Congo Square Research Articles

Congo Square and the Second Line

In New Orleans, Louisiana, nearly every occasion is marked with a celebratory parade, most famously the Mardi Gras processions that seemingly take over the city during Carnival Time. But throughout the year, jazz funerals and parades known as "second lines" fill the Backatown neighborhoods of New Orleans with the jubilant sounds of brass band music. Despite this, and the rapidly growing body of well-researched and well-meaning literature by "new jazz studies" scholars, the second line culture that derives from Congo Square remains excluded from jazz history courses the world over in favor of a single text that provides an "easier read" for undergraduate students. The resulting texts provide incomplete surveys that do little to correct previously held assumptions about jazz and are now deeply embedded within American culture, serving as an indoctrinating canon that limits the brass band's role and its practitioners within the jazz tradition. Those scholars that do mention brass bands—past or present—spend little time discussing them. This article highlights these oversights and problematizes the monolithic narrative proliferating jazz texts today. Herein, I will discuss the New Orleans second line culture and its relevance to shifting narratives about jazz history in relation to Congo Square and its historical implications: what is Congo Square, what about it is missing from the jazz narrative, accepting practitioner's beliefs and social actions as proof, and why it is crucial that we (scholars/educators) implement practitioners' beliefs and community and new jazz studies scholarship to create a better, more nuanced picture of jazz as a whole.

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot, and: The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love by Bryan Wagner

Reviewed by: The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot, and: The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love by Bryan Wagner Tynes Cowan Grégory Pierrot. The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2019. 274 pp. $32.95. Bryan Wagner. The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2019. 272 pp. $39.95. When the runaway slave named Squire (known in legend as "Bras-Coupé") was killed in 1837 after years of marronage in the swamps surrounding New Orleans, the city authorities ordered that his body be dismembered and displayed in the Place d'Armes as a warning to the Black population. There his body remained for days, giving those enslaved and free people of color time to witness the scene—whether led there by curiosity or coercion. Not unlike the insurrectionaries of 1811 whose heads were placed on pikes for all in New Orleans to see, Squire's body provided an official response to the threat of African American autonomy. Perhaps with the Nat Turner insurrection fresh in mind, the authorities found ample reason to make an example of Squire. For white authorities, the public display was intended as an explicit threat to any who might consider running away, living in the swamps, or plundering plantations. The display was also intended to transform the legendary Bras-Coupé back into the runaway Squire: to conclude his story and control the narrative. The threat of a Black hero, free in the wilderness, to inspire and potentially to lead an insurrection would have been more dangerous to white authorities than the potential depredations he might commit against property. The narrative power of Bras-Coupé and other Black avengers is the subject of these two books: The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé by Bryan Wagner. Pierrot frames his study with recent cinematic representations of the Black avenger trope. His Introduction claims Django, Jamie Foxx's character in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), as a direct descendant of other Black avengers in the Atlantic tradition: "the extraordinary black leader who would lead his fellow enslaved to deliver righteous retribution on their white oppressors" (9). He concludes his book musing about Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018), with Prince T'Challa's cousin, Erik "Killmonger" Stevens, inheriting the role of Black avenger. Between these contemporary references, Pierrot examines several characters, from the Renaissance to the Progressive Era, who exemplify the trope. Reaching back to ancient Rome for founding myths, Pierrot argues that Black avenger narratives have been used historically not only to critique slavery but to reinforce the borders of national identity. Beginning with the prototypical rebel slave (Spartacus) and the catalyzing agent for political action (Lucretia), the various examples in the book are understood as reenactments or inversions of these "original patterns," whether the fictional creations of Martin Delany and Sutton Griggs, or the real Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture. The royal slave of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), for example, embodies the exceptional qualities of the Black avenger—the status and pedigree necessary to enact revenge—with which Behn's audience would find sympathy. Oroonoko's own failure dooms his fellow enslaved who are incapable of enacting vengeance themselves, and threats posed by the Black avenger are safely (though brutally) exorcised by the narrative. In the end, the Black avenger trope has [End Page 255] "contributed to deny, stifle, and obfuscate the portrayal of Black collective agency and its very reality" (14). As such, the Black avenger is a sacrificial figure, dying on the altar—and for the benefit—of white identity. Bras-Coupé, the subject of Bryan Wagner's book, is a particular incarnation of the Black avenger not mentioned by Pierrot. Bras-Coupé's legend extends far beyond the basic facts of Squire's outlawry, as reflected in Wagner's subtitle: "The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law...

