Showing papers in "American Quarterly in 2009"

Beyond Disaster Exceptionalism: Social Movement Developments in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Abstract: Since Hurricane Katrina, grassroots social justice activists in New Orleans have organized for a just reconstruction This research maps two generations of movement response to Katrina The first was directed at the immediate conditions following the hurricane, especially post-disaster policy The second targets the broader social problems that turned the hurricane into a disaster Three emergent movement orientations characterize the second generation of movement activity: a social constructionist approach that rejects disaster exceptionalism, a strategic synthesis of service provision and community organizing, and a human rights framework Hurricane Gustav, which struck Louisiana in 2008, was the first significant storm threat to the region since 2005 It is used as a case study to demonstrate the way in which the three emergent orientations inform a new disaster action repertoire The analysis is based on three and a half years of participant observation, interviews, and movement literature

Les Misérables of New Orleans: Trap Economics and the Asset Stripping Blues, Part 1

Abstract: The essay argues that at least four interpretive frameworks are essential to understanding the debates surrounding the reconstruction of New Orleans: neoliberalism as a global and national movement; the form, function, and processes of social-spatial enclosures; the institutional organization of racial impoverishment, and the theory and practice of neo-Bourbonism in Louisiana. As the epicenter of urban poverty, New Orleans was the site of major social disasters before Hurricane Katrina. Numerous regional institutions were organized to reproduce and intensify a range of racial, gender, class, age, and geographic inequalities. Despite the glare of the international spotlight, after Katrina these institutions engaged in accelerated asset stripping and social trapping with the support of the federal government. Unaccustomed to the nature and intensity of the social conflict in Louisiana, activists, non-profit organizations, foundations, and policymakers often exacerbated inequalities without challenging the regional institutions that generate them. Consequently, New Orleans presents several fundamental theoretical challenges to reformers and communities confronting daily social disasters.

"Circular Reasoning": Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns

Abstract: In 1829-1830 Catharine Beecher, Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, and numerous white women across the Northeast and Midwest launched a successful petition campaign against Indian removal that has been called the first organized political action undertaken by American women. This article repositions the New England women’s campaign within a longer trajectory of American women’s activism, namely, Cherokee women’s political organizing. In the early 1800s, Cherokee women recognized the threat of removal and rose in defense of themselves and their communities. The Cherokee women’s antiremoval campaign was not only impressive at the time, but it also was likely to have had an impact on the New England women’s later effort. This story introduces Margaret Ann (Peggy) Scott Vann Crutchfield—a Cherokee nationalist, Christian convert, slaveholder, and activist—as a complex yet important figure in Cherokee history, Native American women’s history, and U.S. women’s history.

Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem

Abstract: ���� he landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education dealt a lethal blow to the “separate but equal” doctrine of segregation established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896; it did so largely on the grounds that segregation damages African American children’s self-esteem. In the Court’s words, “to separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” 1 Because of this psychological harm, the Court determined, African American children could never get an education equal to white children’s in a segregated school, no matter how good the physical facilities or curriculum. To support its finding of psychological damage, the Court cited in a footnote a number of social science works, most notably a report by psychologist Kenneth Clark that summarized the results of “racial preference” tests he and his wife, Mamie, had conducted to assess African American children’s racial identification. 2 In the most famous of these tests, the Clarks asked children to choose between brown and white dolls in response to a series of questions, including which doll was the good one and which the bad, which doll they wanted to play with and which looked most like him or her. 3 A majority of children identified a brown doll as looking like them, but chose a white doll to play with, as the nice one, and as the one with a nice color. The Clarks concluded that the children had internalized society’s racist messages and thus suffered from wounded self-esteem. Effectively legitimating the Clarks’ research, Brown established a discursive link between educational achievement and self-esteem for African Americans and spurred a veritable industry of racial preference testing that continues to this day. Social scientists have used racial preference tests to advocate policies on multiculturalism, self-segregation, affirmative action, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, resegregation, and the racial achievement gap. 4

