global cultural economies that are intimately connected to the restructuring of our society. In other words, when thinking about the future of New Orleans at Jazz Fest, it was difficult not to suspect that within the modes (institutional, financial, discursive, and affective) through which this music was cherished lay both hope for the future and the seeds of reproducing older formations of inequality and some of its recent manifestations.2
I ponder in this section how what we observed at and around Jazz Fest, amplified by what became apparent in retrospect after learning more about the history of the event, exemplifies just how complicated a notion it is that “the culture” can enable the reconstruction of New Orleans. I try to address some of the thorny issues that have emerged when jazz and other forms of music have been invoked or deployed to rebuild New Orleans, given the competing claims on the city and its musical cultures, the fault lines of race and class in play before and after the storm, the long-standing ways that local musical cultures have reflected social exclusions, and the complexities that emerge when the complicated cultural practices of the past and present collide in the context of disaster. But I try not to be too pessimistic. I also suggest here that we can locate social possibilities in the contradictions of Jazz Fest. This section thus provides a foundation for analyzing in more hopeful terms some of the social and artistic projects considered later in the book.
Wandering through the tents and arenas of Jazz Fest that spring, one could easily get swept up in the grand sense of multiracial communion promoted by the festival organizers. Also compelling was the idea, expressed by musicians and audience members alike, that a shared love for the music and the city could somehow bring them both back. The stated theme of the festival was “Homecoming.” There were simply sublime moments offered by local luminaries: Irma Thomas joining Paul Simon to sing “Bridge over Troubled Water” Marva Wright singing Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem “I Will Survive” John Boutté's revised rendition of Randy Newman's “Louisiana 1927,” a mid-1970s ode to local perseverance in the face of natural disaster and government neglect, especially poignant because of the tradition of Jazz Fest performers using the song to keep the spring rains at bay and new lyrics that spoke of the horrific flooding in the Lower Ninth; and the impromptu Sunday afternoon jam session in the Jazz Tent, which culminated with “What Does It Mean to Miss New Orleans,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and many words of appreciation for local musicians, ordinary folk, and tourists who returned to New Orleans for the first post-Katrina iteration of the event. Such homecoming rituals were played out across town. I witnessed them also at a brass band show at Donna's Bar and Grill and at an art opening and impromptu jam session at an acquaintance's home. These performances affirmed the profound attachments many have to the city that are mediated and consolidated through music.3
Culture was also deployed as a more specifically economic resource at Jazz Fest. It was clear that the good feelings of homecoming and multiracial communion were intertwined with the desire to generate capital, as when one performer thanked people for their “moral support” and for their “financial support.” Many local musicians were displaced by Katrina and had difficulty finding work in the storm's aftermath. For some of them, Jazz Fest represented a paycheck, either through the few gigs available to them on the festival grounds or for stints in clubs filled with tourists during Jazz Fest season. Perhaps more importantly, Jazz Fest represented the possibility of more paychecks if the crowds and enthusiasm accurately signified the local music industry's revival. More than one musician on stage, and cultural workers I spoke to offstage, talked about the fundamental importance of the music and tourist-friendly festivals to the city's collective spiritual resolve and to its financial health. After all, New Orleans, in this first year after Katrina, had lost most of its convention business as well as other big-name tourist events, such as the Sugar Bowl and the Essence Festival. The featured article in the Jazz Fest program commented that the event “marks a major public celebration of homecoming and rebirth for the city and its music. Musicians and singers like [Irma] Thomas are back where they belong in late Spring. But the festival also showcases the work of an entire community to rebuild and rejuvenate the Crescent City.”4
Another message in the aforementioned performer's thank-yous was the notion that the tourists themselves were empowered to shape the direction of the city's recovery. As one local writer offered to Jazz Fest visitors, “I hope you'll be able to get some idea of what makes this place so unique, so special, so different, and worthy of saving. Stand up for New Orleans, and do something tangible to help the city. Just coming here and spending time with us certainly helps—not only economically—and it lets us know that you care.”5
These invocations of culture as a tool for reconstructing New Orleans speak to cultural studies scholar George Yudice's account of the complex ways that “culture as resource” serves and constitutes residual and emergent forms of power and knowledge in the current neoliberal political-economic order. Geographer David Harvey describes neoliberalism as being supported by the idea that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”6 In Yudice's view, culture under neoliberalism takes on a new and pronounced role as a resource in the formation of ideology and identities, the production of social norms, and the consolidation and distribution of resources. Culture as resource also fills the political void caused by the neoliberal shrinking of government and a decline in normative civic participation.7 This perspective has been commonly voiced in New Orleans after the storm. As local artist and radio producer Jacqueline Bishop put it early in 2007, “In post-Katrina, most New Orleanians are convinced that it is the role of art and artists to rebuild our city, especially since we have no leadership.”8
We must be attuned, of course, to both the progressive and regressive ways that culture as resource fills the political void. Culture is central to the new economy of the global era and its attendant divisions of labor, as well as to the formation of “communities,” which are understood, depending on the context, as economic development projects, marketable commodities, political blocs, or social problems. The creative economy, as Yudice notes, enables the upward flow of capital to a multiculturalism-friendly professional managerial class, while people with lower status and income (particularly members of racially subordinate groups) are often relegated to being low-level service workers or “providers of ‘life giving’ ethnic and other cultural experiences.” Yet, in the void created by the retreat of the welfare state, the “'disorganized’ capitalism that spawns myriad networks for the sake of accumulation also makes possible the networking of all kinds of affinity associations working in solidarity and cooperation.” And cultural practices, as vehicles for consolidating group awareness, self-worth, and distinction, can also serve as a “foundation for claims to recognition and resources.”9 Voicing and acting upon such “claims to recognition” are, of course, a delicate dance. Such claims can be used to enhance the lives of those on the margins, but they can easily be manipulated to benefit instead the market, the state, or individuals with power. In various ways, they can be redeployed to extract value from, contain and surveil, and even terrorize the communities that produce them.
Jazz Fest fits into a pattern long established at other jazz festivals. As the list of artists mentioned earlier indicates, a wide range of sounds are often sold and celebrated under the rubric “jazz,” which in turn signifies an array of musical meanings and functions. When thinking about how Jazz Fest exemplifies the role of culture in the reconstruction of New Orleans, we should consider what literary studies scholar Lisa Lowe has termed the “multiplicity of the festival-object.” Examining a 1990 multicultural arts festival in Los Angeles, she identifies competing narratives at work in the exhibits, performances, spatial arrangements, and acts of consumption evident at that festival. The challenge, she argues, is not to “reconcile the narratives or to determine one as dominant.” Rather, it is to understand how competing narratives may produce “both a mode of pluralist containment and a vehicle for intervention in that containment,” as they simultaneously elide “material differentiations” among racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities and expose cracks in the slick, pluralistic facade.10
There is a relevant historical foundation to this, of course—one that emerged during the early twentieth century, wherein deployments of culture