In this article, we consider how long‐term patterns of resistance to structural violence inform citizens' responses to displacement before and after Katrina. Drawing on Abdou Maliq Simone's (2004) conceptualization of people as infrastructure, we recenter the discussion about the rebuilding of New Orleans around displaced residents, taking the place‐making practices of members of a social club as a lens through which to examine the predicament of the city as a whole. Members have been generating alternative ways of thinking about and dwelling together in a restructuring city. Their perspectives are articulated through in‐depth interviews, focus groups, and the embodied practices of club members and their followers as they make claims to the city through massive, participatory street processions known as second lines. These distinctive ways of thinking and being in the city—the subaltern mainstream of the second‐line tradition—are now being deployed by exiled New Orleanians reconsidering their relationship to home.
Popular memorial practices, including traditional jazz funeral processions, are continually being refashioned and re-appropriated for devotional, commercial, and political purposes in New Orleans. Belying nostalgic representations of the jazz funeral as a "dying tradition," neighborhood-based parades produced by working-class African Americans continue to provide a space for the articulation of local subjectivities, particularly for those most affected by the violence of contemporary urban life, [blackness, memory, New Orleans, urban space, performance, violence, heritage] Mimesis unto death [is] the political art form par excellence, repeated and worked over continuously.
In this paper, we consider how the folk are produced and consumed at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest). Founded in the aftermath of the civil rights movement as a cosmopolitan gathering of music, food, and art lovers, Jazz Fest has become one of the world’s largest music festivals. The staging of the festival in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was seen as a symbol of the reviving spirit of New Orleans and showcased the festival as an icon of the city. Blackness and other forms of otherness are central to producing a concentrated experience of cosmopolitanism there and to constructing a "hip" identity. Festgoers and producers are "in the know" about the folk, even as they are separated from them by race, class, and/or education. Those who produce the folk participate in an imaginary leveling of difference, while festival visitors experience the spine-tingling transcendence of musical communion. At the same time, folk artists, demonstrators, vendors, and performers are tightly disciplined by the structures that specify precise limits on what they can and cannot do. A close examination of the production of culture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival reveals a reproduction of a racialized social structure in which people of color (mostly African Americans) and other "folks" are sidelined while owner-connoisseurs are able to control presentation and production.
It is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation, and we cannot wield "how life really is out there" as a kind of test against which the political rightness or wrongness of a particular cultural strategy or text can be measured.-stuart hall, "What is this 'black' in black popular culture?"We're going to have to learn to fight. Everything feels good now, and we'll worry later when we disagree that we'll damage our organization or relationships to speak out about it. Really, [if we try to avoid arguments] we'll just make it worse. Knowing how to fight and how to make up builds trust and respect. It balances power. -shana sassoon, community organizer, March 2006The Neighborhood Story Project opened its doors in New Orleans in 2004 with a deceptively simple mission statement: "Our stories told by us" ). The organization, which Rachel co-directs with Abram Himelstein, and in which Helen is an active board member, works with high school students and collaborates with neighbors and "community-based" organizations to create and publish books about neighborhoods around the city. NSP methodology is inspired by the eclectic backgrounds of the people who work under its umbrella. The collaborative anthropologies • volume 2 • 2009 116 •
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