desire and disaster in new orleans by lynnell thomas

8/12/2019 Desire and Disaster in New Orleans by Lynnell Thomas

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DESIRE

DISASTER

Tourism, Race, and Historical MemoryLynnell L. Thomas

IN NEW ORLEANS


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Duke University Press All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Courtney Leigh BakerTypeset in Arno Pro by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataThomas, Lynnell L.,

Desire and disaster in New Orleans : tourism, race, andhistorical memory / Lynnell L. Thomas.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.

- - - - (cloth : alk. paper) - - - - (pbk. : alk. paper)

. New Orleans (La.)Description and travel.

. TourismLouisianaNew Orleans.

. African AmericansLouisianaNew Orleans. I. Title.

. . ' dc

Cover art : Tyrone Turner/National Geographic Creative


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In loving memory of my most steadfast mentor,JAMES E. M C LEOD, who encouraged me to do it nowand gave me the tools to persevere later.


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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

One. The City I Used to Come to Visit

Two. Life the Way It Used to Be in the Old South

Three. Urbane, Educated, and Well-To-Do Free Blacks

Four. Wasnt Nothing Like That

Five. Starting All Over Again

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Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index


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Acknowledgments

Like the road to Katrina that I document in these pages, my road to this book has been long and circuitous. I am indebted to the fellow travelers whoguided me past roadblocks; provided clear, useful directions; or offered mea safe place to rest and recharge along the way.

I am grateful to my professors and advisers at Tulane University for layingthe foundation for this project. Rebecca Marks graduate English seminars,independent study, and advising provided the rst opportunities for me tocritically examine my experiences growing up black in post civil rights eraNew Orleans, as part of the rst generation since Reconstruction to a enddesegregated schools (and the rst, since Plessy v. Ferguson , to witness theirgradual resegregation). She encouraged my interest in material culture, lit-

erary analysis, ethnography, and oral history and, though I didnt appreci-ate it at the time, took me on my rst plantation tour. Joseph Roach madeincisive suggestions and posed important, challenging questions about my work that continue to inform my research and writing.

I am also indebted to the many faculty and staff members in or affiliated with the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University who of-fered guidance and support as I expanded the interdisciplinary scope of theproject. In the Department of English, Frances Smith-Foster taught me how

to interrogate nontraditional sources, trace the scholarly debates animatingthe discipline of African American studies, and rethink the relationship be-tween theory and practice. James Roark and Dan Carter in the Departmentof History introduced me to a diverse body of scholarship and source ma-terial on the old and new Souths and challenged me to appreciate the hor-rors of slavery and racial oppression without losing sight of the humanityand agency of the enslaved and oppressed. I am especially grateful to MarkSanders (African American Studies) and Dana White (Graduate Institute

of the Liberal Arts) who offered me insightful comments and patient guid-ance in the early stages of conceptualization, research, and writing. Cindy


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Pa on, the consummate adviser, continued to provide useful feedback, en-couragement, and mentorship long a er our tenures at Emory Universityhad ended. Much of my ethnographic research on pre-Katrina New Orleans was made possible by an Emory-Mellon Graduate Teaching Fellowship thatpermi ed me to teach at Dillard University, a historically black institutionin New Orleans, while I conducted research. I am thankful for the experi-ence of working alongside Dillard University faculty and staff members andstudents who graciously welcomed me back home and powerfully refutedthe racial distortions of the citys tourist representations.

Just as I prepared to begin revising my project into a book manuscript in, Hurricane Katrina hit, ravaging countless lives, scholarly and cultural

repositories, and the citys tourism industry. In between the daily frustra-tions and humiliations of navigating the Road Home Louisianas scandal-ridden federally funded rebuilding program I was compelled to reframemy project in light of the storm and post-Katrina developments in the tour-ism industry. During this difficult period of reassessment, rebuilding, andrecovery, my new colleagues, students, and friends at the University of Mas-sachuse s, Boston, supported and sustained me and my work. Thanks toall of you too many to list here who showed concern and compassion.

I must single out my colleagues in other departments who modeled the best of interdisciplinary collegiality and fellowship. Doreen Drury, BrianHalley, and Tim Sieber read and commented on early dra s and revisionsand supported me in countless ways; Barbara Lewis and Rita Nethersolecollaborated with me on a Katrina anniversary symposium that helpedme reect on the historical antecedents and national implications of post-Katrina New Orleans; Jim Green and Rajini Srikanth gave scholarly advice;Ping- Ann Addo, Elora Chowdhury, David Hunt, Ellie Kutz, Denise Patmon,

Aminah Pilgrim, and Shirley Tang offered personal sanctuary. Each of mycolleagues in the Department of American Studies has been generous andsupportive. I am particularly grateful to Aaron Lecklider, who patiently andinsightfully responded to each of my panicked phone calls, emails, and textmessages and there were embarrassingly many throughout the revisionand production stages; Lois Rudnick and Judith Smith, who read dra sof the work at various stages, offered substantive suggestions for revision,and guided me through the academic publishing process; Marisol Negrn,

who has been a faithful writing date, the books talented unofficial photog-rapher, and an unwavering supporter; Rachel Rubin, who graciously offereda forum to translate my work to a broader audience; and Shauna Manning


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and Kelly MacDonald Weeks, one of my former graduate students, whohelped to ease my transition to the university, the city of Boston, and NewEngland winters. In addition to these human resources, the institutionalsupport I received from the University of Massachuse s, Boston, provedinvaluable for conducting research on post-Katrina New Orleans. Financialassistance came in the form of research grants from the College of Liberal Artss Deans Fund for Faculty Development, a Joseph P. Healey ResearchGrant, an Endowed Faculty Career Development Award, and the Roy J.Zuckerberg Research Fellowship.

This project has also been enriched by mentors, colleagues, and rolemodels outside of these institutions who offered suggestions, encourage-ment, and inspiration: Connie Atkinson, Gerald Early, Lewis Gordon,Miriam Greenberg, Leslie Harris and the New Orleans Research Collab-orative, Arnold Hirsch, Ann Holder, Amy Lesen, Alecia Long, CatherineMichna, Lawrence Powell, Kerry Ann Rockquemore and the National Cen-ter for Faculty Development and Diversity, Jim Smethurst, J. Mark Souther, Anthony Stanonis, and especially the late Clyde Woods and the late Jim Mc-Leod. The book could not have been wri en without the cooperation of themen and women who agreed to be interviewed or accommodated me on

their tours. Thank you to Bill Coble, Dan Brown, Phala Mire, Paul Nevski,Gregory Osborn, Gwen Reidus, Toni Rice, and the anonymous or pseudo-nymous staff members, tour guides, and tourists I interviewed and inter-acted with from Cajun Encounters Tours, Celebration Tours, Dixie Tours,Eclectic Tours, Friends of the Cabildo French Quarter Walking Tours,Gray Line Tours, Le Monde Crole French Quarter Courtyards Tour, Lou-isiana Swamp Tours, Tennessee Williams Festivals African American Leg-acy Heritage Tour, and Tours by Isabelle.

I owe special thanks to those who facilitated the archival research for themanuscript, in particular Daniel Hammer of the Williams Research Centerat the Historic New Orleans Collection; Florence Jumonville, of the Louisi-ana and Special Collections Department at the Earl K. Long Library of theUniversity of New Orleans; Andrew Salinas, of the Amistad Research Cen-ter at Tulane University; David Stoughton of the New Orleans Jazz NationalHistorical Park; and the librarians and staff members of the Greater NewOrleans Multicultural Tourism Network, the Midlo Center for New Orle-

ans Studies at the University of New Orleans, and the New Orleans PublicLibrary. The editorial staff at Duke University Press has been incredibly pa-tient and helpful throughout the publication process. Thanks to Courtney


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Berger, Christine Choi, Danielle Szulczewski, Erin Hanas, and Jeanne Ferrisfor your accessibility and your professionalism.

As I reect on my journey down this road, I must thank the membersof my large extended family, who paved the way. My grandparents, Georgia-e a C. Duplechain, the late Leroy Duplechain Sr., Cornelia Bell Thomas,and Leonard Thomas Sr., taught me dignity, resilience, and civic engage-ment in the face of injustice. My parents, Sargiena Thomas and LeonardThomas Jr., worked hard to provide a life for their children in New Orleansthat was open to opportunities and possibilities that they could have neverimagined for themselves. My sisters, Lori Gray and Leah Valdez, kept megrounded and a uned to what really ma ers. My in-laws, especially mymother-in-law, Bernadine Pe way, housed me and humored me as I workedon this project throughout the years. My aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces,nephews, close friends, and neighbors in New Orleans, Atlanta, Boston,and beyond buoyed me with their love and support. Most important, I wantto acknowledge Phillip Andrews, the person who li ed me up and carriedme down this road, who has been a devoted husband and an even be erwife and who, along with our son, Nyle, has made my work and lifemore meaningful.

of chapters and originally appeared as TheCity I Used to . . . Visit: Tourist New Orleans and the Racialized Responseto Hurricane Katrina, inSeeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Cri-sis, Race, and Public Policy Reader , edited by Manning Marable and KristenClarke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). An earlier version of chap-ter originally appeared as Roots Run Deep Here: The Construction

of Black New Orleans in Post-Katrina Tourism Narratives, American Quar-terly , no. ( ). An earlier version of the section Tourist Sites andSounds in Treme in the epilogue was published as People Want to See What Happened: Treme, Televisual Tourism, and the Racial Remappingof Post-Katrina New Orleans,Television and New Media , no. ( ).