An "Orphan" with Two Mothers: Transnational and Transracial Adoption, the Cold War, and Contemporary Asian American Cultural Politics

Abstract: Society has already told you and me that we have become Americans because of someone else’s charity. Now we’re being told that our cultural displacement had a purpose—multiculturalism. By growing up in white families, we can be examples, Luuk. We can show others that racial harmony is possible. We just can’t show our burdened backs . . . I guess someone forgot to ask us if we wanted to become America’s diversity mascots. —Kari Ruth, “Dear Luuk”

"Roots Run Deep Here": The Construction of Black New Orleans in Post-Katrina Tourism Narratives

Abstract: This article explores the emergent post-Katrina tourism narrative and its ambivalent racialization of the city. Tourism officials are compelled to acknowledge a New Orleans outside the traditional tourist boundaries – primarily black, often poor, and still largely neglected by the city and national governments. On the other hand, tourism promoters do not relinquish (and do not allow tourists to relinquish) the myths of racial exoticism and white supremacist desire for a construction of blacks as artistically talented but socially inferior.

The Ruse of Engagement: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing

Abstract: This article seeks to contribute to a discussion of the peculiar place of commercial black filmmaking in the cultural politics of the post-civil rights era United States. It argues that a recrudescence of antiblackness in popular culture has accompanied the growing clamor about "blacks in officialdom" that both liberal and conservative variants of multiculturalism have amplified over the last several decades, a clamor that reached fever pitch with the recent presidential election cycle. It considers whether setting this contradictory logic of representation alongside the continuing conditions of segregation that characterize black existence in the United States over the same period does not undermine too easy assertions about contemporary black inroads in state and civil society. More to the point, it suggests that such convergence complicates current thinking about an institutionalized black complicity with the structures of white supremacy, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The various guises of black empowerment, particularly images of black masculinity as state authority, should not be simply contrasted with the associations of illegitimacy, dispossession, and violence that otherwise monopolize the signification of racial blackness, but rather the former should be understood as an extension of the latter. Director Antoine Fuqua's collaboration with Denzel Washington in Training Day (2001) provides a case study for the discussion, and Fuqua's professional ascent more generally articulates some of the political, economic, and cultural conditions for a popular and lucrative antiblack black visibility on a global scale.

"We Know This Place": Neoliberal Racial Regimes and the Katrina Circumstance

Abstract: In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Black New Orleans was represented as a symbol of “disorder” as major network news focused attention on one of the poorest cities in the poorest region in the country—a city where Blacks accounted for 67% of the city before the storm. While mass mediated discourses of security, law and order helped legitimate repressive state responses to the event, New Orleans poet, teacher, singer, and Black grassroots activist Sunni Patterson articulated a “poetic knowledge” of the historical drama of social conflict through her music and poetry. Patterson's cultural productions have served as a compelling counter-discourse to the language and symbolism that inhabit what the article calls neoliberal racial regimes of security . This article explores Patterson's poetics to foreground alternative ways of seeing struggles for a social wage and a new commons that are otherwise obscured through racialized neoliberal security narratives of the event.

"You Should Give them Blacks to Eat": Waging Inter-American Wars of Torture and Terror

Abstract: This article examines the role of the state in sanctioning canine torture within the brutal context of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century plantation societies. While the employment of dogs as a slave-catching strategy was commonplace throughout the Americas, I trace the use of Cuban-bred dogs trained to track down and feed upon black flesh. Spanish, French, British and North American slave-holding powers in the region collaborated in subduing enemy combatants, using canine warfare techniques that dated back to the Spanish Conquest. These techniques were employed during the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803), the Second Maroon War in Jamaica (1795-96), and the Second Seminole War in Territorial Florida (1835-1842), the three largest-scale conflicts pitting the colonial state against African and indigenous populations from the 1790s-1840s. I illustrate that the viciousness of this strategy was a topic of strident debate for contemporary observers and that it left an indelible mark on public memory. This memory has been vividly preserved in the visual record, as well as in historical fiction by African American and Caribbean intellectuals. The use of canine torture and the debate it engendered recurred in the public sphere with the allegations surrounding the American prison at Abu Ghraib, and I close by examining continuities between the Age of Revolution and the contemporary War on Terror. Justified as a question of colonial/national security in each case, torture has proved an indispensable component in the imperial subjugation of non-white peoples.