City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 by Jason Berry

Reviewed by: City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 by Jason Berry Michael Shane Powers City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300. By Jason Berry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 412. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4714-2.) The tricentennial in 2018 of the founding of New Orleans has produced a wealth of excitement and interest in the Crescent City’s storied history. Jason Berry, a journalist and writer, contributes admirably to the recent groundswell of popular attention to the city, which dates to Hurricane Katrina and controversies over Confederate monuments. Drawn mostly from academic secondary sources, Berry’s work focuses on individuals from Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville to Mayor Mitch Landrieu as case studies to demonstrate the evolving and contentious development of New Orleans. Yet City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 avoids the pitfalls of great-man history that often mark books written by journalists and geared toward a popular audience. Berry gives apt attention to how marginalized people—enslaved people dancing in Congo Square during the colonial era, for instance—helped mold the city’s unique history. Berry’s work is at its best when chronicling cultural and social history. Readers should look elsewhere for a synthesis of New Orleans politics or economics. The history of voodoo, burial marches, carnival krewes, jazz, and other cultural waypoints are covered well. City of a Million Dreams is also notable as a work of popular history for consistently placing the Crescent City in the wider world and demonstrating the myriad ways fluid borders and transnational exchanges have defined New Orleans. For example, Berry gives sufficient attention to the importance of Spanish control in developing the city from a colonial backwater to a significant Atlantic world hub. In addition, Berry assesses environmental and biological forces when appropriate, such as the trajectory of yellow fever pathogens from mosquitoes to humans. Readers must expect a book that covers three hundred years of history to reflect tough choices of what to include. For instance, Berry merely scratches the surface of New Orleans during Reconstruction. While accurately reminding readers that “[t]he real war in New Orleans began after the war,” he gives short shrift to the postbellum politics that defined the contours of Louisiana’s political arena until the rise of Huey P. Long in the 1930s (p. 161). Moreover, Berry chooses not to address the significance of New Orleans’s world’s fairs in 1884 and 1984. Including an assessment of the fairs would have strengthened Berry’s otherwise accomplished goal of demonstrating the rich and nuanced history of New Orleans as a “crossroads of humanity” (p. 5). On the whole, such faults are minor. The book’s purpose to provide a synthesis of academic scholarship on New Orleans past and present is achieved in a well-written narrative. Berry’s focus on “[t]he tension between spectacle and law” is carried throughout (p. 6). City of a Million Dreams should be a go-to [End Page 136] resource for scholars and the general public alike wishing to find a concise and engaging account of New Orleans’s colorful past. Michael Shane Powers Angelo State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Protecting the spirit of the American South: Representations of New Orleans Culture in Contemporary Children’s Picture Books

This article explores selected aspects of southern culture as presented in contemporary children’s picture books. It analyzes children’s stories which celebrate New Orleans’ residents and their traditions. Unlike many scholars who point to the end of the New Orleans spirit due to recent economic and demographic changes, children’s authors perceive the culture as a resource which regenerates the city. By means of writing for children they keep the city’s distinct black culture from disappearing. The aim of this article is to examine to what extent the spirit of the South has survived in the minds of contemporary authors and artists addressing young generations of readers. It discusses the presence of such cultural elements as jazz music, body movement and the ritual of parading in selected children’s picture books set in New Orleans. Among others, it analyzes such titles as Freedom in Congo Square (2016) by C. Weatherford, and Trombone Shortly (2015) and The 5 O’ Clock Band (2018) by Troy Andrews. The article focuses on the interaction between the verbal and the visual elements of the books, and the ways they convey the meaning of the stories.

