men from the Seventh Ward, Cajun fisherfolk from the surrounding countryside, and others from as far away as Texas—who brought their boats or found someone else’s and navigated the floodwaters to save people when the government could not or would not. We subsequently saw it in the efforts of those who stayed, those who soon returned, and those volunteers from across the nation and beyond, who quickly began feeding, clothing, housing, and administering medical care to the needy in the wake of government and established aid agency failings. We know this has not worked smoothly. We know about the heroic deeds of local activists but also about the schisms that tore apart some organizations. We know about the activists who moved to New Orleans and acted with grace and virtue but also about those who did not listen to local concerns or acted as if establishing their activist credentials was more important than serving the community in which they settled. And about the artists whose representations have been haunting, beautiful, and inspiring, but who took bread from the mouths of local colleagues. And about the rents that the well-meaning transplants helped raise. And so on.
Ultimately, Dear New Orleans begins to map a space of collaborative artistic production and a broader economy of civic engagement in and around New Orleans that remains contradictory and uneven. This space has shifted from the incredible highs and lows, the rawness that defined the immediate post-Katrina period, into something more prosaic. The city is, of course, in many ways still reeling from the catastrophe. The past several years have been extremely difficult, especially for the displaced, the poor, the female, the young, and the elderly, the people who lost family members to the flood and to the state or criminal violence that followed. It is worth noting that Amnesty International reported shortly before Katrina’s fifth anniversary that displaced New Orleanians (particularly low-income people of color), as well as some of those who had returned to the city, continued to experience human rights violations because of a lack of access to affordable and adequate housing, racial inequality in reconstruction projects, a lack of reasonable health care, police misconduct, and a dysfunctional criminal justice system. Yet things have been made better for some in the city, and not just for the elite.8 Optimism and levels of civic engagement exceed that of most places in the nation.
On the cultural front, though many worried that neighborhood-based cultures—Mardi Gras Indians, social aid and pleasure clubs and their parades—would disappear along with working-class black residents of New Orleans, these groups have reconstituted themselves and have played an important role in the reconstruction of the city through their public rituals and explicit activism. Major artists and even some previously underground performers, like transgender rap artists Big Freedia and Katey Red, have received national media attention.9 So in many ways we see a city whose unique culture is not only surviving but in many ways blossoming despite and in some ways as a result of the disaster that was Katrina. Indeed, New Orleans has much to teach us at a moment when, as Saul Williams puts it, we stand at a crossroads.
My initial reaction to what I saw happening in New Orleans was, like that of many others, one of outrage. The lesson of the storm indeed seemed to be, as Michael Eric Dyson put it soon thereafter, “The deeper we dig into the story of Katrina, the more we must accept culpability for the fact that the black citizens of the Big Easy—a tag given the city by black musicians who easily found work in a city that looms large in the collective American imagination as the home of jazz, jambalaya, and Mardi Gras—were treated by the rest of us as garbage.”10 Moralizing about New Orleans has proliferated. Often called the most African of U.S. cities, New Orleans has functioned in the political imagination post Katrina much like Africa. As V. Y. Mudimbe describes the representational function of Africa, New Orleans often operates as a “sign of something else.”11 Following Paul Theroux’s description of contemporary affinities for Africa, post-Katrina New Orleans is often seen as an “unfinished project,” where people can ennoble themselves by acting upon it.12 Over the past seven years this moralistic ennobling has sometimes taken reactionary forms, as in the we-told-you-so accounts of black savagery and the errors of big government in the immediate aftermath of the storm. One infamous example was Representative Richard Baker of Baton Rouge telling lobbyists, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”13 But we have also seen the righteous performances of the Left, in which the traumatized, displaced, or dead bodies of New Orleanians have been the cudgels with which we symbolically beat down the racial, heteropatriarchal state, the interstitial power of Empire, and other evils. While my affinities lie with the second moralizing project, I recognize that it can obscure and silence some residents of the city, and that it does not always enable a very good understanding of the complexities of people’s lives, their cultural movements, or their own analyses of the conditions they face.
One must, of course, try to come to terms with the ways the twin evils of exploitation and neglect have long helped to constitute New Orleans. Outrage remains an important motivation for writing and activism. But moving politically and analytically into the future also requires paying attention to insistent expressions of humanity. Watts’s photographs do this. Some evoke the pain and the destruction, but most show “the beauty and fragility of the race, the ironic humor of everyday life, the dream life of a people.”14 In other words, they help us to not be overly consumed by outrage about what happened to this city and its residents in the late summer of 2005 and its aftermath.
Ultimately, the possibilities of political and creative collaboration in the music and the affirmative content of (at least some of) Watts’s photos encourage me to examine the ways that New Orleanians have “reinvented life” in the seven years after the storm and the levee breaks. As a writer, I am compelled to frame this story less as an argument for the necessary survival of a special place, as many fine works have done, than as an analysis that builds from the confidence one can find in the activism and cultural acts of New Orleanians in recent years.15 Even with all the difficulty and contradiction, such expressions perform the ways in which the city and its residents are surviving and have been since the moment the storm hit. Such practices now reflect less what was and what happened and more what is becoming.
To try to tell this story via music is like a dance on bottle caps: staccato, slippery, and precarious. People have long talked about the relationship between music and the social. Some of us have asked how history is sedimented in sound and lyric, how music reflects the complexities of political moments, and how it might point to Utopian and dystopian futures. We have considered how music inspires people to imagine a better, or at least a different, world and about how people sometimes use it to try to change the world. But even those of us who are invested in music and social possibility recognize, at least if we are honest, that it is difficult to say with certainty what specific pieces, movements, or genres actually mean and do. Musical expressions are generally quite complicated. They often contain contradictory and ambiguous sentiments created by artists, producers, recording engineers, and businesspeople; and their diverse listeners hear them differently and selectively across time and space. This is true even when talking about music with lyrics carrying a relatively straightforward semantic meaning, let alone when considering music full of complex imagery and innuendo, or without lyrics at all.
Writing about power and possibility in New Orleans music brings with it a particular set of challenges. One stems from the depth of investment that artists, businesspeople, boosters, activists, politicians, and everyday people have in defining New Orleans as a musical city. We are thus faced with the challenge of separating fact from fiction regarding what music actually accomplishes and how it may actually relate—as opposed to mythically relate—to the specific needs, circumstances, and aspirations of the city's residents.
The HBO television series Treme, for example, the most prominent dramatic representation to date of New Orleans post Katrina, contributes to this phenomenon by portraying the city's predicament and recovery primarily through the lives of musicians and other cultural workers. As some have argued, such a focus, as well as the narrative needs of television entertainment, leads to a less than adequate treatment of complex social arrangements with deep historical roots that continue to unfold in the present. These include the profound and multifaceted racial and economic marginalization of large segments of the black population.16 It also potentially reproduces a flawed sense that multiracial musicians’ networks—composed of people who often live very difficult lives, to be sure,