separately and in unison on ideas and variations on themes.
We invite you, the reader, to make your way through this book as you see fit. Some may choose to focus first (or solely) on the photographs. Others may move first to the text. One might, while reading the written sections, go back to individual photographs for illustration of issues encountered there. Or one could, while surveying photographs, check the index for textual references to Mardi Gras Indians, second lines, jazz funerals, and other subjects represented in the images.
But here is what we think it means to read this book from front to back, with the idea of a suite (and a jam session) in mind. The first section of photographs provides a foundation for those that follow. It portrays the atmosphere of the city, the cultural practices and environmental conditions that Lewis encountered and was directed to by many friends and acquaintances in visits over the years. Most of the photographs in this section predate Katrina, although he also includes a few post-Katrina images that reflect enduring qualities that have survived the natural and human-made disasters. Eric’s written sections 1 and 2 are also foundational. In section 1, “New Orleans, America, Music,” he provides a brief meditation on the political, social, cultural, and moral scene one must engage with when writing about New Orleans and its music post Katrina. Section 2, “Reflections on Jazz Fest 2006,” conveys some of our impressions of the first iteration of this event after Katrina. The key issue Eric ponders here is the complicated notion that “the culture” can enable the reconstruction of New Orleans, which is a recurring theme in the words and images.
One crucial component of our shared data is the specific destruction wrought by the storm and levee breaks and what many have described as the additional catastrophe caused by the response to the crisis by the government and local elites. Eric tells some of that story briefly in sections 1 and 2, and Lewis expands upon it in the first section of the large group of photographs that follow. There he uses his long-term interest in the “cultural landscape” as a filter for reacting to the specific effects of the storm on the environment. He reflects further upon its impact on local culture and the ways people responded, for better and for worse. Some photos are from several weeks after the storm, while a number were taken during the spring 2006 trip, when Eric was also present. Their shared conversation while traveling through the city on this visit shaped each contributor’s analysis of what they encountered and thus also became part of the shared data for the suite.
The large group of photos continues with two sections dedicated to the rituals that have sustained people before and after Katrina, with particular attention to traditional African American practices. The first section, on second line parades and funerals, includes photographs taken before the storm and during several later visits to the city. The second section includes photographs from Mardi Gras in 2007 and 2008. Eric’s written sections 3 to 5 follow and provide a parallel take on rituals and transformations to them. Section 3, “Parading against Violence,” examines some of the different ways cultural workers and their allies have employed traditional and alternative second line practices in the struggle against criminal and state violence and have, in the process, opened up space for an interesting referendum on who bears responsibility for violence in post-Katrina New Orleans. Among other things, Eric discusses a 2008 Lundi Gras second line that also appears in some of Watts’s photographs, providing another set of shared data. Section 4, “Reconstruction’s Soundtrack,” looks at the ways post-Katrina recordings by local musicians comment on the transformations in the city following the storm, speaking forcefully for an equitable reconstruction of the city and ultimately theorizing New Orleans as a zone of radical potential forged out of the often mundane, sometimes heroic relationships of its citizens and sustained through alliances with outsiders. Finally, section 5, “To Reinvent Life,” focuses on cultural shifts that are happening along with demographic transformations and changing spatial relationships in the city. It suggests that future writing about New Orleans would benefit by conceptualizing the city as a node in overlapping diasporas, the site of multiple experiences of displacement in the past and present.
Much of the inspiration for these last two written sections came from encounters during our April 2010 visit to the city, when we witnessed the paradoxical ways that New Orleans was recovering from the disaster five years later. That visit more or less coincided with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which has produced a new set of challenges while reminding us that the 2005 storms are part of a much longer history of people surviving and celebrating under difficult conditions.
FOUNDATIONS
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PLATE 1. Tremé bar, 2001
PLATE 2. Central City, 1994
PLATE 3. After school, Rampart Street, 2000
PLATE 4. Lee Circle, 1994
PLATE 5. Algiers, 2011
PLATE 6. John Scott drawing at a house party, 1994. John Scott was a MacArthur Award-winning artist who lost his house and studio after Hurricane Katrina and died shortly afterward.
PLATE 7. Earl “African Cowboy” Turbinton playing for Adella Gauthier and her daughter at a house party, 1994
PLATE 8. Player piano restoration, Magazine Street, 2001
PLATE 9. Magazine Street, 2001
PLATE 10. Rashida Ferdinand’s bedroom in her recently reconstructed house, Ninth Ward, 2008. Pictured is her grandmother, Marjorie Belcina Pajeaud.
PLATE 11. Black Madonna, Uptown, 2010
PLATE 12. Sweet Olive Cemetery, Baton Rouge, 2001
PLATE 13. Jessie Hill’s grave, Holt Cemetery, 2005
PLATE 14. St. Roch (“patron saint of miracle cures”) Chapel, Bywater, 2001
PLATE 15. Altar to Marie Laveau, Voodoo Spiritualist Temple, 1996
PLATE 16. Fats Domino under the freeway, Claiborne Avenue, 2006
1
NEW ORLEANS, AMERICA, MUSIC
. . . How much are we subject
to the metaphors we reference?
If we sing of mighty battles
will we conjure them?
New Orleans
the