Culture & Power in New Orleans

Catalog description

New Orleans is renowned for culture and it has been Black New Orleanians, above all, whose creativity has shaped the city’s musical, culinary, architectural, and religious identity. This course places culture at the center of struggles for full citizenship by African Americans and Creoles of Color as well as Italians, Jews, Latinos, and Vietnamese. Under colonial, antebellum, and Jim Crow rule, culture was a source of power in terms of fomenting an ethics of care and a politics of rebellion against white supremacy. Since the Civil Rights era, culture has increasingly been incorporated into the tourist economy. This added value has trickled down unevenly, with Black culture workers most exploited and subject to surveillance, enclosure, and extraction. This course will investigate the deep history of local culture as a contested source of value, drawing upon historical, anthropological, and cultural studies of Blackness and whiteness in New Orleans.