Jeroen Dewulf. From the Kingdom of Kongo to the Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians.

J<scp>eroen</scp> D<scp>ewulf</scp>. <i>From the Kingdom of Kongo to the Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians</i>.

Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans ed. by Teresa A. Toulouse and Barbara C. Ewell

Reviewed by: Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans ed. by Teresa A. Toulouse and Barbara C. Ewell Nathan Cardon Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans. Edited by Teresa A. Toulouse and Barbara C. Ewell. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Pp. xx, 299. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1857-7; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1702-0.) To outside observers, many American cities look devoid of history. Their glass towers and suburban landscapes erase the past in favor of a never arriving future. Only the odd surviving building reminds the visitor of a longer history. This situation, however, is not the case for New Orleans, where history weighs heavily. Part of the reason for New Orleans's sense of history, as argued by Richard Campanella in one of the stand-out essays of this edited collection, is the city's intense structural social memory that reflects a historical mixture of peoples. New Orleans, unlike any other American city, looks as much to the past as to the future. Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans emerged from an interdisciplinary course taught by Teresa A. Toulouse, a literary critic, and the late Mac Heard, an architect, at Tulane University (many of the fourteen contributors are affiliated with the university). The intellectual inspiration for the collection comes from Heard's work on the energy and tension within the spatial relations of New Orleans. Each of the essays takes on, in one form or another, the concept of "sweet spots," loosely defined as in-between or interstitial spaces both real and imagined. Throughout the collection, sweet spot is a nebulous term that, as pointed out in the final essay by the philosopher John P. Clark, only really works as a phonetic metaphor: the point of maximum vibration. The book is divided into six "interspaces," with essays conceived and written in a variety of styles, from traditional book chapters, to photo essays, to manifestos. The glossy pages are accompanied by illustrations, maps, and photos. For the most part, the essays work well together and reflect a truly multidisciplinary group of scholars who share a passion for the city. Chapters on Edgar Degas's A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) and John Galsworthy's essay "That Old-Time Place" (1912) work well to develop an interstitial analytic that brings to light tensions between public and private, memory and forgetting, nostalgia and history. The strongest work is contained in the section titled "Constituting and Contesting the Interstitial." Here, cultural geographer Campanella looks at how New Orleans's historical cityscape, what he calls its "high urban granularity," created a layering of acceptability for salacious activity that manifests itself on Bourbon Street (p. 130). At the same time, visitors to the city feel the absence of Storyville, while the almost complete disappearance of slave pens and auction blocks creates a different kind of emotional and structural forgetting. Campanella's belief, however, that "[o]ut of sight, out of mind—and conversely, in sight, in mind," cuts against the premise of the collection, that unseen interstitial space can influence the built and social environment of a city (p. 132). Sociologist Beth Willinger's look at how white and black middle-class women forged an in-between space in the public and private spheres as they addressed the space of prostitution in Storyville and the plight of single women represents the most realized use of the interstitial analytic in the collection. Women reformers created new spaces that remained in-between. "More than housewives and mothers, yet neither [End Page 756] politically nor historically notable, they tackled important issues that were invisible or considered unimportant to male city leaders," notes Willinger (p. 166). Lastly, sociologist Angel Adams Parham traces the history of Congo Square as a "lieu de souvenir," a place of remembrance, in which the shifting sands of race and the city's historic black diversity may be traced (p. 174). Sweet Spots makes a compelling case for an interstitial analytic through a variety of styles. Joel Dinerstein's cultural analysis accompanied by Pableaux Johnson's photo essay makes a convincing argument that "the second line is the most significant...

