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 scatteredAin't like we ever matteredSo I ain't surprisedboth 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 Africa 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-Africa movements, but also by instantiating memories of Africa 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 Africa 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, Africa 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. As Gwendolyn Midlo Hall reminds us, "New Orleans remains, in spirit, the most African city in the United States" (1992, 59).

Yet life in New Orleans is riddled with contradictions. African retentions are everywhere in the city, but they...