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One.The City I Used to Come to Visit

New Orleans Tourism on the Road to Katrina

In late August , like so many other people around the world, I sat gluedto news coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the now infamous images of Af-rican Americans stranded on roo ops, wading through ooded streets,and trapped in unsanitary and unsuitable shelters of last resort. Their hy-

pervisibility symbolized a corporeal indictment of American politics andpolicies. Not only was I appalled by what I was witnessing, but I was alsodesperate for information about my husband and other family members who had remained in our New Orleans home during the storm. That infor-mation was ltered through an image of the city that had been cultivated by writers and tourism boosters whose racial mythologizing le a lastingimprint on the national popular imagination. In those critical days of anxi-ety and outrage, I recognized in a new and painful way how the citys tourist

image and its a endant racial representations continued to shape Amer-icans view of New Orleans by de ning and delimiting black citizenship.The tourism narrative was manifest, during Katrina and in its immediatea ermath, in representations of the city that prioritized the French Quar-ter and the citys European identity, labeled historically and predominantly black areas of the city as dangerous, and obscured or distorted the Africanpresence and participation in the development and sustenance of the city.

During those early days of reportage on Katrina and the damage it

caused, I observed in disbelief three critical ways that the citys racializedtourism narratives recirculated to seal the fates of the citys most vulner-able populations. First, news reporters who were rmly anchored in the


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French Quarter the icon of tourist New Orleans repeatedly and falselyreported that the city had escaped major damage as oodwaters engulfednontourist areas of the city, where most African American residents lived.Second, even as levees remained breached, rescue efforts were suspended because of alleged violence by black New Orleanians (later revealed to belargely exaggerated), leaving tens of thousands of people stranded and un-protected from the rising oodwaters. The failure by so many to corrobo-rate these allegations reinforced the citys tourist geography, which steeredtourists and consumers to heavily policed tourist zones and restricted ordiscouraged access to nontourist black neighborhoods that were auto-matically presumed to be risky, unsafe, or violent. Finally, local, state, andnational public officials and media collaborated in the tourist promotionof debauchery and degradation as the most predominant and enduring fea-tures of black New Orleans. In each of these examples, media spectators were reacquainted with spectacles of blackness already made available forconsumption by the citys tourism industry.

Hurricane Katrina exposed the devastating human cost of New Or-leanss racialized tourism narratives on black New Orleanians and ourprospects for rescue and rebuilding. Those who were most responsible for

representing the city and its citizens in the a ermath of Katrina did so froma limited perspective that conformed to a narrative perpetuated in tour-ist representations of the city. Catering to outside visitors whose histories were intertwined with New Orleans as a site of desire and disaster, theserepresentations lacked adequate terms and conventions to represent NewOrleanss rich black experience as diverse, varied, and sometimes conicted.Media coverage of the storm and subsequent policy debates about stormsurvivors grotesquely mimicked the distortions of the tourism narratives,

placing a premium on safeguarding the French Quarter and other tourismspaces to the exclusion of black neighborhoods. The reckless spread of ru-mors about black lawlessness and inhumanity that brought rescue efforts toa halt and the inadequate, and o en reluctant, dispersal of resources to themost vulnerable communities both relied on static, stereotypical construc-tions of the citys black population. This problematic tourism narrative hadpaved the road to the damage inicted by Hurricane Katrina.

Representations of Katrina point to the historic invisibility of New Or-

leanss black residential population that was facilitated through the cityspromotion of and dependence on its tourism industry. The limited cate-gories in the public imagination for representing this population and con-


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ventions available for identifying its members even a er the storms vic-tims demanded recognition reveal the costs of the distortion that tourismnarratives impose on black peoples lives. Tourist shorthand is not withoutconsequence: competing representations of race in contemporary New Or-leans tourism offer important insights into the processes of racialization inthe post civil rights era that might help us be er understand the ways thatrace, as a socially constructed category, is simultaneously being erased andemployed to erode the gains of the civil rights movement. Although thelegal end of segregation and its a endant social and cultural transforma-tions seemed to signi cantly democratize U.S. political and popular culture,New Orleans has found itself among a growing number of tourist destina-tions faced with the difficult challenge ofreconciling traditional tourismnarratives with more inclusive stories that incorporate and validate racialminorities and other marginalized groups. Yet o en in these cases, as theColonial Williamsburg historian Anders Greenspan reminds us, the oldmessage was gra ed uncomfortably on the new. The responses to Katrinareected this tension by eerily emulating the popular representations of thecity that have become the hallmark of its traditional tourism narrative.

Given the contemporary fact that tourism is New Orleanss most lucra-

tive industry and the historical reality that most outsiders and a goodnumber of insiders perceptions of the city have been ltered throughtravel accounts, literature, lm, and other popular depictions, it should havecome as li le surprise that even in the midst of unprecedented crisis, theportrayal of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina continued to be dom-inated by the troubling images and ideas of the citys tourist iconography.

Place Identity: A Brief History

New Orleans tourism capitalizes on its unique place identity. The resultingnarrative represents a long historical trajectory that brings into alignmentlocal residents sense of place and personal a achment to their city; market-ing professionals use of mass media to promote a particular image of NewOrleans; and the citys civic reputation, or how New Orleans is perceived by outsiders. In his introduction to Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn , the historian S. Frederick Starr encapsulates the relation-

ship between the citys deep-seated popular image and the tourism indus-try, noting that the popular images of fading grandeur, cultural hybridi-zation, noble simplicity, eroticism, authenticity of expression (and a hint


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of danger) promulgated in ctional accounts of New Orleans have beenaccepted as faithful representations of the city and have been promoted assuch through the tourism industry. New Orleanss place identity shapesand is shaped by a tourist-oriented narrative that, although not uncon-tested, has certainly become ubiquitous, forged through the conict andconciliation of visitors, local residents, and business elites whose visionsof the city have reected the changing technological and cultural landscapeover the past century or more.

Beginning in the French colonial period during the eighteenth century,the bustling, lawless port city a racted a multilingual, multiracial popula-tion of slaves, slave owners, members of the military, merchants, and travel-ers. Early nineteenth-century visitors to New Orleans were already part of aproto-tourism industry that catered to elite travelers for whom New Orle-ans winters offered a milder climate and a more animated social season thanthey found in their permanent residences. In the late nineteenth century,several developments provided more coherence and structure to the citysamorphous tourist appeal: New Orleanss antebellum reputation as a greatSouthern Babylon of vice, hedonistic unrestraint, and socially sanctionedracial and sexual transgression was concretized with the designation of

Storyville, a sanctioned prostitution district; literary representations of thecity that provided spatial and imaginative maps for travelers hoping to expe-rience the exotic New Orleans they had encountered in novels, newspaperarticles, and guidebooks; and the restructuring of Carnival with the forma-tion of elite white krewes, or social clubs, and racially hierarchical ritualsthat offered an easily marketable product for potential white tourists.

By the early twentieth century, the emergence of a shared national com-mercial culture facilitated by widespread railroad travel, hotel develop-

ment, popular amusements, and local boosterism had helped New Orle-ans to join the ranks of other tourist destinations that each projected whatthe historian Jim Weeks refers to as an image created by the marketplace.New Orleans, like Ge ysburg and other cities pro ting from sanitized por-trayals of the historical past, was a product of the market that hummed by masking its unpleasant inner workings, particularly the complicatedracial histories and meanings that undergirded the citys popular image. New Orleans tourism expanded in the years between the two world wars, as

interstate automobile travel, mass consumerism, population shi s to urbanareas, changing gender roles, and the dramatic decline of industries that hadlong been economic strongholds converged to beget the modern tourism


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industry. This modern industry helped popularize racial stereotypes andperpetuate white supremacy, serving as a reection of the Jim Crow societyin which it emerged.