"You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix

Abstract: This article offers a reassessment of Toni Morrison’s most acclaimed novel, Beloved , a text that has been consistently described by critics as a “neo-slave narrative.” This generic tag denotes a set of modern—usually latter twentieth century—novels that offer retrospective narrations of chattel slavery from a “post” slavery context. I challenge this prevailing view of the novel by describing it as a narrative of neoslavery , a term that I use to describe texts in which the institutional, legal, and spatial survivals of chattel slavery after de jure emancipation are thrown into relief. I offer analysis of Morrison’s graphic depiction of three of the most horrific penal architectures in US history—the slave ship, the plantation, and the chain gang camp—contending that Beloved is as concerned with “future” racial traumas, i.e. those occurring after the Civil War, as it is on those of the chattel slavery past. When read in relation to Morrison ’s portrait of the Middle Passage, the chain gang scene focalizes the intimate connections of ante- and postbellum formations of racial and spatial terrorismsystems of abjection that have culminated in the modern prison industrial complex which currently encages well over 2.3 million people. The living entombment of Paul D and 45 other black men in a chain gang “box” in Alfred, Georgia, represents a forward haunting intrusion of a postbellum spatial formation of penal terror into the action of a novel ostensibly fixated on the antebellum past. I consequently read the chain gang scene—and Beloved as a whole—as a narrative articulation of what I describe as the Middle Passage carceral model , a system of racial and spatial terrorism that belies liberal notions of historical progress while bringing into focus the long-standing criminality of the racial capitalist state.

Picture Revolution: Transnationalism, American Studies, and the Politics of Contemporary Native Culture

Abstract: Since the 1980s, political shifts within Native America, including the transnational indigenous peoples movement, have increasingly emphasized connections among indigenous communities, illuminated the place of Native America in global imperialism, and reshaped indigenous cultural production. Indigenous transnationalism, this essay argues, carries particular weight for feminism and other contemporary anti-colonial strategies as it also draws Native studies into a closer but frequently vexed relationship with postnationalist American studies. Parallel transnational tendencies in American studies and Native American studies have heretofore worked at cross-purposes: as pan-tribal alliances draw attention to U.S. internal colonialism and its connections to global imperialism, postnationalist American studies has largely neglected the ongoing colonization of Native America. Through an analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead and Shelley Niro’s multimedia installation “The Border,” this essay addresses this neglect by considering what happens to postnationalist American studies when you put Native studies at the center.

After Katrina: Racial Regimes and Human Development Barriers in the Gulf Coast Region

Abstract: The racial, social, and economic effects of Hurricane Katrina are still reverberating throughout the Gulf Coast. The category 5 storm displaced 2 million citizens, was responsible for 1,800 deaths, and inflicted at least $400 billion in damages. While much attention has been placed on government and quasi-governmental efforts at rebuilding the physi cal, economic, and disaster relief infrastructure, we need to give more attention to the particulars of the racial and political economic context that configures the opportunity structure for equitable human development. The theoretical premise of this article is that the neoliberal framework for governance in the Gulf Coast region, principally those states hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina?including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama?struc tures life opportunities among their citizens in ways that maintain concentric hierarchies of race, class, and gender. As V.O. Key has suggested, the South is the clearest U.S. example of government sanctioning of, and investment in, forms of racial inequality driven by an aristocratic and/or elite/corporate

Stories at the Center: Story Circles, Educational Organizing, and Fate of Neighborhood Public Schools in New Orleans

Abstract: This article investigates the pre-Katrina work of Students at the Center (SAC), a writing and digital media program formerly headquartered at Frederick Douglass High School in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Among other projects, SAC led a campaign to build an interactive civil rights memorial park at the site of Homer Plessy's 1892 arrest that would use youth writing, democratic pedagogy, and practices of public storytelling to remember and honor the collective actions of local participants in the ongoing “ride” towards social justice and democracy in New Orleans. This article argues that SAC's pre-Katrina coalition work with arts and community organizations illuminates the crucial role that neighborhood public schools and community-based education play in voicing, sustaining, and empowering local politics of place in dis-privileged urban neighborhoods. Tracing the way in which New Orleans's neighborhood public schools have been dismantled since 2005, this article then asks how the market-based approach to urban school reform is now transforming not only the city's educational system but also its social, political, cultural, and geographical landscapes.

