Black Music & Performance in New Orleans

Catalog description

This course provides an historically situated introduction to African American music and performance traditions in New Orleans. The course opens with an exploration of the historical currents and racial economies that contributed to the making of New Orleans as a particularly Caribbean-esk site of early colonial North America. The course then considers the ways culture, race, and plays of social power gave rise to early “creolized” forms of cultural practice and artistic expression, foundational to the fashioning of black New Orleanian music and performance traditions. The syllabus then follows this conversation chronologically through a thematic exploration of various African American performance genres and spaces from Congo Square, to jazz, to brass bands and second-lines, to Mardi Gras Indians, through today’s hip hop and bounce musics. Additional attention will be given to the social impacts of tourism and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina on black performance traditions, questions of citizenship, and related economies of consumption.