Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory by Lynell L. Thomas (review)

[Errata]

In this crisply written account, Lynell Thomas provides a fascinating exploration of tourism in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. The “city’s tourist geography” was especially apparent in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when it “steered tourists and consumers to heavily policed tourist zones and restricted or discouraged access to nontourist black neighbourhoods that were automatically presumed to be risky, unsafe, or violent” (p. 2).

Before and after Hurricane Katrina many commercial guides offered tourists a selective and occasionally false New Orleans historical narrative. Commercial guides and tourist literature focused on the city’s colonial historical connections with Europe. At the same time, however, mainstream commercial guides softened or omitted the histories of those of African origin who lived under French, Spanish, and American slave regimes.

Even when mainstream tour operators acknowledged Africans’ existence in early New Orleans, they did so in narratives highlighting the multicultural city. In her account of one company’s year 2000 historical narrative, Thomas notes that guides spoke of Africans’ roles in the building of New Orleans, but claimed that they lived in a racially exceptional city. Guides particularly emphasized the importance of the Creole in the city’s history. The company’s definition of Creole acknowledged the centrality of West African culture, but also described Creoles as an influential elite class without mention of poor or enslaved Creoles.

While the tour company included black characters in its narrative, the company’s “failure to vindicate and empower its black characters” was apparent (p. 81). Thomas found for example, that guides told the story of a New Orleans’ slave named Toussaint without mentioning Toussaint Louverture, whose leadership in a slave revolution contributed to the establishment of the first free black nation in the Caribbean in 1804. Naming an enslaved child Toussaint in a slave society was a significant statement of identity and an act of resistance.

Some New Orleans tour companies offered counternarratives to the selective and occasionally fictitious historical accounts Thomas describes in her third chapter. Thomas begins her fourth chapter with a description of the origins of the black heritage movement in New Orleans which emerged simultaneously with the modern civil rights and Black Power movements. Black business and civic leaders established an organization in 1986 and the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Network (gnobtn) in 1990. Thomas argues that the gnobtn challenged the mainstream New Orleans tourism image. This organization informed tourists that “every facet of this city, including its churches, schools, architecture, folklore, music and food has been touched and gilded by the people of the African diaspora” (p. 106).

Black heritage authors and tour guides’ narratives about slavery and the achievements of African Americans in the city often challenged mainstream tour companies’ depictions of historical New Orleans. Thomas found, however, that a division of tour subject material into “traditional (white) and (black) tours relegated the black heritage tour — even within a black-owned company — to the margins of New Orleans’s tour industry. Representationally and structurally, these segregated tours reproduced a separate and unequal New Orleans” (p. 121).

In her final chapter, Thomas investigates the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans tourism. Some tour companies encouraged visitors to enjoy the fantasy of a pre-Katrina city. Many companies, however, incorporated the hurricane into tours. While the post-Katrina tourism narrative was uneven in that the white-dominated, historic/romantic New Orleans narrative coexisted alongside the more recent narratives of black history and agency, tours into African American neighbourhoods forced companies and visitors to acknowledge a New Orleans “outside the tourist boundaries, primarily black, often poor, and still largely neglected by the city and government” (p. 150).

Tour companies’ focus on the history of African American neighbourhoods quickly faded as the national media focus on Katrina waned. Thomas believes that within a few years most tour companies shifted attention from rebirth and recovery. Black heritage tourism suffered a severe...