Like other southern cities propelled by U.S. affluence a er World WarII, more affordable options for lodging, the establishment of tourism bu-reaus, the sanitizing of the past, and the acquisition of professional sportsteams, New Orleans increasingly marketed its premodern mystique to white middle-class travelers. Unlike these other cities, however, New Or-leans cultivated tourism at the expense of other economic and commercialdevelopment. In the la er half of the twentieth century, the city was trans-formed by a touristic culture, in which New Orleanss economic, political,cultural, and social institutions and practices became dependent on and de-

ned by the tourism industry. Though there were certainly antecedents inthe previous eras, French Quarter preservation, cultural and heritage tour-ism, tourism-driven repackaging of black cultural productions as emblemsof a vanishing past, and the internationalization and corporatization of NewOrleans as a place and an idea were rmly entrenched and formalized bythe time Hurricane Katrina hit. However, what was new in the secondhalf of the twentieth century was the dilemma that middle-class African

Americans enfranchised and emboldened by civil rights legislation posed for tourism promoters. In the post civil rights era, tourism promot-ers recognized black tourists as both a new niche market and a potentialthreat to the citys racially exclusive tourist image. In important ways, NewOrleanss touristic culture resulted from, responded to, or reacted againstthe effects of the civil rights movement, which publicly gave voice to ongo-ing struggles over memory, history, identity, and citizenship that the cityspredominant tourism narrative had for so long a empted to efface.

Post Civil Rights Public Sphere

By the late twentieth century, the New Orleans tourism industry was op-erating within a post civil rights public sphere, marked by the widespreadinstitutionalization and global circulation of black cultural production,conspicuously spearheaded by a contingent of inuential African Americanartists, activists, and intellectuals. Their contributions to commercial public

culture, such as sports, lm, music, television, and politics, fundamentallyrecon gured U.S. popular culture and facilitated African American recog-nition and inclusion in the body politic. Yet they also revealed the inade-


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quacy of a politics of representation as an enduring and effective challengeto structural racism and inequality. In the decades following the enactmentof the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, black representation and culturalproduction have been co-opted by conservatives and liberals alike to ma-nipulate the political process through the use of racially coded images andlanguage that helped exacerbate racial and class inequalities. Ironically, atthe same time that the political process was becoming more racialized, race was being evacuated from the political discourse, which increasingly pro-mulgated tropes of color blindness, multiculturalism, and, more recently,postracialism to help nullify policies and practices designed to amelioratehistorical inequities.

Many scholars have a ributed these contradictory uses and understand-ings of race to the development of the modern liberal state and its failureto address as well as its complicity in maintaining the social, struc-tural, and institutional nature of race and racism. Even the history of theCivil Rights movement, the historian Carol Horton reminds us, has beenlargely rewri en to support the conservative crusade for color- blindnessand against affirmative action. This national memory of a watered-downcivil rights movement illustrates the ways that race, as a category, has be-

come simultaneously pervasive and irrelevant, except insofar as it applies toindividual, private experience. In this context, the proliferation of black rep-resentation and even black popular cultural production o en displaces anddistorts the political and moral project of the civil rights movement. The black culture industry abets the post civil rights public sphere of racism without racists that constrains political activism and trivializes the needsand demands of African Americans. Through its veneration of New Or-leans black culture, promotion of selected black heritage sites and historical

actors, and commitment to a racting and sustaining a new niche marketof African American travelers and consumers, New Orleanss tourism in-dustry paradoxically has made concessions to the post civil rights publicsphere even as those concessions have masked if not exacerbated thegross racial and class divisions exposed by Hurricane Katrina.

Desire and Disaster

The tourism narrative that developed in the decades preceding Katrinaclearly exploited the tension between Jim Crow legacies of racially moti- vated violence, disfranchisement, and exclusion, on the one hand, and civil


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rights claims to full citizenship, access, and inclusion, on the other hand.Most notably, New Orleanss tourism narrative represented black culturethrough two distinct but intersecting frames: desire and disaster. Tourists were encouraged to think that they were experiencing and celebrating blackculture by eating Creole cuisine, dancing to local music, participating in thetraditional second line street parade, a ending jazz funerals, and listeningto anecdotes of quadroon balls and secret voodoo rites. At the same time,however, tourists were directed to adopt the white supremacist memoryof slavery and black culture that views the old South with a sense of lossand nostalgia by touring plantations, lodging and dining in repurposed slavedwellings, purchasing slavery memorabilia, and being pampered by blackservice workers. In effect, the citys promotion of black cultural consump-tion produced a desire for blackness at the same time that this blackness was used to signify the disaster of black emancipation and desegregationand the perceived social ills of poverty, crime, immorality, educational in-adequacy, and political corruption of the postbellum and post civil rightseras. New Orleanss tourism narrative, then, was part of the historically par-adoxical construction of blackness that acknowledges and celebrates blackcultural contributions while simultaneously insisting on black social and

cultural inferiority. In the end, these competing impulses of desire and di-saster facilitated the symbolic continuance of slavery as the appropriationof black labor and denial of black history and agency even as they high-lighted the citys black cultural contributions and appealed to black resi-dents and visitors.

One way that the tourism narrative achieved this duality was by limitingits historical focus to the colonial and antebellum periods and focusing al-most exclusively on the purportedly exceptional race relations that distin-

guished New Orleans from the rest of the slaveholding South. The empha-sis on selected features of these eras such as European cultural inuences,the relative freedom of New Orleanss black population, the citys laissezfaire a itudes regarding race, the social sanctioning of interracial unions,and a large population of free blacks lent itself to the construction of NewOrleans as bene ting from the most liberal and re ned elements of south-ern culture while avoiding its most brutal, inhumane, and inegalitarian fea-tures. As a result, New Orleans was o en erroneously portrayed by tourism

promoters, artists, and even historians as a racially exceptional city that wasnot sullied by the racial tension and conict affecting other southern cities.The dearth of mainstream tours that depicted the history of the Recon-


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struction or civil rights eras and their bi er struggles for racial justice meansthat the prevailing romantic, idyllic narrative of racial harmony and equalityhas gone largely unchallenged. These racial ctions have been exempli ed by the modernizing of slave quarters into trendy restaurants, hotels, andtourist sites; the proliferation of racially stereotypical images and merchan-dise on display in tourist shops ( gures . . ); and the omnipresenceof African Americans in the service industry whose performance of happyservitude is mandated by the conventions of the local tourist economy. In each case, tourists are encouraged to consume or gaze on black culture without the uncomfortable acknowledgment of an exploitative slave systemor its persistent legacy of racial and class inequality. New Orleans tourists,then, become acquainted with a representation of blackness that leaves theactual black New Orleans invisible.

This disjuncture shaped my own childhood in post civil rights New Or-leans, where I was continually confronted by a tourist landscape of blackdocility, subservience, and stereotypical distortion. Like other African American New Orleanians, I was faced with the challenge of reconcilingthe omnipresence of these representations with the reality of black agency,autonomy, and community that shaped my lived experience. In part, this

book is an a empt to affirm that lived experience and to present a counter-narrative to the tourist-oriented construction of New Orleans. It is alsoan a empt to interrogate that construction of the city during the ascen-dance of black heritage and multicultural tourism, which affords a uniqueopportunity to examine the complex and o en contradictory ideas aboutrace that have reshaped national discourse. During the past thirty years,the New Orleans tourism industry has a empted to respond to public andscholarly demands for a more inclusive representation of history, and both

mainstream and black heritage tours have incorporated the language andsymbols of diversity, multiculturalism, and black history.Indeed, one might have expected to nd such a counternarrative in the

recent development of multicultural tourism that a empts to represent African American culture and history. However, these tours just as o enoffered their perspective through the persistent lens of New Orleanss ra-cial exceptionalism. Following the lead of the citys dominant tourismnarrative, multicultural tours also dissociated the city and its history from

national and regional pa erns of racial discrimination, violence, and blackstruggles for liberation. New Orleanss construction as a multicultural cityreinforces the idea that racism in the city is either nonexistent or aberrant.


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. Pickaninny dolls for sale in a French Quarter tourist shop.Photograph by author.

. Racially stereotypical merchandise, including Mammy and Sambogurines, on display in a French Quarter tourist shop. Photograph by author.


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. Contemptible collectible postcards displayed in a

French Quarter tourist shop. Photograph by author.


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A note worthy example is the portrayal of the citys colonial and antebellumCreoles of color, whose economic, civic, artistic, and educational accom-plishments are used as evidence of New Orleanss uid racial boundariesand progressive race relations. In the popular imagination, and even in his-toriography, this population has been simplistically cast as a distinct racialgroup of tragic mula oes who unwaveringly upheld elite, white intereststhrough slave ownership; endogamy; and an insistence on a cultural, po-litical, and social divide between themselves and enslaved blacks. Despiterecent scholarly challenges to this history, New Orleanss tourism industrycontinues to construct blackness based on this clichd racial image.