An Unsung Fashion Designer, Congo Square, Pinktoe Tarantulas, and Dead People: Expecting the Unexpected in Children's Literature

AbstractChildren's literature plays an essential role in the literacy development of children. This department column focuses on the teaching and use of children's literature and provides educators with information about a wide range of books across multiple genres that are representative of the diverse world in which we live. A strong emphasis is placed on the importance of having diverse library collections that take into account numerous factors, such as race, class, disability, and religion. This column also offers innovative approaches for bringing children and books together, as well as content analyses and rich descriptions of titles that share common features (e.g., endpapers, the blending of poetry and nonfiction).

Review of Randall Sandke. 2010. Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz . Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press

Randall Sandke has written a new jazz history book. But it is not the usual jazz history. Rather than offering decade-by-decade accounts of different jazz styles, Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet offers facts that differ from popular understanding of the origins of jazz styles. It presents fresh perspectives on the ways that the music industry in the United States has treated jazz. Like other jazz histories, this one addresses the origins of jazz in New Orleans, what in the music is retained from Africa, the origins of modern jazz, and recent trends in jazz styles. But this volume overturns common wisdom about these topics. Instead of recounting traditional notions about jazz history, Sandke raises crucial questions about how jazz history has been told: What are the dangers of combining the telling of history with social activism? How have both black and white jazz musicians been negatively affected by stereotypes? Are the rhythmic approaches of jazz and African music fundamentally the same? Was the music in New Orleans’ Congo Square a decisive influence on jazz? Did Jim Crow laws actually affect the creation of jazz? When did white musicians begin playing jazz in New Orleans? Did big business dominate the jazz world in the past thirty years? Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet provides behind-the-scenes glimpses into the business of the jazz world, touching on audiences and presenters, studio work, copyrights, agents and managers, and the decline of major record companies in the age of the Internet. Sandke’s history of jazz is based on voluminous research, much of which is fresh. Instead of merely repeating the accounts of the best-known jazz historians, Sandke highlights their errors. Instead of celebrating the thinking of prominent jazz journalists, he identifies their biases. Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet boldly attacks jazz critics, and, quite understandably, jazz critics have attacked the book for this.

NEWS &amp; ANNOUCEMENTS

NEWS &amp; ANNOUCEMENTS

American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt

American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt

Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860

Book Review| September 01 2014 Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860 Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward. By Salvaggio, Ruth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2012. xiv, 242 pp. Cloth, $39.95; e-book, $29.95.Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860. By Faflik, David. Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press. 2012. xii, 374 pp. Cloth, $79.95; paper, $29.95. Kevin R. McNamara Kevin R. McNamara Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2014) 86 (3): 616–618. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2717443 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin R. McNamara; Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860. American Literature 1 September 2014; 86 (3): 616–618. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2717443 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by Duke University Press2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Freddi Williams Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans. Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011. Pp. 209. Paper $20.00.

Freddi Williams Evans, <i>Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans</i>. Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011. Pp. 209. Paper $20.00.

Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans by Freddie Williams Evans

Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans by Freddie Williams Evans

