341 REVIEW Wade, Leslie A., Robin Roberts, and Frank De Caro. Downtown Mardi Gras

REVIEW Wade, Leslie A., Robin Roberts, and Frank de Caro. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 256 pp. $99.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-4968-2378-6; $30.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4968-2384-7 Vaz-Deville, Kim, ed. Walking Raddy: The New Orleans Baby Dolls. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. 384 pp. $90.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-4968-1739-6; $30.00m ISBN 978-1- 4968-1740-2 Aurélie Godet Université de Paris, France One of the few positive consequences of Hurricane Katrina (2005) has been a surge of interest in Louisiana cultural traditions among local and nonlocal anthropologists, historians, folklorists, geographers, and sociologists. Unsurprisingly, New Orleans Carnival has received the lion’s share of those scholarly efforts, and a number of books have explored its complex history and contemporary manifestations.1 In this review I focus on two of the most recent: Leslie A. Wade, Robin Roberts, and Frank de Caro’s ethnographic study of new carnival practices in the city’s downtown area and Kim Vaz-Deville’s edited collection on the New Orleans “Baby Dolls,” an African American female performance tradition that has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the twenty-first century. Though different in goal, scope, and methodology, both volumes contribute significantly to our understanding of the “city that care forgot.”2 In the introduction to Downtown Mardi Gras, Wade dwells on the significance of carnival for both residents and the outside world in a post-Katrina context. To New Orleanians, the festive season “functions as a touchstone, organizing relationships and rivalries between its citizens.” In other words, it stands as a “key constituent of identity and belonging” (p. 7). To the rest of the nation and abroad, Mardi Gras symbolizes New Orleans’s supposed flair for celebration, performative exuberance, and laissez-faire disregard for a mainstream American ethos—a perception that feeds the city’s tourism engine and brings in millions of visitors every year. Beyond such observations about the event’s “double audience” (a distinction somewhat complicated by the fact that residents are encouraged to experience their city as tourists do), it can be hard to generalize about New Orleans Carnival.3 “There are as many versions of Mardi Gras as there are revelers,” Wade rightly points out. Such complexity does not detract the authors from distinguishing between various sets of festive performances. The book thus pits the big uptown carnival parades organized by exclusive clubs (most of them established prior to 2005) against the more democratic walking parades organized by small “krewes” in the neighborhoods of Tremé, Marigny, and Bywater, which have welcomed many transplants since Katrina. In the six chapters that follow, the authors spotlight seven of these “downtown” groups (the Krewe KEYWORDS de Jeanne d’Arc, Skinz n Bonez, ‘tit Rex, the Krewe of Red Beans, the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus, the Amazons, and the Black Storyville Baby Dolls) and analyze their positioning Carnival in terms of gender, class, and race and the way they operate under a shared umbrella of civic New Orleans identity while embodying negotiations of urban space, including neighborhood rivalries for status and resources in a gentrifying city. Journal of Festive Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 341–349. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.83 341 Based on a combination of participant observation and interviews conducted over a period of ten years (from the beginnings of the Joan of Arc parade in 2008 to the 2017 carnival season), each chapter delves in depth into the biographies and motivations of the groups’ founders as well as into the experiences of regular members. It also pays significant attention to the materiality of Baby Dolls the parades and to their spatial inscription. Such meticulous ethnographic work, enhanced by color photographs, allows the reader to take in the celebratory atmosphere, while fully conveying performance tradition the amount of commitment and headache involved in creating a new parading organization commodification (something that, incidentally, complicates the leisure/work divide). It is buttressed by a solid theoretical structure that combines theater historian Joseph Roach’s concept of “surrogation” cultural appropriation (the process by which people deal with the unspeakability of loss or social turbulence in the gentrification circum-Atlantic world by engaging in performances that act as living effigies) with performance studies scholar Diana Taylor’s distinction between authorized, sanctioned stagings that are written into histories (the archive) and the more ephemeral performances of the street that enact 4 1. See especially Roger D. Abra- embodied memory (the repertoire). To Wade, Roberts, and De Caro, New Orleans contemporary hams, with Nick Spitzer, John F. carnival practices consist in performing memory work in the shadow of disaster while inventing Swed, and Robert Farris Thomp- new ways of being together. By recasting the traditions of Mardi Gras, by setting themselves son, Blues for New Orleans: in relation to past practices (and the citizens who performed them), and by advancing new Mardi Gras and America’s Creole performance styles and new civic identities, the downtown marching krewes are said to be filling 5 Soul (Philadelphia: University the “cavities” created by Katrina. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Rachel Breunlin, ed., The House of Surrogation, however, raises issues that nearly all the groups discussed in the book have had Dance and Feathers: A Museum to navigate: concerns over cultural appropriation (especially sensitive in a postcolonial city like by Ronald W. Lewis (New Orleans: New Orleans), commodification (groups that perform for money or seek corporate sponsorship UNO Press/Neighborhood Story have been accused of “selling out”), and gentrification (which has resulted in the displacement of Project, 2009); Kim Marie Vaz, residents deemed to be “culture bearers” and the arrival of new “cultural entrepreneurs”). On all The “Baby Dolls”: Breaking the of these topics, the authors adopt nuanced positions, suggesting, for instance, the possibility of 6 Race and Gender Barriers of the “good-natured borrowing” and of non-exploitative festive work. New Orleans Mardi Gras (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer- In the book’s conclusion, Wade reflects on what has been termed “the new golden age of Mardi sity Press, 2013); Errol Laborde, Gras” and wonders whether the increasing popularity of downtown carnival and its democratic Mardi Gras: Chronicles of the ethos will contribute to a citywide shift toward social progressivism, or whether the admission New Orleans Carnival (Gretna, LA: of certain carnival performances into “the archive” will turn certain individuals into “guardians Pelican Publishing, 2013); Rosary of tradition,” leading to yet another period of stasis. Yet he refuses to be cynical and, rather than O’Neill, New Orleans Carnival focus on the adversarial nexus of carnival (debates over lineage and authenticity, cultural-capital Krewes: The History, Spirit & Se- envy, internal bickering, battles over turf, individualistic status-seeking, etc.), he prefers to dwell on crets of Mardi Gras (Charleston, carnival’s utopian dimension as an escape from the status quo. To all three authors, downtown SC: History Press, 2014); Howard Mardi Gras is “a vast piece of egalitarian street theater,” a laboratory of civic life, where new forms Philips-Smith, Unveiling the Muse: of sociability are constantly invented and collective identities forged (p. 223). This willingness The Lost History of Gay Carnival to explore unmaterialized futures and blend the real with the imaginary sets New Orleans apart in New Orleans (Jackson: Univer- from many US cities, they argue. A few caveats aside, Wade, Roberts, and De Caro thus end up sity Press of Mississippi, 2017); siding with the “exceptionalists” who see New Orleans as one of the very few cities in the nation Jennifer Atkins, New Orleans that fosters an “irrefutable sense of place” (p. 224). Such an outlook, while bracing for all those Carnival Balls: The Secret Side of who love New Orleans, feels a bit undue, as nowhere in the book do the authors compare New Mardi Gras, 1870–1920 (Baton Orleans with other US cities, or Mardi Gras with other urban US (or world) festivities. Contrasting Rouge: Louisiana State Univer- New Orleans’s downtown carnival krewes with some of the newly established mummers’ Journal of Festive Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 341–349. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.83 342 groups in Philadelphia, Bloco de Carnaval in Brazilian cities, or indeed with Mardi Gras-inspired endeavors in such cities as Galveston, Pensacola, Orlando, Tampa, St. Louis, Tulsa, Portland, San Diego, and San Luis Obispo might have challenged (or perhaps strengthened) the argument.7 sity Press, 2017); Brian Costello, Aside from this reluctance to embrace a more comparative/global approach to urban festivity, Carnival in Louisiana: Celebrating other aspects of the book beg for debate. For instance, it is not clear how the authors came to Mardi Gras from the French select the seven groups they focus on. Were they deemed especially representative of the whole Quarter to the Red River (Baton downtown Mardi Gras scene or were these groups to which the authors had the best access? Rouge: Louisiana State University Either way, the readers may wish to know more about the sampling methodology. Wade rightly Press, 2017); Ottmar Ette and acknowledges the relativity of their conclusions in the book’s introduction. Listing the reasons Gesine Müller, eds., New Orleans that might have led them to look at some parades more than others might have enriched this and the Global South: Caribbean, discussion on positionality. Creolization, Carnival (Hildesheim: George Olms Verlag, 2017); Although the book does a great job of studying the production of carnival parades, it says Jeroen Dewulf, From the Kingdom little on how these parades are perceived by those who watch them.

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