Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas

Abstract

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory, by Lynell L. Thomas. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. xii, 272 pp. $24.95 US (paperback) In this crisply written account, Lynell Thomas provides a fascinating exploration of tourism in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. The tourist geography was especially apparent in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when it steered tourists and consumers to heavily policed tourist zones and restricted or discouraged access to nontourist black neighbourhoods that were automatically presumed to be risky, unsafe, or violent (p. 2). Before and after Hurricane Katrina many commercial guides offered tourists a selective and occasionally false New Orleans historical narrative. Commercial guides and tourist literature focused on the city's colonial historical connections with Europe. At the same time, however, mainstream commercial guides softened or omitted the histories of those of African origin who lived under French, Spanish, and American slave regimes. Even when mainstream tour operators acknowledged Africans' existence in early New Orleans, they did so in narratives highlighting the multicultural city. In her account of one company's year 2000 historical narrative, Thomas notes that guides spoke of Africans' roles in the building of New Orleans, but claimed that they lived in a racially exceptional city. Guides particularly emphasized the importance of the Creole in the city's history. The company's definition of Creole acknowledged the centrality of West African culture, but also described Creoles as an influential elite class without mention of poor or enslaved Creoles. While the tour company included black in its narrative, the company's failure to vindicate and empower its black characters was apparent (p. 81). Thomas found for example, that guides told the story of a New Orleans' slave named Toussaint without mentioning Toussaint Louverture, whose leadership in a slave revolution contributed to the establishment of the first free black nation in the Caribbean in 1804. Naming an enslaved child Toussaint in a slave society was a significant statement of identity and an act of resistance. Some New Orleans tour companies offered counternarratives to the selective and occasionally fictitious historical accounts Thomas describes in her third chapter. Thomas begins her fourth chapter with a description of the origins of the black heritage movement in New Orleans which emerged simultaneously with the modem civil rights and Black Power movements. Black business and civic leaders established an organization in 1986 and the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Network (GNOBTN) in 1990. Thomas argues that the GNOBTN challenged the mainstream New Orleans tourism image. …