Katrina Tourism and a Tale of Two Cities: Visualizing Race and Class in New Orleans

Abstract: This essay explores new forms of tourism that have emerged in post-Katrina New Orleans. It begins by looking at the ways in which the city's long history of commodifying black culture for predominantly white tourists has enabled the existence of two parallel worlds. Though distinct, these worlds are defined by a necessarily precarious boundary which allows New Orleans's tourists to experience African American culture “up close.” The voyeurism of the post-hurricane disaster tourism works rather differently. The Katrina bus tours, which transport tourists to storm-devastated neighbourhoods, focus eyes on a landscape peculiarly devoid of human inhabitants; likewise, the IMAX feature Hurricane on the Bayou is driven by a de-politicized environmentalism that elides the human cost of the storm. Both offer a sense of closure by rendering the ongoing post-Katrina racial fallout all but invisible. The essay argues that this possibly indicates a new and deeper kind of disconnect between the two parallel cities that reside in New Orleans.

Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late-Nineteenth-Century California Magazines

Abstract: This essay analyzes the workings of romantic love and its legal institution, marriage, as signs of universal humanity in fictional representation of Chinese immigrant women in two important California magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Overland Monthly and the Land of Sunshine, including short stories written by Asian American/Eurasian writer Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. Reading these fictional narratives in the contexts of the period's prevailing trope of "yellow slavery," antimiscegenation legislation that codified white heteronormativity, and the magazines' expansionist rhetoric, I argue that these narratives constitute a "culture of benevolence"-sentimental emancipatory discourse shaped by U.S. women's reform movements-which has been integral to the racial projects of the U.S. nation and empire. By tracing the tension between the trope of "yellow slavery" and marriage, I situate my analysis within the broader shared ideological structure and connected histories that racialized African Americans and Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century all the while foregrounding how heteronormative narratives about Chinese immigrant labor produced the period's shifting boundaries between the domestic and the foreign. I argue that while sentimental narratives attempt to address injustices by "humanizing" the Chinese, that is, by imagining their inclusion in universal humanity through heteronormative love and marriage, the very terms of heteronormativity paradoxically rationalize the logic of exclusionary laws, obscure imperial historic power relations, and undermine the eligibility of the Chinese for citizenship, socially, culturally, and politically. These narratives thus expose the limits of emancipatory discourses that posit heteronormative love and marriage as the passages to full membership within U.S. capitalist and imperial relations.

The Ecological Landscapes of Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson

Abstract: Within the field of urban studies, perhaps no book has garnered more attention than Jane Jacobs's 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Both vilified and praised, Death and Life effectively changed how people understood cities. Noted urban historian Kenneth Jackson claimed that Jacobs was "the single most important author on cities in the twentieth century."1 Urbanist Marshall Berman argues that "Jacobs' work has often been appreciated for its role in changing the whole orientation of city and community planning."2 From an environmental stud ies perspective, Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring, drew on the new science of ecology to document the hazards of chemical pesticides, transforming how human societies understood the physical environment. Pub lished only fourteen months after Death and Life, Carson's book engendered a fundamental shift in environmental politics. As historian Ted Steinberg has argued, "Carson helped transform ecology into the rallying cry of the envi ronmental movement."3

"Blacks in all Quarters of the Globe": Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins's Literary Journalism