Ancestors of Congo Square

Ancestors of Congo Square

Africa in New Orleans: Creole Complexities in Racist America

Africa in New Orleans: Creole Complexities in Racist America

Black Nativity as Valence of Cultural Survival

Black Nativity as Valence of Cultural Survival Macelle Mahala (bio) When Black Nativity premiered in New York City in December 1961, the usage of the term "black" was still considered a contentious and political act. New York Times columnist Sam Zolotow suggested that several cast members found the title "in bad taste," and the lead actress quit the production after producers discarded the more folksy title Wasn't It a Mighty Day? in favor of the more militant Black Nativity (49). Traditionally performed as a gospel musical, Langston Hughes's "song play" exists at the intersection of religion, theatre, politics, and cultural practice. Black Nativity re-imagines both the narrative and performance of Christ's birth in a way that creates an African American cultural space in a holiday performance season otherwise dominated by European works such as Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Handel's Messiah, and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, not to mention the more plebian performances of innumerable white shopping-mall Santa Clauses. Claiming this cultural space and, at the same time, labeling it "black" is just one example of what the production of Black Nativity accomplishes in terms of the enactment of a specifically African American theatrical practice within the public sphere. Since its original production, Black Nativity has become a holiday staple for many African American theatre companies and other companies that seek to attract African American audiences. In 2007, American Theatre magazine featured four companies that produced versions of the play as evidence of the continued national appeal of this now-classic work. The article recognized Penumbra Theatre Company's production in St. Paul; Lorraine Hansberry Theatre's production in San Francisco; Congo Square Theatre Company's production in Chicago; and The Classical Theatre of Harlem's Broadway production in New York (14). Penumbra's production of the play contributes to African American cultural practice on three key fronts. First, the play is a religious celebration that equates the Nativity with various aspects of African American identity, such as the cultural survival of African Americans up from and out of slavery. The staging of these narratives ritually enact the collective memory of a common history in service of the survival and maintenance of a culturally specific group identity. Second, the production helps to maintain the theatre's relationship to the local community as the production where local artists, youth, and clergy are most broadly represented. And last, Penumbra's production of Black Nativity supports the vitality and survival of the theatre as a viable cultural institution and the livelihood of the artists who work within it. As one of the strongest selling show in the theatre's season each year, the company counts on it to bring in a certain amount of earned income. In the following pages, I examine how each of these different valences of cultural survival inform and interpenetrate one another. Black Nativity as Narrative of Cultural Survival Penumbra began producing Black Nativity in 1987 and has performed this work every year since, with the exception of the 2003–04 season (Penumbra Theatre Company 2009b). As a consequence of repeated annual productions and in order to differentiate Penumbra's more recent versions of the play from past productions and other companies' interpretations, the theatre occasionally varies the framing device of the play. In these cases, Hughes's original minimalist script operates more as inspiration than directive. Looking comparatively at the narrative frames featured [End Page 11] in Penumbra's various manifestations of Black Nativity reveals how each production concept stages African American cultural survival differently by emphasizing diverse aspects of black identity, history, and spirituality. Because black identity changes and is both temporally and geographically constructed and experienced, the narratives that support the expression and interpretation of black identity must also necessarily change from one historical moment to the next. Performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson writes that "[f]ar from undergirding an essentialist purview of blackness, performance, as a mode of representation, emphasizes the ways in which cultures struggle to define who they are and who they want to be" (606). Penumbra's evolving interpretation of Black Nativity is involved in precisely this ongoing process of continuous self-definition. Treating the Nativity...