Given the fact that the inclusion of free people of color in New Orleansstourism narrative marked a rare occasion when black culture was discussedat all, its problematic portrayal had far-reaching implications, not only forthe popular imagination but also for the political and economic realitiesof peoples lived experiences. If we accept the proposition that free peopleof color were equally, if not more, white than whites were in their appear-ance, cultivation, education, and contempt for and castigation of black peo-ple, then we fail to recognize how the presence of this group challengedthe legitimacy of racial categories, the premise of racial separation, and the

inviolability of the color line. We also deny the labor, contributions, andagency of other black New Orleanians, who we are le to assume didnot contribute anything worthwhile to the city and are consequently un- worthy of historical, political, or popular a ention. The salience of theseideas was unmistakable in the pre-Katrina tourism narrative and would havedramatic implications for post-Katrina policies. Ultimately, the tourism nar-ratives assertions of French and Spanish leniency during the colonial pe-riod; depictions of a romantic, paternal slave system during the antebellum

period; and an oversimpli ed insistence on a constantly self-sustaining, vi- brant class of free people of color who were allegedly more aligned with theinterests of whites than those of other blacks all obscured the fact that freepeople of color, as well as enslaved and free blacks, found a range of waysto navigate and circumvent the black- white binary that undergirded Anglo-slave society. Throughout New Orleans history, Afro-Creoles and African Americans fought in myriad ways to obtain or expand their freedom, asserttheir rights, and demand equitable treatment.

New Orleanss black heritage tourism seemed to take on the task of pre-senting that history to the citys visitors. In the s New Orleans African Americans through local and national political and civic organizations


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organized at the grassroots level, litigated for desegregation, forged coali-tions, engaged in direct action protests, agitated for economic opportuni-ties, and slowly wielded their hard- won bargaining power to wrest conces-sions from the previously whites-only tourism industry. The crux of this bargaining power stemmed from the activists recognition of their ability tohurt New Orleanss tourist image and disrupt the tourism trade. As the his-torian Adam Fairclough asserts, African Americans strategy of bluff and brinkmanship relied on the understanding that the citys dependence ontourism made white businessmen in New Orleans peculiarly sensitive to thethreat of disruption. African American activists had learned to appropri-ate the rhetorical conventions of the local tourism industry to ght for civilrights and would eventually employ this same rhetoric to gain entry into thetourism industry itself.

By the mid- s, increasing numbers of New Orleans tour owners,guides, and promoters began responding to post civil rights movementdemands by black New Orleanians for a stake in the burgeoning tourismindustry and for the presentation to tourists of stories that reected thecomplexity and contributions of New Orleanss black culture. At the sametime that the city turned almost exclusively to tourism to alleviate the eco-

nomic crisis that followed the late- s oil bust and the worsening of urban blight, there was an exponential rise in black heritage tourism and the in-creased marketing of African Americans historical past by mainstream in-stitutions. In New Orleans, the creation of the Louisiana Black CultureCommission in , the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Center in

, the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Network in (whosename was changed to the New Orleans Multicultural Tourism Network in

), the Essence Music Festival in , the multicultural branch of the

Louisiana Office of Tourism in , and even mainstream tours celebratingracial and cultural diversity, responded to demands for a more inclusive,authentic representation of the citys African American past and a emptedto provide opportunities for an economically viable future.

However, the inclusion of African Americans in the tourism industrycame at a cost. The new a ention to black New Orleans further entrenchedthe predominant tourism narrative for three primary reasons. First, African American inclusion was o en con ned to the politics of representation

that promoted visibility at the expense of political, economic, and socialequity. As had been the case throughout the twentieth century, New Orle-anss tourism industry o en referenced and even staged black history and


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cultural productions, such as traditional jazz performances, second line pa-rades, and voodoo ceremonies. Tourism promoters did so primarily by ex-ploiting and commodifying black culture to suit the expectations of mostly white visitors. Just as in other southern cities, such as Charleston, which were concurrently developing into tourist destinations, in New Orleans theproduction of black culture (and that of other marginalized groups) waso en transformed into what the historian Stephanie Yuhl describes as atherapeutic performative commodity that whites around the country ea-gerly consumed. Wrenched from their cultural and community contexts,these static performances of black culture were physically and symbolicallyremoved from local neighborhoods and living traditions characterized byresistance, survival, and innovation.

Second, because predominantly poor and working-class African Ameri-cans had few employment options beyond the low-paying service industry,they were compelled by economic necessity to conform to these touristperformances that distorted and trivialized black history and culture. Many African American performers, tour guides, and service industry employeesfound themselves in the position of seeking the economic rewards of thelocal tourism industry, while simultaneously leveling incisive, if not sweep-

ing, critiques of hegemonic discourses. For instance, some African Ameri-cans developed their own black heritage tours or subtly revised mainstreamtours to cra counternarratives to the citys racialized mythology. In thesetours, they incorporated histories of slave uprisings; black entrepreneur-ship; civil rights milestones; and African American educational, political,and cultural institutions. Yet they faced systemic and institutional obstaclesto nancing and marketing their own black heritage tours in a tourism in-dustry that exalted the citys European heritage over its African one.

The nal reason, then, why these critiques did not supplant the predom-inant tourism narrative is that they could not successfully compete againstthe mainstream tourism industry. An imbalance of resources, marketing,and industry support relegated most black heritage sites and tours to theperiphery of the citys tourism industry. Hence, on the eve of HurricaneKatrina, the predominant historical and thematic tourism narrative aboutNew Orleans had so effaced the lived experiences of the citys black com-munity that this community was effectively rendered invisible to the rest

of the nation. It took the catastrophic destruction of Katrina to lay bare thecitys long history of racial and class disparities.

The failure of even the citys multicultural and black heritage tourism


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narratives to present a viable counternarrrative to the myth of New Or-leanss racial exceptionalism points to the difficulty of overcoming a deeplyentrenched narrative that provides economic bene t to the city and psycho-logical rewards to many of its locals and visitors. A er all, to fully revise thisnarrative would necessitate not simply an inclusion of black characters or acommitment to more accurate or authentic cultural representations but arevision of the idea of New Orleans itself. Such a revision is a costly one, forthe idea of New Orleans a city of uncontested contradictions that includeits simultaneous claim of uniqueness from the rest of the South and its oldSouth romance; its celebration of racial exoticism and mixture and its in-sistence on racial boundaries and exclusiveness; its allure of decadence anddanger and its continual demarcation ofsafe spaces is one that appeals toand validates a broad spectrum of locals and visitors.

For many whites, this idea of New Orleans provides a safe, sanctionedspace to indulge in black culture and unite with black bodies, if only vicari-ously. As the historian Alecia Long demonstrated in her study of Storyville,the early twentieth-century vice district, New Orleans has long operatedas a geographic and metaphoric safety valve that provides a simultane-ous respite from and entrenchment of the racial, religious, and behav-

ioral strictures found in other U.S. cities. In the context of New Orleanstourism, racialized consumption is afforded without censure and with theadded bene t of absolving whites of guilt and culpability for a racist past orpresent. In the post civil rights era, white tourists consumption of blackculture substitutes for the much more difficult and abnegating task of sus-tained antiracist work to create economic, educational, and environmentalparity for the black residents of the city. The idea of New Orleans has alsoprovided psychological and economic bene t for blacks in the city, who

are not only able to subsist on tourism dollars but for whom a glori edpast of bene cent slavery, wealthy and independent free people of color,and racial harmony counters a far less redeeming or digni ed history of de-humanizing slavery, chronic poverty, and racism.

Just as the citys tourism narrative neglected or misrepresented New Or-leanss black history and clearly delimited the proper, safe New Orleans asnonblack, representations of the city in the a ermath of Hurricane Katrinaignored the complexity and diversity of New Orleanss black experience

and continued to entrench the boundaries around the French Quarter,abandoning the rest of the city as too dangerous and menacing to rescueor rebuild. In an article describing the widespread exaggeration and false


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reporting in the a ermath of Katrina, two local journalists observed: Thepicture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of ood victimsresorting to u er depravity, randomly a acking each other, as well as thepolice trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them.[New Orleans Mayor Ray] Nagin told [Oprah] Winfrey the crowd has de-scended to an almost animalistic state.

More frequently, Hurricane Katrina survivors, such as my husband,forged a community for mutual support and protection in the days followingthe storm, instead of waiting for the uncoordinated and ineffective nationalresponse to materialize. Residents pooled resources by sharing necessarysupplies, including food, water, generators, and working cell phones; theycoordinated and staffed makeshi shelters in abandoned homes, schools,and churches; they patrolled neighborhoods to search for elderly and in rmrelatives and neighbors; they held continuous vigils to discourage looters;and they saved lives using their own shing boats, ra s, and whatever else would oat. This type of community effort reects black New Orleansshistory of grassroots organizing, strong kinship ties, and multigenerationalcooperation, a perspective largely absent in the media coverage and otherpublic portrayals of the city in the immediate a ermath of Katrina.