Abstract: “‘Blacks in all Quarters of the Globe’: Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins’s Literary Journalism” traces the genealogy of black radicalism to Hopkins’s early twentieth century writings in the Colored American Magazine . Not only do these fiction and nonfiction works address race relations in the United States, they also engage international politics by imagining a collective anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project that connects African Americans to Haitians, Native Americans, and Filipinos. Until Booker T. Washington removed her from her editorial post in the magazine in 1904, Hopkins’s insurgent prose challenged U.S. foreign and domestic policies regarding race and economic exploitation. In historical sketches about Toussaint L’Ouverture or famous women such as Harriet Tubman as well as in Winona , an historical novel that features John Brown as a major character, Hopkins presages a proletarian revolution that will bring about her economic and political version of divine justice.

The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State

Abstract: This essay explores what the author terms the “game theory narrative,” a cultural narrative that gained prominence in American culture in the early years of the Cold War. For many Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s, game theory was a way for scientists, in collusion with the US government, to prevent nuclear exchange by conceptualizing the Cold War as a game, and by playing this game according to specific rational strategies. The first part of the essay describes how the game theory narrative popularized the idea that the rationality of pure mathematics could be applied to manage some major threats of the Cold War—the menace of an unknown enemy and the specter of an accidental nuclear exchange. The following sections explore how this narrative was both exemplified and criticized by a variety of creative works and other artifacts of Cold War culture.

Broadway and Main: Crossroads, Ghost Roads, and Paths to an American Studies Future

Abstract: As the parent of a high school student, I often find myself contemplating the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the SAT), which means jumbling together my intellectual understanding of the test s built-in knowledge inequali ties with my fascination with the aesthetic beauty of its analogy questions. I want to begin with one of these analogies: Robert Johnson is to crossroads as crossroads is to (blank). I'm going with answer C: American studies. Crossroads offers a useful trope for thinking about intersections, danger, commerce, intercourse with others, and the possibility of the new?and the figure that seems to represent these meanings best is Robert Johnson. One almost cannot hear his name without making the link to a long-lived story:

Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture: "Music Moms" and the Performance of Asian and Asian American Identities

Abstract: In a series of articles about summer camps, the New York Times reported on the Perlman Music Program, a prestigious six-week instructional program led by the world-renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. The article focused less on the teenagers who attend than on the efforts and ambitions of the "music moms" who enroll their children in advanced programs of music study. As the reporters note: "music moms' seasons are far longer than those of soccer moms. Their financial payoffs are far smaller and more elusive than those of tennis moms. But they are every bit as competitive, protective, ambitious, and self-sacrificing." The ethos of self-sacrifice emerges clearly in a comment offered by one of the article's featured mothers, Mrs. Kim, who bluntly states: "First priority is Yoon-jee."1 For Mrs. Kim, this has meant living apart from her husband, a South Korean diplomat whose work required him to return to Seoul, so that her daughter, Yoon-jee, could continue her piano studies at the Juilliard Schools Pre-College Division. From the initial decision to enroll their children in music lessons to the continued labor of driving back and forth to music lessons, performances, auditions, and rehearsals, "music moms" are active architects of their children's musical development. What the New York Times article makes clear is the integral part that parents?in particular mothers?play in the realm of classical music training. Indeed, to understand the broad context of Western classical music making, an examination of the role of "music moms" who facilitate and support their children's musical pursuits is critical. Variations of the "stage mom" exist in many different realms, from competitive sports to beauty pageants. Yet, while the "soccer mom" typically brings to mind the image of a middle-class, white, suburban mother, as this essay reveals, the traits of sacrifice, pushiness, and determination embodied in the "music mom" have increasingly become as sociated with being Asian.2 The contemporary racialization of the "music mom" is not necessarily surprising given the large number of Asians and Asian Americans involved

"Our Battle Cry Will Be: Remember Jenny McCrea!": A Précis on the Rhetoric of Revenge

Abstract: Everyone in the early Republic knew the name and story of Jane McCrea. She was the beautiful woman killed in her wedding dress on her wedding eve in upstate New York in late July, 1777. Of course, most of her story was fiction. There were no witnesses to her death, and the tale was quickly embellished to blast the British and serve the rebel cause. In this essay, we explore the myth of Jane McCrea in order to probe our cultural fictions about revenge-for Jane McCrea's story was first and foremost a revenge story. By observing how the narrative of revenge changed as the story evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the McCrea myth suggests that revenge should be understood not primarily as a moral wrong, as an innate human depravity, or a universal, trans-historical inevitability, but instead as a historically conditioned, circulating discourse of power in modern states.