Why We Can't Talk to You about Voodoo

We who are natives of this City and count ourselves among Faithful cannot talk with you, outsider, about Voodoo. And that is unfortunate. Because in this highly complex, deceptively simple set of principles, beliefs and what-have-you, is much that could heal you of whatever it is in your life that needs healing. Could heal your whole life, probably. Because that's what it really is all about. Your whole life. Not you personally, of course, but how wholeness anyone and everyone should have can be restored, can restore one to oneself. But very fact that you come asking after it means that you will never possess it, at least not in this lifetime. And certainly not from anything you might learn here. And besides, we honestly cannot talk with you about it anyhow. You, of course, will tell us about books you have read and research you have done. None of which has anything to do with us or our beliefs. We will smile sympathetically as we always do at such defenses, which we recognize as pleas for belonging that they are. Or perhaps you are a modern-day Latin--by which we mean that you are descended not from our oppressors of past centuries, but from same oppression wreaked throughout islands and inlands of what is now called Latin America. In other words, a cousin of sorts. In which case you will go on about Santeria, which you will not call by its name, Santeria, but, in hushed tones, the saints--as if pope might have his spies nearby. As if pope's spies had nothing better to do than loll about eavesdropping over iced coffees in New Orleans. You will go on about it and about your love of Africa; but what we will notice is your affection for things European. And how you use that word European as an adjective for all that is good not only about our City but about yourselves. You drop it like a compliment, without warning. We notice that although you come from race-less, class-less worlds just next door to us, you will go on, at length, about color and texture and shapes of skin and hair and lips and noses. We will note with not a little shame specific physical transformations you have foisted upon yourselves and freely recommend to us. By time you return to the saints, in other words, we will have begun to wonder if pope's spies might not be needing their coffees topped. (Perhaps, for sake of good manners, we ought to invite them to join us at club this evening to hear our favorite bassist and his new trio.) You will notice our attention waning and become defensive. another age we would say, why not?) You will attempt to lure us with comparisons. The drums! (your voice rising now) where are drums?! (In Congo Square, we might offer, every Sunday for last few centuries.) But we have heard all this before and so will offer more coffee--water? rum? sweets perhaps? Anything to take edge off your confusion. And shut door on that endless yammering. None of this, of course, will satisfy you. Still, we will do whatever we can to put you at ease. You are, after all, a not too distant relation, and we feel for your discomfort. In end, however, we will tell you nothing you care to hear. You will leave perhaps a little triumphant. But in a matter of hours, perhaps a day or two, some dis-ease will come over you and you will seek us out again. You will be calmer but no less unhappy. And we are sorry, truly sorry, for your distress. But we cannot help. We really cannot talk to you about it. Perhaps you should, finally, go home. And indeed, wouldn't that be very best thing for you, all of you, no matter who you are and how distantly or not so distantly related you might prove? Wouldn't it be better all around if you just turned about and went back home? We, for our part, would be quite content to see you go. We would like to imagine you, from time to time, lodged in some place as completely your own as this is ours. …

New Orleans in the World and the World in New Orleans

New Orleans became another crossroads, where the river, the bayous, and the sea were open roads, where various nations ruled but the folk continued to reign. They turned inhospitable swamplands into a refuge for the independent, the defiant, and the creative unimportant people who tore down barriers of language and culture among peoples throughout the world and continue to sing to them of joy and the triumph of the human spirit through the sounds of jazz. --Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1992, 87) ... so my people's still scattered Ain't like we ever mattered So I ain't surprised both poverty level and black death on the rise. --Truth Universal (Patterson and Truth Universal 2007) Unless we can control the space we occupy, we will not be able to really love one another. --Kalamu Ya Salaam (Senter 1991, 37) The complex culture of New Orleans offers us an opportunity to rethink the concept of diaspora, to discern the ways in which New Orleans is always African--but never only African. The social history of New Orleans helps us understand that diasporic models of exile and return home to a motherland tell us less about the way African identities are lived in the world than do frameworks based on Afro-diasporic practices of world-traversing and world-transcending citizenship. We owe a great debt to past scholars for proving the persistence of African beliefs, practices, and processes in North America. African retentions helped black people to counter the dominant culture's racist erasures of the African past and its presumptions that Africans in America lacked any enduring or meaningful connections to their native lands. Yet in the United States, African retention has always been paired with New World invention (Buff 2001, 31). Cut off from ancestral homelands in and denied full franchise and social membership in the United States, many blacks forged ideals of world-traversing and world- transcending citizenship and cultural production. Some retained hopes of return to Africa, not just by participating in black nationalist back-to- movements, but also by instantiating memories of in everyday practices of household decoration, healing, craft work, and religious rituals (Thompson 1984; Smith 1995). As Charles Joyner notes, even when slaves were compelled to work exclusively with American or European tools, they nonetheless employed them in African ways (1986, xxi). These practices could not function the same way they did in Africa, however, because of the grim realities of slavery and white supremacy in the United States. Instead, these African retentions provided the basis for New World inventions, evidencing not so much a literal desire to return to as much as demonstrating a commitment to living and working In African ways in the New World. They helped produce a diasporic imagination that affirmed that wherever Africans are, is. New Orleans is a special place. People all over the world revere it as a significant center of the African diaspora. The Crescent City's music, dance, food, architecture, speech, religion, and performance styles all display African influences and retentions. Hand-drawn illustrations by Henry Benjamin Latrobe of performances by black musicians in Congo Square in the nineteenth century depicted instruments that closely resembled those made and played traditionally in Africa. These images displayed traces of African practices such as carving figures on stringed wooden instruments and making drums by stretching the skins over hollowed-out pieces of wood (Latrobe 1951; Blassingame 1976, 5; Rose 1999, 514). Dena Epstein argues that displays of African culture persisted openly in New Orleans before the Civil War to a greater degree than in any other North American city (2003, 85). Sidney Bechet argued that when slaves dreamed things would come to them out of Africa (2002, 7). Today, the parade umbrellas and percussive polyrhythms of second liners display the enduring and irrepressible African presence in the local culture. …