The citys racialized tourism narrative anticipated a man-made disasterof media misrepresentation and governmental neglect. The vili cation

of black New Orleans as an incorrigible drain on nancial and civic re-sources shaped the debate about whether to proceed with rebuilding effortsand illustrates the limited terms and conventions available to policy makersand the news media as they tried to understand who New Orleans residents were and what they might need. We witnessed the public policy impact ofthe citys tourism narrative in the insufficiency of federal relief; redlining

of black neighborhoods; lack of a coordinated rebuilding effort; disregardof the interests of renters and public housing tenants, most of whom were black; silence around the decimation of the black middle class; and exclu-sion of minority contractors and community leaders, as well as black resi-dents, from the rebuilding efforts.

That is why it is not surprising that during a brief visit to New Orleansless than ve months a er the storm, President George W. Bush bypassedthe worst-hit, predominantly black areas of the city and instead went to the

Lower Garden District, which had not been ooded during Katrina. Hiscomments to Mayor Nagin and a group of business owners and communityleaders reected the degree to which New Orleanss tourism image contin-


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ues to obfuscate the realities of black agency and racial inequality in the city.Bush announced to the group: I will tell you, the contrast between whenI was last here and today . . . is pre y dramatic. It may be hard for you tosee, but from when I rst came here to today, New Orleans is reminding meof the city I used to come to visit. Its a heck of a place to bring your family.Its a great place to nd some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun. And Im glad you got your infrastructure back on its feet.I know youre beginning to welcome citizens from all around the countryhere to New Orleans. And for folks around the country who are lookingfor a great place to have a convention, or a great place to visit, Id suggestcoming here to the great New Orleans.

The fact that the president returned to the familiar image of the city[he] used to come to visit one of frivolity and avorful food in themidst of a national catastrophe speaks volumes about the impact and en-during legacy of New Orleanss problematic racialized narratives. Even inthe midst of heart- wrenching devastation and potentially new understand-ings of race and poverty in the city and the nation, the president circulateda construction of New Orleans that relied on the romance of black labor (toprepare the great food and provide the wonderful fun) while ignoring the

needs of the predominantly black citizenry. Instead, the president encour-aged citizens from all around the country tourists to return to NewOrleans, not the mostly black New Orleans residents who were anxiouslyawaiting the opportunity to return and rebuild their communities that had been devastated by the ood.

Even as I write this chapter, nearly eight years a er Hurricane Katrina,parts of the city look just as they did when the rest of the world was rstintroduced to them immediately following the storm. Interspersed with

new construction are demolished homes, deserted neighborhoods, and broken-up streets. Yet, while many New Orleans residents remain miredin bureaucratic processes and ba les with politicians and power brokersover affordable housing, quality education, and accessible health care, NewOrleans tourism has rebounded, and the tourist sites of the pre-Katrinaera largely undamaged by the storm have been revived. Their revivalhas been augmented by the rise of post-Katrina tourism, featuring new sites,tours, and geographies of the city that incorporate African American neigh-

borhoods,lieux de mmoire , and narratives of survival and resilience. Thesemore recent tours are, nevertheless, troublingly dependent on the racialtropes that characterized pre-Katrina tourism.


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Racial Geography

New Orleanss tourist landscape is inextricably linked to the citys physicaland racial geographies. The citys precarious location, its scarcity of habit-able land, and its vulnerability to oods and disease compelled a hetero-geneous populace to cohabit and work in close proximity to one anotherthrough the early twentieth century. The absence of geographic racial seg-regation, however, did not translate into social integration, as the systemsof slavery and Jim Crow segregation entrenched racial and class inequali-ties. Throughout the twentieth century, new technologies that facilitatedthe drainage of former back swamps, marshes, and other environmentally vulnerable lands, white ight, gentri cation, programs of urban renewal,economic downturns, and the displacement of the poor and working classfrom tourist and commercial districts resulted in a residential pa ern thatmore closely mirrored and perpetuated the citys racial and class divides.

From the late s to the end of the twentieth century correlating with the post civil rights era the interrelated processes of suburban sprawland racial segregation mimicked the shi in racial demographics that the cityexperienced during Reconstruction with the inux of poor, recently freed

slaves. As the citys mostly white middle-class population le for surround-ing parishes and affluent all- white enclaves o en in the most structurallyand environmentally stable neighborhoods the citys African Americanpopulation grew and spread primarily into more affordable, lower lying,and less environmentally sustainable areas of the city, such as the LowerNinth Ward, parts of Gentilly, and New Orleans East. Not surprisingly,the majority of black neighborhoods geographically and ideologicallyisolated from the historic and tourist core of the city were wracked by

debilitating poverty, unemployment, and failing schools. In his geographyof New Orleans, originally published in , Peirce Lewis uses evidenceof the growing racial divide to challenge persistent claims of New Orleansexceptionalism: In New Orleans, as elsewhere, blacks are relatively poorand ill-housed, and their neighborhoods are poorly a ended by municipalservices. Educational levels are low, crime rates high. Meanwhile, whitesee and the proportion of blacks continues to increase, as do the isolationand alienation of a population that sees itself as abandoned and abused.

Although African Americans became the largest racial group in thecitys population in , their increased electoral presence and growingpolitical inuence failed to reverse these trends. Even when black voters


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Lake Pontchartrain

M i s s i s s i p p i R i v e r

JeffersonParish

Jefferson

Parish

Lakeview

Gentilly

New OrleansEast

LowerNinthWard

Algiers

Carrollton

Uptown

GardenDistrict

ArtsDistrict

Mid-City Trem Marigny

Bywater

UpperNinthWard

F r e n

c h

Q u a

r t e r

CBD/Downtown

E s p l a n a d e R i d g e

. Map of New Orleans neighborhoods. is the Central Business District.


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rejected the traditional model of white patronage and historical and cultural black-Creole divisions to elect the citys rst black mayor Ernest DutchMorial in , New Orleanss new leadership was forced to confrontdaunting challenges with limited resources and few economic prospects. Infact, although Morials reformist approach to local government was a prom-ising departure from traditional city politics, his uncompromising effortsto disband the citys political, social, and economic oligarchy and provideequal access to city government to all New Orleans citizens ultimately alien-ated him from whites and deepened the electoral racial divide.

Conditions only deteriorated further with the oil bust in and thea endant departure of jobs and the middle-class tax base that had sup-ported essential municipal services. Morials two-term successor, SidneyBarthelemy, the citys second African American mayor, turned exclusivelyto tourism to redress the problems facing the city and ushered in an era of atourism-dominated economy. By New Orleans had one of the high-est rates of poverty in the country. Hardest hit were black New Orleanians,already among the citys poorest and least educated. In the nal decadesof the twentieth century, disproportionate rates of poverty and unemploy-ment for black New Orleanians, whites desertion of the public school sys-

tem, and a new pa ern of residential segregation that concentrated poor African Americans in public housing projects and other isolated ghe osmade New Orleans more geographically, economically, educationally, andpolitically segregated than at any other time in its history. As a result, thecitys racial cartography was referred to descriptively as a white teapot,the shape appearing on maps that depicted the concentration of whitesin the highest elevations of the city. This racial geography was produced by historical pa erns of environmental racism, educational and economic

disparities, and residential segregation. Ironically, in spite of or perhapsin response to the gains of the civil rights movement, New Orleans had become a separate and unequal city.

The tourist landscape clearly reected and exacerbated these inequal-ities as it helped shape a range of social and economic pa erns, includinggentri cation and unequal property values and distribution of resources. Bythe beginning of the twenty-rst century, New Orleanss tourist geographyhad extended beyond the French Quarter but was still limited to distinct

tourism areas that included the Warehouse District, the Garden District,and the Central Business District. The addition of new streetcar lines andan Audubon Institute riverboat ferry gave tourists more convenient (and


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more easily contained) ways of ge ing from the French Quarter and down-town hotels to a ractions on the riverfront, uptown, and in City Park. The viability of these tourism districts directly correlated to the deteriorationof many of the citys nontourist neighborhoods. The resources that the citypoured into the tourist districts for continuous police protection, debrisremoval, beauti cation, and infrastructure maintenance reduced the services available for other areas of the city. The lack of community-engagedpolicing, eroding streets and blighted housing, and irregular trash collectionand landscaping in these nontourist areas displayed a literal and symbolicdisregard primarily for the citys poor, black residents. In the decades beforeKatrina, the systematic neglect of these nontourist sections of the city fore-shadowed the devastation they incurred during the hurricane.

