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

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores some of the complexities between Black beauty, alterities of Black possibility, and oppositional refusal on one hand, and Black vulnerability—if not expendability—on the other as lived among members of New Orleans Black Masking Indian community vis‐à‐vis the city’s tourist‐driven cultural economy. At center sits a dichotomy of Blackness that figures some African American New Orleanians as commercially assimilable and therefore valued Black subjects, and those otherwise deemed un‐assimilable and hence ultimately dispensable. Amid such bifurcated economies of desire/disposability generative of a kind of “contractual Blackness,” some Black Masking members craft entrepreneurial strategies through which local African American cultural traditions serve as currencies that afford entry to a raced marketplace otherwise largely inaccessible. While such creative agencies suggest a critical foregrounding of Black subjects rather than simple objects of market consumption, they also appear to underscore some of the ambiguities, if not enduring vulnerabilities of Black refusal and its liberatory promise amid the current moment.