New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System

essay provides a roughly chronological history of a single musical tradition in New Orleans, the brass band parade, as a case study that supports a more expansive proposition. The first half of this proposition is specific to New Orleans: I note that the city has become largely identified with African American musical practices and repertoires and, further, that the associations between music, race, and place can be adequately subsumed under the categorical term New Orleans Music. While New Orleans Music includes an amorphous collection of interrelated styles--brass band, jazz, blues, rhythm & blues, soul, and funk, to name the most prevalent--they are bound together through an association with race (African American), place (New Orleans), and functionality (social dance) to such a degree that even a disaster of immeasurable consequences, which disproportionately affected that race and dislocated them from that place, has not threatened its cohesiveness. The consensus about the overall attributes of New Orleans Music is so pervasive that naming them as such seems redundant. The second half of the proposition raises a more sweeping question: By what processes do specific musical forms and practices become linked to particular people and places? essay pursues the role of discourse and media--including eyewitness accounts, historical and musicological studies, musicians' autobiographies, fictional writings, media reports, images, films, and sound recordings--in solidifying the connections between people, places, and musical traditions. New Orleans Music is broadly synonymous with African American music, but this affiliation is by no means timeless and was facilitated, in part, by the writing of jazz history since the 1930s. The claim made most resoundingly in the book Jazzmen (1939) that jazz began just [in New Orleans], not somewhere else (Ramsey and Smith 1939, 5) changed the characterization of New Orleans as a musical city, altering understandings not only of where jazz came from but what constitutes the entirety of New Orleans Music. Prior to being nominated the birthplace of jazz, New Orleans's musical reputation was based on a multitude of offerings, including ballroom dance and French opera, street criers and organ grinders (Kmen 1966). The marching bands that led parades and funerals with music represented numerous ethnicities and races, but as jazz emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, African Americans, mixed-race Creoles, and European Americans reconfigured the brass band as a black music ensemble, performing syncopated and improvised dance music in burial processions that came to be called jazz funerals and in community parades known as second lines (Schafer 1977; White 2001). These parades wound through an extraordinarily heterogeneous urban center, led by a diverse set of musicians that embodied the city's complex history of interaction, but in narratives of jazz and New Orleans Music they are often narrowly presented as a strictly African American phenomenon. More precisely, jazz funerals and second line parades have been reimagined as a conduit that links jazz back to the celebrated slave dances at Congo Square and, by implication, to A representative example can be drawn from the television documentary Jazz Parades: Feet Don't Fail Me Now (1990) directed by folklorist Alan Lomax near the end of his career. In the opening sequence, we are shown a community procession called a second line parade, with African Americans dancing through the streets while the Dirty Dozen Brass Band plays their original song My Feet Can't Fail Me Now. This isn't chaos, Lomax narrates. It's black tradition right out of Africa. In an arresting scene, footage of black New Orleanians is intercut with various archival clips of ritual and folkloric dancing in West As Lomax discusses the intimate relation between music and bodily movement and points out similarities between specific dance steps, he states what cannot have escaped the observation of any attentive viewer: Below the surface runs the deep tide of African tradition. …