African American neighborhoods suffered the most from the combi-nation of these economic, social, environmental, and political factors. Al-though the Lower Ninth Ward was not among the poorest or lowest-lyingNew Orleans neighborhoods, it was decimated by Katrina because of a longhistory of local and federal policies that had isolated the neighborhood andfacilitated its environmental degradation. Long the site of the citys mostdistasteful and dangerous industries and operations because of its location

downriver from the heart of the city, the Lower Ninth Ward was dramat-ically affected by the expansion of the citys port industry. Beginning inthe early twentieth century, a succession of navigation canals were carvedthrough the Ninth Ward, physically separating the neighborhood from thecity proper and leaving it inadequately protected against the bodies of waterthat surrounded it on three sides. Black and poor Lower Nine residents, who had already been relegated to the lower-lying area, referred to as backof town, were further alienated by racial discrimination, white ight, and

class inequities in the decades before Katrina. Yet, the condition of theLower Ninth Ward and its residents could no longer be ignored follow-ing the hurricane, and tourism became a vital, albeit problematic, way that Americans and the rest of the world a empted to see, understand, and inthe case of voluntourism ameliorate these conditions.

Despite their shorter histories and different geographies, parts of theGentilly and New Orleans East neighborhoods shared the Lower Ninth Wards pre- and post-Katrina fate. Until the twentieth century, the marsh-

lands on the outskirts of the city were sporadically and unevenly devel-oped because of the inhospitable terrain, limited access, inadequate trans-portation, and poor drainage. In both Gentilly and New Orleans East, the


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dredging of canals, the construction of levees and highways, and the imple-mentation of advanced drainage technologies facilitated the developmentof previously uninhabitable neighborhoods and eventuated in soil erosionthat le most of the area below sea level and susceptible to hurricanes andstorm surges. Racial integration of Gentillys once-segregated subdivisions, white ight, and the devastation of historically black communities with theconstruction of an interstate highway enticed middle-class African Ameri-can homeowners to previously all- white inner suburbs. New Orleans Eastlikewise experienced a demographic shi in the second half of the twenti-eth century. The eastern edge of the city drew developers who were willingto ignore or gloss over environmental risks, such as soil subsidence and theimpending threats ofhurricanes and storm surges, to capitalize on increas-ing land values. Though New Orleans East was initially marketed to whitesas a suburb within the city limits, development companies ultimately failedto lure signi cant numbers of affluent whites to the area. Throughout the

s and s, however, the newly drained wetlands did a ract middle-class and affluent African Americans who, in the post civil rights era, were

nally able to stake a claim to the suburban American Dream. The East also became home to displaced poor and working-class African Americans who

took advantage of affordable housing and government-subsidized rents fol-lowing the oil bust, demolitions of public housing, and the gentri cationof historic neighborhoods. The exodus of middle-class whites from Gen-tilly and New Orleans East and the accompanying loss in tax base coincided with the citys economic depression and surge in crime, further cementingthe citywide pa erns of racial and economic polarization.

The historic Afro-Creole Faubourg Trem, a nineteenth-century suburbadjacent to the French Quarter, escaped many of the environmental and

geographic hazards of other low-lying African American neighborhoods. As both the site of Congo Square, where slaves and their descendants gath-ered to meld and pass down expressive culture traditions, and home toHomer Plessy, whose iconic failed challenge to racial segregation was partof a much longer history of radical Afro-Creole activism, the Trem com-mands a place at the epicenter of the citys and even the nations early black cultural, spiritual, social, civic, and political life. Following the exo-dus of whites in the early twentieth century, the poor and working-class

African Americans who remained in the neighborhood sustained existing black institutions and cultural practices and created new ones, as evidencedin the cultural and built environment of dance and jazz clubs, second line


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parades, funeral homes and insurance companies, mutual aid and benevo-lent societies, and other neighborhood organizations. Despite its historicimportance or, more accurately, because of it the district becamea contested space as African American residents competed with the cityof New Orleans and gentri ers over its meanings and uses. The citys urbanrenewal plans have included the leveling of signi cant historic structures,the razing of entire neighborhoods, and the dislocation of residents to erecta highway overpass, civic and cultural centers, and a park in honor of Louis Armstrong. Critics have questioned the prudence of memorializing thecitys most famous son by destroying a portion of the old neighborhoodin which jazz evolved and replacing it with unseemly berms and bridged la-goons. In instances such as this, the tourist packaging of Trems culturalcontributions to the city has taken precedence over the cultural contribu-tors themselves, who are le to contend with a seriously diminished physi-cal and cultural landscape. At the same time, the prevalence of nineteenth-century architecture, the proximity to the French Quarter and the CentralBusiness District, and economic incentives to renovate deteriorating prop-erties have made some parts of the neighborhood appealing to affluent blacks and whites whose ideas about aesthetics and propriety are o en

at odds with long-standing black traditions and practices. These tensionshave taken a toll on the neighborhood, which suffered the same problemsof crime and urban decay as other predominantly black areas of the city.

Because of these historical pa erns of racism, poverty, economic ex-ploitation, environmental hazards, and geographic isolation and alienation,these African American neighborhoods were especially vulnerable to Ka-trina and the glaringly inefficient bureaucratic response that ensued. Whenthe hurricane hit, more than two-thirds of the citys black residents lived

in areas prone to ooding. In disproportionate numbers, African Ameri-can and poor residents were trapped in the city by the ood waters and afatally botched rescue operation. Flooding from the hurricane and stormsurges caused the evacuation, dispersal, and, in some cases, demise of entire black communities throughout the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East,Gentilly, and Trem. In addition to the devastating losses that they sufferedas a direct result of the storm and uncoordinated rescue efforts, African American and poor residents as well as the black professional class whose

businesses and practices were sustained by them have faced dauntingchallenges to rebuilding and recovery in the storms a ermath. Dispropor-tionately affected by ooding and housing damage, the absence or delayed


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return of municipal services, the demolition and ongoing dearth of publichousing, and the racially inequitable disbursement of federal funds for rebuilding, African Americans have returned to New Orleans more slowlyand at lower rates than all other racial and ethnic groups. Data from the census suggest that just percent of the citys population is now black,down from percent before Katrina a decline of more than ,people. The displacement of so many black New Orleanians has alreadysigni cantly altered the citys cultural, economic, and political landscape,precipitating an inux of more affluent white residents; the election of the

rst white mayor in over thirty years; a majority- white city council;the loss of a congressional seat; and the consolidation of some majority- black legislative districts. These immediate developments may foretellmore sweeping changes to New Orleanss racial geography, compoundingthe problematic relationship between race and tourist space that paved theroad to Katrina.

New Orleans Tourism as Racial Project

Desire and Disaster explores New Orleanss tourism industry, and the mod-

ern urban tourism industry more generally, as a racial project that explic-itly integrates racial structures and representations. As a racialized socialstructure, New Orleans tourism redistributes resources to tourism zonesand initiatives; maintains a racially, educationally, and economically strati-

ed workforce; and designates certain segments of society and communi-ties as dangerous or as disaster zones, resulting in the type of isolation andsystematic neglect that make these communities even more susceptible tonatural and man-made disasters. As a form of racial representation, urban

tourism super cially trumpets the value of racial difference and diversitythrough the commodi cation and consumption of customs, foodways, andcultural traditions associated with certain racial and ethnic groups. Embed-ded within the racial ideologies of multiculturalism, racial exceptionalism,color blindness, and postracialism, contemporary urban tourism respondsto the desire of consumers in the post civil rights era for racial diversityto the detriment of racial equality. Using race as a lens to study New Orle-ans tourism offers a way to explore the o en constrained, but determined,

efforts of black heritage tours to resist and critique the structural and rep-resentational manifestations of the mainstream tourism industry. Overall,analyzing New Orleanss tourism narratives and practices illuminates the


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ways that public policy and popular culture in the post civil rights era re-spond to racialized subjects simultaneously as objects of desire who inviteimitation and as sites of disaster in need of remediation.

In theorizing desire and disaster, I set out to show how New Orleanstourism in the post civil rights era serves as a critical site where nationalunderstandings, popular memories, and public policy decisions about Af-rican Americans are debated and deployed. As I demonstrate in the follow-ing chapters, New Orleanss tourism narrative in the late twentieth centuryhinged on a partial and incomplete historical, political, and social under-standing of the citys black population. This ctitious narrative nonethelessadvanced a powerful and persuasive argument about African American citi-zenship that contributed to and exacerbated Hurricane Katrinas dispropor-tionate impact on black residents. By highlighting the relationship betweenracial desire and manmade disaster, this study responds to Lewiss call for anew generation of Muckrakers willing to expose and work collaborativelyto address the worst problems such as threats from hurricanes and racialdivisions that beset New Orleans long before Katrina struck.

