New Orleans Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity
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Remaking New Orleans Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity THOMAS JESSEN ADAMS & MATT SAKAKEENY, editors New Orleans Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity duke university press Durham and London | 2019 © 2019 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Julienne Alexander Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Ser vices Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Adams, Thomas Jessen, editor. | Sakakeeny, Matt, [date] editor. Title: Remaking New Orleans : beyond exceptionalism and authenticity / Thomas Jessen Adams and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018040997 (print) lccn 2018053730 (ebook) isbn 9781478003328 (ebook) isbn 9781478001829 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478002871 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: New Orleans (La.)— Social conditions—21st century. | New Orleans (La.)— Politics and government— 21st century. | New Orleans (La.)— Social life and customs—21st century. | New Orleans (La.)— In popu lar culture. | Ethnology— Louisiana— New Orleans. Classification: lcc f379.n54 (ebook) | lcc f379.n54 r46 2019 (print) | ddc 976.3/35— dc23 lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018040997 Cover art: Tavares Strachan, You Belong Here, Prospect 3, New Orleans, 2014. Blocked-out neon, 30´ × 80´. Courtesy of the artist. Contents Acknowl edgments ix I ntroduction: What Lies beyond Histories of Exceptionalism and Cultures of Authenticity 1 THOMAS JESSEN ADAMS, SUE MOBLEY, & MATT SAKAKEENY Part One Constructing Exceptional New Orleans 1 La Catrina: The exicanM Specter of New Orleans 35 SHANNON LEE DAWDY 2 Charles Gayarré and the Imagining of an Exceptional City: The iteraryL Roots of the Creole City 55 RIEN FERTEL 3 Phony City: Under the Skin of Authenticity 72 AARON NYERGES Part Two Producing Au then tic New Orleans 4 “ Things You’d Imagine Zulu Tribes to Do”: The Zulu Parade in New Orleans Carnival 93 FELIPE SMITH 5 The Saga of the Junkyard Dog 117 BRYAN WAGNER 6 Local, Native, Creole, Black: Claiming Belonging, Producing Autochthony 138 HELEN A. REGIS 7 The Contradictions of the Film Welfare Economy, or, For the Love of Treme 162 VICKI MAYER, HEIDI SCHMALBACH, & TOBY MILLER Part Three What Is New Orleans Identity? 8 “Queers, Fairies, and Ne’er- Do- Wells”: Rethinking the Notion of a Sexually Liberal New Orleans 179 ALECIA P. LONG 9 Building Black Suburbs in New Orleans 199 VERN BAXTER & MARIA CASATI 10 Refugee Pastoralism: Viet nam ese American Self- Representation in New Orleans 219 MARGUERITE NGUYEN Part Four Predictive City? 11 Boosting the Private Sector: Fe deral Aid and Downtown Development in the 1970s 241 MEGAN FRENCH- MARCELIN 12 What’s Left for New Orleans? The People’s Reconstruction and the Limits of Anarcho- Liberalism 261 CEDRIC G. JOHNSON 13 Neoliberal Futures: Post- Katrina New Orleans, Volunteers, and the Ongoing Allure of Exceptionalism 288 VINCANNE ADAMS 14 The Myth of Authenticity and Its Impact on Politics— in New Orleans and Beyond 307 ADOLPH REED JR. References 327 Contributors 351 Index 355 Acknowl edgments this book grew out of a 2014 conference held at Tulane University titled “New Orleans as Subject: Beyond Authenticity and Exceptionalism.” Funding for the conference was provided by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, with additional support provided by the Tulane Office of Academic Affairs, the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Newcomb College Institute, the Tulane Department of Music, the Tulane Department of Po liti cal Science, and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. We’d like to thank conference participants Vincanne Adams, Vern Baxter, Maria Casati, Joel Dinerstein, Adrienne Dixson, Rien Fertel, Megan French- Marcelin, Cedric Johnson, Yuki Kato, Alecia Long, Vicki Mayer, Marguerite Nguyen, Aaron Nyerges, Larry Powell, Adolph Reed, Helen Regis, Kodi Roberts, Heidi Schmalbach, Felipe Smith, Randy Sparks, Steve Striffler, Christien Tompkins, and Bryan Wagner as well as the numerous audience members who helped make the event full of stimulating and lively discussion. Sue Mobley joined in helping to or ga nize the conference and brought her deep knowledge not only to the introduction but to the entire editorial pro cess. This book would not have been the same without her contributions. Kyle DeCoste offered invaluable support during the conference, editorial input on the introduction, and formatting of the final manuscript. Ken Wis- soker guided the publication with a steady hand, and we thank the entire team at Duke along with the two anonymous reviewers who provided criti- cal and thorough feedback. We dedicate this book to gumbo, King Rex, foggy nights on the Missis- sippi, and memories of Marie Laveau. Introduction What Lies beyond Histories of Exceptionalism and Cultures of Authenticity THOMAS JESSEN ADAMS, SUE MOBLEY, & MATT SAKAKEENY “New Orleans is a world apart,” notes