"My FEMA People": Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora

Abstract: In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, hip-hop artists responded to the disaster with an outpouring of songs that engaged with the racialization, misrepresentation and violence that framed survivors as refugees in dominant discourse. This paper explores post-Katrina hip-hop in relation to the history of post-disaster black musical production in the U.S., and considers the ways in which the music not only narrates the dislocation of the Katrina diaspora but also challenges the media's exceptionalist discourse constructing the disaster and its diaspora as a crisis for America. The music also serves to imagine new forms of home and community in which the music offers itself as a vital means of disaster recovery. Providing an affective mapping of the social, economic and discursive contradictions subtending the human disaster, post-Katrina hip hop is a critical site for interrogating the ongoing tragedy of African-American bodies that don’t matter.

Second Lining Post-Katrina: Learning Community from the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club

Abstract: This article is an analysis of African-American second-line parades in New Orleans and an autoethnography of the first major post-Katrina parade. At a moment of crisis, The Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club raised funds to sponsor its annual parade and help rejuvenate local cultural spirit. The article defines a weekly second-line parade as a “mobile block party,” a four-hour and five-mile long community celebration that carnivalizes and colonizes the public sphere. For more than a century, brass bands have created a mobile musical platform for cultural affirmation, dance, style, self-expression, cooking, public grievance and ethnic customs. The club-sponsored second-line parade is the social institution that carries the Black cultural matrix which has always enculturated the city's jazz musicians, as shown in testimony from Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. The article argues that the repression of these parades post-Katrina—and the lack of recognition for its cultural importance and continuity—constitutes “aesthetic racism.”

Jazz and Revival

Abstract: This essay offers preliminary thoughts on the role of music in the reconstruction of New Orleans. Focusing on Jazzfest and second-line performances, it addresses thorny issues that have emerged when jazz, in particular, has been deployed to rebuild the city, given the competing claims on culture and place, the racial and class divisions in play before and after the storm, the ways that local musical cultures have reflected social possibilities and social exclusions, and the complexities that emerge when the cultural practices of the past and present collide in the context of disaster. Although the story of jazz and revival is still unfolding, the article investigates the ways interracial musical exchanges and collective consumptive acts might encourage reconstruction for all New Orleanians, while also keeping in mind how these exchanges have and may continue to facilitate claims on the city that rely on and reproduce social distance.

"Justice Mocked": Violence and Accountability in New Orleans

Abstract: On February 10, 1930, a white police officer, Charles Guerand, attempted to rape fourteen-year-old Hattie McCray in the New Orleans restaurant where she worked. Prevented from attacking her, Guerand proceeded to shoot and kill the black teenager. McCray's death disrupted Jim Crow discourses of race, justice and black women's sexuality. When McCray was killed, Onelia Sayas Cherrie was a fourteen-year-old student at the only New Orleans high school designated for black students. The girls were born in the same year, both defined as “colored” in a racialized society. Mrs. Cherrie passed away, seventy-five years after McCray, as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Her death highlights silences in twenty-first-century discourses of race, justice and government accountability. These women's stories reveal two crucial moments in generational memory and highlight questions regarding silence and accountability in New Orleans.

A Special Place within the Order of Knowledge: The Art of Kara Walker and the Conventions of African American History

Abstract: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 17-May 13, 2007; ARC/Mus?e d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, June 20-September 9, 2007; Whitney Museum of American Art, October 11, 2007-February 3, 2008; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, March 2-June 8, 2008; Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, Texas, July 6-October 19, 2008. Exhibition curated by Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond.