Desire and Disaster focuses on New Orleanss quotidian mainstream tour-ism package, including year-round, regularly produced or operating tours;

promotional materials; and landmarks, as opposed to more spectacular andrenowned seasonal a ractions such as Mardi Gras and the Jazz Fest. Thisstudy offers the rst focused history of African American tourism in NewOrleans and one of the rst histories of African American tourism in theUnited States due to its rather recent development and a scarcity of sourcematerial. By focusing on everyday tourist practices and how multiculturaland black heritage tourism re-create and resist those practices, and follow-ing Michel de Certeau, I seek to make explicit the systems of operational

combination (les combinatoires doperations) which also compose a culture,and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose sta-tus as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean thatthey are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic termconsumers. Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways onthe property of others. The distinct processes of racialization articulatedand newly emerging in response to the popularization of multiculturalism,the rise of black heritage tourism, and the debates surrounding Hurricane

Katrina have elicited new tactics by black New Orleanians eager to takeadvantage of the citys tourism industry. Ultimately, by reading the nationalresponse to Katrina through New Orleanss tourism narrative, this book


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implicitly argues for a more truthful and thoughtful historical assessment,interpretation, and reimagining of New Orleans on the part of cultural in-stitutions, the tourism industry, and public officials. What is at stake is notonly a guide for remembering the past but a blueprint for reenvisioningNew Orleanss future.

In the decades preceding Katrina, the creation of more and be er-funded destination marketing organizations, the acquisition of professionalsports teams, the efforts to integrate and democratize Mardi Gras, and thetargeting through new media such as the Internet of new niche mar-kets offered evidence of a more economically, politically, and culturally em-powered class of African American visitors and local residents. However, Iargue that these developments also masked and, in some cases, exacerbateda growing racial and class divide and in the process made the citys African American community more vulnerable to the natural and man-made disas-ters set into motion by Katrina. Post-Katrina New Orleans demonstratesthe political, social, and economic implications of an exclusionary historicalmemory. Henceforth, we can ignore tourism and other popular narrativesonly at our own peril. The limitations of the responses to Katrina uncoveredthe ways that racial representations in popular culture profoundly affect the

ways that we live and die.

unfolds in ve chapters. In this introductory chapter,I have a empted to show how the citys dominant tourism narrative helpedframe the response to the city, and speci cally its black residents, followingHurricane Katrina. Focusing speci cally on the construction of blacknessin New Orleans tourism in the post civil rights era, chapter suggests how

the citys promotion of black cultural consumption in the form of enter-tainment, service, and symbolic representations and re-creations of slaveryproduced a desire for representations of blackness that denied black agencyor racial equality. Chapter examines the multicultural framing of New Or-leanss tourism narrative through a case study of Le Monde Crole FrenchQuarter Courtyards Tour. Despite its a ention to black historical guresand events, Le Monde Crole demonstrates the recalcitrance of the dom-inant racial narrative, notwithstanding its rhetorical and substantive allu-

sions to pluralism and social justice.Though much of this book focuses on the official tourism narratives,chapter shi s focus to document strategies of resistance among black tour


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guides who used their own black heritage tours or subtle revisions of main-stream tours to cra counternarratives to the citys racialized mythology.The chapter highlights their struggle to operate in a tourism industry thatfrequently distorts or denies black culture, history, and agency. Chapter concludes Desire and Disaster in New Orleans by exploring the evolution of anew, post-Katrina tourism narrative. This nal chapter suggests implica-tions for the reconstruction of both New Orleans and its tourism industry.

Taken together, these chapters open a window onto the current historicalmoment in which the prevalence of multiculturalist discourse, the ubiquityof black cultural production, and the ancillary postulation of a postracialsociety have supplanted public policy initiatives to ameliorate persistentracial and economic inequality. Despite the rhetorical and symbolic shi sa ending post civil rights racial discourse and neoliberal practices, my-thologies of racial exceptionalism and black inferiority remain intact, with blackness coded as simultaneously desirous and disastrous.


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Notes

One. The City I Used to Come to Visit

In his study of competing claims for authenticity in the New Orleans tourismindustry, Kevin Gotham de nes racialization as a range of historically changing ways in which structures and ideas become endowed with racial meanings and

signi cations ( Au hen ic New Orleans , ). He traces the racialization of NewOrleans tourism to the s, when it became characterized by a set of racialrelations, segregationist ideology, and institutional tourism practices based onracial meanings and distinctions that were intended to build and legitimate animage of New Orleans as a racially exclusive destination for white tourists andconventioneers ( ). I use the term ourism narra ive to refer to the constel-lation of language, images, and motifs repeatedly used to construct a particularstory and experience of a place for visitors. Such narratives are o en crystallizedin tourist guidebooks and other promotional materials. For a history of the use

of prescriptive tourist literature to create and market certain national narrativesof identity and citizenship, to the exclusion of others, see Shaffer,See AmericaFirs , .

For an example of media coverage in the a ermath of the hurricane, see Of-cial. The historian Anthony Stanonis makes similar observations about the

Katrina media coverage (Crea ing he Big Easy , ). Greenspan,Crea ing Colonial Williamsburg , . For examinations of New Orleanss construction as an image and idea in travel,

literary, and other popular accounts, see Bryan,The My h o New Orleans in Li -era ure; De Caro and Jordan, Louisiana Sojourns; Hearn, Inven ing New Orleans;Kennedy, Li erary New Orleans; Stanonis,Crea ing he Big Easy , .

For a fuller discussion of these elements, see Barber,Renos Big Gamble , . Starr, Introduction: The Man Who Invented New Orleans, xxiv.

Long,The Grea Sou hern Babylon; Dawdy, Building he Devils Empire , and ;De Caro and Jordan, Louisiana Sojourns , ; Pi man, New Orleans in the

s; Stanonis,Crea ing he Big Easy , ; Gotham, Au hen ic New Orleans , , , and . For a discussion of how nineteenth-century writers

employed race and gender in their constructs of New Orleans, see Bryan,The My h o New Orleans in Li era ure , .

J. Weeks,Getysburg , and . For more on the particular trends and develop-ments that facilitated the rise of urban tourism at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, see Cocks, Doing he Town , .


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Gotham, Au hen ic New Orleans , ; Shaffer,See America Firs , ; Sta-nonis,Crea ing he Big Easy , ; Starnes, introduction, ; Yuhl, A GoldenHaze o Memory , .

Souther, New Orleans on Parade , ; Stanonis,Crea ing he Big Easy , ;

Starnes, introduction, . New Orleans tourism epitomized the premise of thecultural critic Dean MacCannell that the best indication of the nal victoryof modernity over other sociocultural arrangements is not the disappearanceof the nonmodern world, but its arti cial preservation and reconstruction inmodern society (The Touris , ).

Gotham, Au hen ic New Orleans , . Souther, New Orleans on Parade , ; Souther, The Disney cation of New

Orleans. Herman Gray suggests that major transformations in the structure and con g-

urations of global media; black self-representation; and political, social, andeconomic systems had dramatically reshaped the creation and disseminationof black cultural production by the dawn of the twenty-rst century (Cul ural Moves). See also Gilroy, Agains Race; C. Horton,Race and he Making o Amer-ican Liberalism; Hutchison, The Political Economy of Colorblindness; Wise,Colorblind. C. Horton,Race and he Making o American Liberalism , . Horton offers acompelling example of how racial contradictions operate in the post civil rightsera: Even more problematically, any memory that the movement was in factdedicated to building an interracial coalition commi ed to the joint pursuitof racial and class equity seems to have been completely erased from publicconsciousness ( ). For similar critiques of the modern liberal state and narra-tives of colorblindness, see Chong, Look, an Asian! ; Giroux, Playing in theDark; J. Hall, The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of thePast.

The cultural studies scholar Ellis Cashmore refers to this inversion of civil rightsgoals as Americas paradox. He explains: In black culture, we can nd a historyof American per dy, American violence, American oppression and Americanracism, all captured for our delectation in a way that provokes reection withoutspurring us to action . . . black culture provides more comfort than challenge(The Black Cul ure Indus ry , ). See also Giroux, Playing in the Dark, ;Goldberg,The Racial S a e.

Bonilla-Silva,Racism wi hou Racis s; Kristof, Racism without Racists. See alsoLum, The Obama Era.

Regis, Keeping Jazz Funerals Alive ; Regis, Second Lines, Minstrelsy, andthe Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals; Souther, New Orleans on Parade , ; Thomas, The City I Used to . . . Visit, . Inhis seminal study of tourist practices, MacCannell contends that the worker is

integrated into modern society as tourist and tourist a raction (work display),as actor and spectator in the universal drama of work (The Touris , ). In NewOrleans, African American service workers who form and perform the citys


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premodern tourist experience are similar to MacCannells tapestry workers, whoseem almost museumized . . . outside of industrial time ( ).

