city that were only partially available to me in eleven years of photographing before the storm. My experience has been that the people of New Orleans are very protective of the image and culture of their city, but for the most part people of all walks of life have been very generous to us, because we both try to approach our research with a personal and professional background that places the specific narrative here in a global context. The collaboration with Eric has also been a great way to open my eyes and rethink my reactions to places and events.
REHEARSAL TWO
ERIC PORTER
There is a long history of writing about and otherwise representing music in New Orleans as a means of situating this city in larger narratives concerning diaspora, nation, race, blackness, and so on. People from New Orleans have been invested in this project, and outsiders have too. This work has continued into the post-Katrina present, with many, often elegiac accounts emerging that map this complex cultural terrain and quite often stake a claim for the national and global importance of local expression.
I made several visits to New Orleans during the sixteen years prior to Katrina, beginning with one on the way to a family reunion in Shreveport. I was also interested in New Orleans as a jazz scholar, well aware of the importance of the city to that genre’s history and, more generally, to the history of music in the Americas. Important to that story have been the ways that New Orleans’s social and cultural environment has informed the complex meanings that accompany jazz and other forms of music.9
Like others in the field of jazz studies, I have been interested in understanding music and its meaning in their broader social and political contexts and also in the ways music has been mobilized—by musicians and others—to make social commentary and perhaps even change the world. Following long-standing trends in cultural studies and cultural history, I have tended to look at cultural production as a contradictory site. Genres, communities, and even singular expressions can simultaneously reinscribe power and provide a means of resisting, or at least negotiating, it. Music can express a progressive or even revolutionary orientation or philosophy along one axis of power (say, race) while being simultaneously retrograde on another (say, sexuality). And like many other African American writers, I have understood that trying to say something smart about the music is a project of political and even moral import. Thus New Orleans has seemed to offer a lot when thinking about power and paradox in and through music.
Although I was not able to visit the city until eight months after the storm and what some call the “federal flood,” I was, like many, profoundly affected, beginning that fateful August, by the humanitarian and political implications of Katrina and the threat posed to New Orleanians and their cultural scene. I was also captivated by the ways people turned to music for sustenance in the wake of the storm, and how New Orleans culture was mobilized, for better and for worse, by people with varying and sometimes conflicting interests, to rebuild the city and help (or not help) those who were displaced or otherwise affected by the storm.
Responding to Katrina as a scholar quickly became an imperative and, as the complexity of Katrina’s aftermath and the representation thereof unfolded, an analytical challenge. Attending an early 2006 symposium at the University of California Santa Cruz, where Lewis and I both teach and where he presented his wonderful photographs, provided the catalyst for writing something about the city in the post-Katrina moment. To make a long story short, Lewis and I talked at the symposium about a collaborative project on New Orleans and, after successfully putting together a grant proposal to fund a visit to the city that May, began this collective effort in earnest.
Admittedly, I initially imagined that my contribution to the volume would be based on a much deeper and systematic engagement with archival sources and a large collection of interviews that I hoped to conduct during lengthy stays in New Orleans, but the profession and life more generally got in the way. I also recognized quickly that a tremendous amount of excellent writing on the phenomena that interested me most was being produced by scholars, journalists, activists, and artists with deeper connections to the city than I could ever have. So my approach has been to rely significantly on secondary literature to develop an understanding of some key phenomena that I witnessed (and was directed to by generous local contacts) during visits to the city in 2006, 2008, and 2010. Others’ scholarship has also helped me understand issues I encountered in the myriad media representations of post-Katrina New Orleans over the past seven years. And of course, I have drawn immensely from Lewis’s photographs. I have learned much from their content, and I like to think they have enabled me to bring more art to my writing. Ultimately, I hope that my outsider status—my somewhat different investments in the subjects at hand, the experiences I bring as a scholar interested in the broader (even global) implications of local phenomena, my fascination with paradox, and perhaps also a kind of analytical distance—can provide a distinctive perspective on some familiar subjects and maybe even some new insights.
COMPOSITION AND PERFORMANCE
Our New Orleans Suite is composed with our preferred modes of professional communication: analytical writing and photographs. As a “suite,” the book’s organization follows the logic of two definitions of that term. A suite, of course, is a set of musical compositions designed to be performed and heard in succession. But please consider this a composition that has developed out of a kind of improvisation—a creative exchange between us that proceeded in often unplanned and unexpected ways as we have shared ideas over the phone and e-mail, in conversations in Eric’s living room, when sitting in front of a computer screen in Lewis’s studio, and most important, while walking and driving around New Orleans together in 2006, 2008, and 2010. The conversations and shared observations have been mutually influential, in terms of identifying the key themes around which this story coheres and in terms of their effects on where we have taken our individual narratives. So, on that note, we also envision this book as a “suite” that is analogous to an integrated set of computer applications that operate as a whole and share data.
We present here groups of photographs and written sections that form two narratives. We intend for these to operate independently but also to represent in tandem New Orleans’s cultural history and its recent transformations. At times the mutual influence will be quite subtle, requiring active and creative interpretation on the part of the reader. At other moments the dialogue will be clearer. We also hope to convey in this implicit and explicit dialogue the cooperative process of creating this volume as well as a deeper level of analysis that emerges from such collaboration. One way to think about