On Conjuring Mahalia: Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and the Sanctified Swing

Abstract: n the first several days following Hurricane Katrina the U.S. media paid tribute to numerous legendary musicians—past and present—who hailed from New Orleans. Calling the roll of living and deceased New Orleans musical icons, newscasters intoned a litany of names that spanned from Louis Armstrong to the Neville brothers. In all of the various tributes, roll calls, and performances honoring New Orleans musicians one name was notably missing: Mahalia Jackson. Perhaps this oversight is due to the fact that Jackson came to prominence after she left New Orleans for Chicago. Or, it could have more to do with the ways the canon of New Orleans music is recognized exclusively through lenses of blues and jazz, the signature genres of the lucrative New Orleans tourist industry. Still, as will be made clear in this article, Mahalia Jackson's musical sensibility was formed by and is inex- tricably bound up with the Crescent City's distinct musicality, and Jackson's musicianship was perfectly suited for the combination of gospel and blues born out of the collaborative efforts of her, Thomas A. "Barrelhouse Tom" Dorsey, and others. Stepping outside the canonical readings of New Orleans musical and religious culture, I will argue that this native daughter of New Orleans speaks forward in time, conjuring into existence a communal hope that critiques the politics, representation, and rememory of Katrina. 1 Born in 1911, Mahalia Jackson was reared in a shotgun shack of a New Orleans house situated between Water and Audubon streets facing the river between the levee and the busy City Belt Railroad tracks. 2 Jackson's descrip- tion of her childhood environment coincides with the contemporary poverty of New Orleans's Ninth Ward:

"More desultory and unconnected than any other": Geography, Desire, and Freedom in Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life

Abstract: I have spent many seasons in the South; sometimes I was in Natchez and Vicksburg, and at the plantations along the coast, but generally the greater portion of my time was spent in the city of New Orleans. I have been witness to many queer scenes in this southern country, the relation of which shall occupy this chapter. They were all written long after they occurred, and in the order in which they presented themselves to my memory; so that this portion of my narrative will, perhaps, be more desultory and unconnected than any other. 1 Potter's reference to "many queer scenes in this southern country" echoes most antebellum descriptions of the Crescent City. These consistently por- trayed New Orleans as a space that arrested the senses and engendered a visceral experience of strangeness by all who encountered it. Situated on the banks of the Mississippi, antebellum New Orleans was a bustling shipping port that attracted commerce, immigrants, and visitors from the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. Despite its substantial Yankee population, the city overwhelmed European and Anglo-American visitors with its French colonial past and resilient Creole culture, fortified by nearly 10,000 refugees from Saint-Domingue by way of Cuba. 2 Early- and mid-nineteenth-century travelers' accounts regularly expressed varying degrees of surprise and con- sternation in their initial encounters with the city. "Everything had an odd look," Benjamin Henry Latrobe remarked upon his 1819 arrival. "It was impossible not to stare at a sight wholly new even to one who has traveled much in Europe and America." Frances Trollope described the New Orleans of 1827 as having "the most unnatural appearance imaginable." And Fred- erick Law Olmsted implied a deliberate deceit in the city's geography when

Upholding Community Traditions: An Interview with Cherice Harrison-Nelson by Clyde Woods, March 1, 2009

Abstract: Cherice Harrison-Nelson has been an educator in the New Orleans Public School System for twenty-four years. After earning a graduate education degree from Xavier University, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Senegal and Ghana. She has served as project director of the Haley Story Quilt Project and as chairperson of Jazz Awareness Month. She created a jazz studies curriculum for elementary level students that is used in more than forty schools in southeast Louisiana. She also served as site coordinator for the Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University’s Lessons in Folklife and Technology Program. A third-generation Mardi Gras Indian, she is the curator of the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame. Additionally, she has begun studies for a PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of New Orleans. Harrison-Nelson is the daughter of the late Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame, Donald Harrison Sr., and the sister of jazz legend Donald Harrison. For inquiries concerning the Big Chief and Big Queen Book Project, please contact her at 1941 Alvar Street, New Orleans, LA 70117, or at QueenReesie@aol.com.