Who Dat?: Race and Its Conspicuous Consumption in Post‐KatrinaNewOrleans

Abstract

This article explores the fraught neoliberal refashioning of post-Katrina New Orleans in relation to concurrent modes of racialized inclusion and exclusion. I suggest an intensification of market forces during this period has hastened a privileging of certain acceptable, often gendered forms of blackness tied to their performance-centered market consumption while simultaneously rendering others criminal and/or violently disposable. Such racial regulation, it is argued, is tantamount to a kind of "contractual blackness" within New Orleans' neoliberalized landscape that delineates commercially assimilable and therefore "good" black subjects from deviantly "bad" and hence expendable ones. The article follows with explorations of how some African American working class men mediate these duel economies of consumption/disposability through varying performative strategies of black possibility and alterity. [New Orleans, racial performance, neoliberalism, social disposability, black alterity] bs_bs_banner

Black Freedom, Black Markets: Notes on New Orleans Black Masking Indian Tradition

“…I am interested in the ways such tensions unfold in conversation with New Orleans tourist-driven cultural economy. At center, I suggest, sits a fraught duality that figures some African American New Orleanians as commercially assimilable and, therefore, valued Black subjects, and those otherwise deemed unassimilable and, hence, ultimately dispensable (Perry 2015). This dichotomy of Blackness-one shaped through a raced desire for certain performing bodies, and the other figured largely through a lens of racialized fear-while long-standing, has taken an intensified turn during the city's post-Hurricane Katrina period.…”

“…Passavant 2011), which generated $10.05 billion in revenue in 2019. 2 Yet, equally vital to the trade is a set of odes long celebrating a New Orleanian exceptionality rooted in its local food, music, architecture, and broader cultural traditions (Adams and Sakakeeny 2019;Perry 2015;Souther 2013). While intermingling Franco-Spanish colonial histories, engagements with the circum-Caribbean, and legacies of cosmopolitan urbanity have marked New Orleans in many dynamic ways, African Americans have been at the vibrant core given the centrality of Black lives and labor in the ongoing making of the city's economic and cultural life (Midlo Hall 1992;Powell 2012;Sublette 2008).…”

“…This apparent tension between communal "culture" and entrepreneurial "art," as it were, again illuminates some of the complexities of New Orleans bifurcated racial economy: one predicated on a duality of Black consumptive desire, and one grounded in Black disposability. Strategies fashioned to navigate this dichotomy suggest the workings of a type of contractual Blackness (Perry 2015) that delineates commercially assimilable "good" Black folks from those deviantly "bad" and, hence, dispensable. Here, I seek to elaborate upon the political philosopher Charles Mill's notion of "the racial contract," which underscores the foundational ways western liberalism codified white supremacist systems in the production of normative "white" subjects as full-persons versus sub-human "non-white" subjects deemed incapable of "forming or fully entering into a body politic" (Mills 1997, 53).…”

Architectures of Pain: Racism and Monuments Removal Activism in the “New” New Orleans

“…This approach is particularly fitting for the monuments struggle, during which experiences and perceptions of race, gender, and local versus outsider were heightened and amplified in relation to the politics of post‐Katrina reconstruction, anti‐Black police brutality, and society‐wide rising white nationalism. While I do discuss whiteness, I aim to do so in a way that “decenters whiteness” and tells a more complex story that better reflects the messy, noisy multivocality of New Orleans political projects like the post‐Civil War and post‐2005 reconstructions (Duhé 2018, 121; Perry 2015).…”