a tourism website, “in many ways its own little city- state, part of the United States but at the same time so dif- fer ent from every other place in the country.” Could anyone familiar with the city have escaped this truism that New Orleans is a land unto itself, and could any of us who have been enchanted with this place deny experiencing its singularity in profound ways? Within the specter of American exception- alism, in which the United States is idealized as an immigrant country of hard workers and liberal dreamers— “a special case ‘outside’ the normal pat- terns and laws of history,” as Ian Tyrrell has argued— New Orleans resides as a thing apart, the exception to the exception.1 From the beginning of its existence as a juridically American locale, those both inside and outside the city have marked it off as anathema to broader patterns of urbanity, culture, politics, economics, and, indeed, Americanness. Placed in opposition to a nation perpetually driven by pro gress, New Orleans is the “city that care for- got.” It can also be the “Paris of the South,” the “northernmost Ca rib bean City,” and the “most African city in the United States.” That New Orleans can be all of these is what makes this place diff er ent from any other place, or the United States as a whole. Or so the story goes. The response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 is a useful barom- eter of exceptionalism discourse and the importance it plays in the city’s identity vis- à- vis the nation. “Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this 2 concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools,” wrote veteran journalist Jack Shafer, while Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert observed from Washington, “it looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”2 To be sure, the overwhelming response to the devastation in New Orleans was an outpouring of assistance, with thousands of volunteers and donors support- ing rebuilding efforts and contributing their dollars and sweat to the pro cess of bringing a major American city back from the brink. Affective cases for Adams, Mobley, & Sakakeeny Mobley, Adams, rebuilding were packaged under titles like Why New Orleans Ma tters and What Can’t Be Lost. Testifying on Capitol Hill about the “strategy neces- sary to rebuild Louisiana,” then Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, who would be elected mayor in 2010, explained to Congress, “Louisiana has an economic asset that other states can only dream of: a multifaceted, deeply rooted, au then tic, and unique culture.”3 Though the calls for support ran directly counter to the desires of the conservative bulldozers, both relied upon a broadly shared perception of an inimitable city set apart from a nor- mative Amer i ca. How is it pos si ble that the justification given for saving New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana was not that it’s a major metropolitan area, home to 1.3 million people, or the nation’s busiest port system, or perhaps the key nodal point in North Amer i ca’s oil and gas infrastructure? From the other perspective, would se nior politicians and influential opinion makers have called for the abandonment of the Bay Area following the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, or of lower Manhattan and northern New Jersey afte r Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, or of the Houston metropolitan area inun- dated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017? Whether sinful or soulful, post- Katrina New Orleans was to live or die by the sword of exceptionalism, by how those in power assessed the value— not least in monetary terms—of its culture. New Orleans exceptionalism, its raison d’être, is grounded in notions of cultural authenticity embodied in creolized cuisine and architecture, jazz and other musical traditions, community parades and black Indian pro- cessions, voodoo queens and Mardi Gras royals, public drinking and prosti- tution. We should state at the outset that as residents of New Orleans, each of us participates in the city’s multifaceted traditions and attends to vari ous cultural formations in our research. This book is an attempt not only to draw out other, more neglected areas of local study but to highlight the affini- ties between scholars, popu lar historians, journalists, and tourism marketers who have narrowed in on select cultural formations, masking their incorpo- ration into the market, and thus imbuing them with authenticity as defini- tively local and communitarian. This cultivated rendering of New Orleans is rooted in a nineteenth- century romantic literary tradition, continuously 3 Introduction Introduction repackaged through the twin engines of tourism and economic development schemes, and supported by research in sectors of the humanities and social sciences that has isolated the city from comparison. Such a consensus is the result of an analytical tautology in which cultural authenticity renders New Orleans exceptional and the city’s exceptionalism renders it au then tic.