For inuential historiographical examples, see G. King, New Orleans; Rankin,The Impact of the Civil War on the Free Colored Community of New Or-

leans; Rankin, The Politics of Caste. Similar arguments that minimize thedivisions within the community of Creoles of color are found in Foner, TheFree People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue and Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places. For more recent scholarship that argues for Creoleradicalism and alliances between enslaved and free blacks, see Bell,Revolu ion,Roman icism, and he A o-Creole Pro es Tradi ion in Louisiana; G. Hall, A icansin Colonial Louisiana , ; Hirsch and Logsdon,Creole New Orleans.

It is important to note that in the New World, this black- white binary was a pe-culiarly American phenomenon that differed in important ways from the viewsand practices of the French and Spanish during the colonial period. From theeighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, racial designations in colonialLouisiana derived from the complicated relationships among multiple factors,including class status, ethnicity, and skin color. For recent studies that shrewdlydemonstrate the racial complexity of the colonial period, see Dawdy, Building he Devils Empire; Spear,Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans.

Fairclough,Race and Democracy , . Souther, New Orleans on Parade , .

Souther, New Orleans on Parade , . For a range of publications documentingthe rise of black heritage tourism, see Cantor,His oric Landmarks o Black Amer-ica; Chase, In Their Foo s eps; Eichstedt and Small,Represen a ions o Slavery;Ferris, Around the South in Search of the Past; Hayden,The Power o Place ,

; Hodder, Savannahs Changing Past. Yuhl, A Golden Haze o Memory , . See also Starnes,Sou hern Journeys. See Regis, Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second

Line; Regis, Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of NewOrleans Afro-Creole Festivals; and Souther, New Orleans on Parade , .

Lipsitz, Mardi Gras Indians; Roach,Ci ies o he Dead; Souther, New Orleanson Parade; Thomas, Kissing Ass and Other Performative Acts of Resistance.

Campbell-Rock, Black Tourists Pump Millions into the New Orleans Econ-omy; Osbey, Tourism in New Orleans; R. King, Blowing Life Back into theBirthplace of Jazz.

Long,The Grea Sou hern Babylon , . See also Long, A Notorious A rac-tion, . Alicia Barber argues that Nevada serves a similar function for U.S. visitors (Renos Big Gamble , ). InSlavery and Public His ory , Edward Linenthal similarly argues that both whites and blacks enduring hunger for redemptive narratives smooths anyrough edges in these indigestible stories (Epilogue, ).

Thevenot and Russell, Rumors of Deaths Greatly Exaggerated. For reports that corroborate this type of community effort, see Penner andFerdinand,Overcoming Ka rina; Update ; St. Mikes Hardware.


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Babington, Some Legislators Hit Jarring Notes in Addressing Katrina;Barre , A Right to Rebuild; Cass, Notable Mardi Gras Absences Reect Lossof Black Middle Class; Dao, Study Says of New Orleans Blacks May NotReturn; Davis, Who Is Killing New Orleans?; Howell and Vinturella, Forgot-

ten in New Orleans. President Participates in Roundtable with Small Business Owners and Com-munity Leaders in New Orleans. See also Newman, Bush Notes Progress inNew Orleans Cleanup. President Bushs rst visit to New Orleans likewiseavoided a walkthrough of the most devastated sections of the city, which thepresident toured by helicopter. In remarks during that visit, the president simi-larly drew on his tourist nostalgia for the city: I believe the town where I usedto come from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself, occasionally too much . . .[laughter] . . . will be that very same town, that it will be a be er place to cometo (Bushs Remarks in New Orleans). See also Bumiller, Promises by Bushamid the Tears.

Hammer, Citizens in Road Home Purgatory; Herczog, Tourist Areas in NewOrleans Rebound While Other Parts Remain Far Behind; Krupa, Road HomeIsnt Easy Street; Moran, Without Charity Hospital, the Poor and UninsuredStruggle to Find Health Care; New Orleans Update; Public School Per ormancein New Orleans; Simon, Report Critical of Charter Schools; Jacque a White,Ad Campaign Fights Katrina Myths and If You Sell It, Will They Come?;Finn, Two Years a er Oil Spill, Tourists Back in U.S. Gulf.

Campanella, Bienvilles Dilemma , ; Campanella,Geographies o New Orle-ans , ; Campanella and Campanella, New Orleans Then and Now , and

; Lewis, New Orleans , and ; Hair,Carnival o Fury , . Campanella, Bienvilles Dilemma , and ; Campanella, An Ethnic Geog-

raphy of New Orleans, ; Campanella and Campanella, New Orleans Thenand Now , ; Lewis, New Orleans , , , .

Lewis, New Orleans , . Campanella and Campanella, New Orleans Then and Now , ; Hirsch, Simply a

Ma er of Black and White, ; Lewis, New Orleans , . Campanella, Bienvilles Dilemma , , ; Lewis, New Orleans , ; Cam-

panella and Campanella, New Orleans Then and Now , and ; Souther, NewOrleans on Parade , , .

Lewis, New Orleans , ; Souther, New Orleans on Parade , , , and . The political scientist Paul Passavant identi es a conuence of local,

state, and federal policies that increased racial segregation, economic polariza-tion, and urban decline, leading to the reorientation of New Orleans infrastruc-ture away from its residents and toward tourists (Mega-Events, the Super-dome, and the Return of the Repressed in New Orleans, ).

Campanella, Bienvilles Dilemma , . The urban geographer Richard Cam-

panella surmises that isolated from public view, dismissed by the historicaland architectural community, and plagued by the same social ills found through-out inner-city America, the rear sections of the Lower Ninth Ward seemed


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like a world unto itself cherished by its residents, avoided by everyone else( ).

Campanella, Bienvilles Dilemma , ; Campanella, An Ethnic Geography of NewOrleans; Campanella, Greater Gentilly, , ; Campanella and Campan-

ella, New Orleans Then and Now , , ; Dillard Neighborhood Snapshot;Lewis, New Orleans , , , ; Pines Village Neighborhood Snapshot; PlumOrchard Neighborhood Snapshot; Read Blvd West Neighborhood Snapshot;Sothern, Down in New Orleans , ; Souther, Suburban Swamp; Village delEst Neighborhood Snapshot; West Lake Forest Neighborhood Snapshot.

Campanella and Campanella, New Orleans Then and Now , ; Crutcher, His-torical Geographies of Race in a New Orleans Afro-Creole Landscape, ;Sco , The Atlantic World and the Road to Plessy v. Ferguson; Trem / La eNeighborhood Snapshot.

Campanella and Campanella, New Orleans Then and Now , . Campanella and Campanella, New Orleans Then and Now , ; Crutcher, His-

torical Geographies of Race in a New Orleans Afro-Creole Landscape, ;Sakakeeny, Under the Bridge, , . The seriesTreme , which began airing in , depicts some of these tensions.

Associated Press, Census Shows New Orleans Losing Many Blacks; Campan-ella, Bienvilles Dilemma , and ; Campanella, An Ethnic Geography of NewOrleans, ; Campanella, Greater Gentilly, ; Clarke, Katrina LeavesNew Orleans Political Landscape Looking Whiter; Crutcher, Historical Ge-ographies of Race in a New Orleans Afro-Creole Landscape, ; DeBerry, ForBlack Road Homers, a Hollow Victory; DuBos, Redistricting Free-For- All;Flaherty, A New Day for New Orleans?; Fussell, Sastry, and Van Landingham,Race, Socioeconomic S a us, and Re urn Migra ion o New Orleans afer Hurricane Ka rina; Hammer, Road Homes Grant Calculations Discriminate against BlackHomeowners; Krupa, Census Shows Katrina Effects; Krupa, Fewer ThanHalf of the Census Questionnaires Sent Out in Orleans and St. Bernard WereReturned; Krupa, Minority Populations Still Growing in New Orleans Area;Mildenberg, Census Data Show a Far Less Populous New Orleans; Perry,New Orleans Residents Still Struggling to Get Back Home; Quigley, Finger,and Hill, Five Years Later; Robertson, Smaller New Orleans a er Katrina,Census Shows; Sothern, Down in New Orleans , ; Tilove, Five Years a erHurricane Katrina.

I rely on the de nition of racial project proffered by Michael Omi and Howard Winant: A racial projec is simul aneously an in erpre a ion, represen a ion, orexplana ion o racial dynamics, and an effor o reorganize and redis ribu e resourcesalong par icular racial lines. Racial projects connect what racemeans in a particu-lar discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everydayexperiences are raciallyorganized , based upon that meaning (Racial Forma ion

in he Uni ed S a es , ; emphasis in original). As Herman Gray posits, such an analysis must move beyond simply critiquing

stereotypical representations and also a end to the frameworks and social con-

desire and disaster in new orleans by lynnell thomas

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