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

In Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory, Lynnell L. Thomas deftly analyzes the relationship between culture, commerce, and tourism. Thomas argues that “New Orleans’s road to Katrina epitomizes how racialized tourism narratives have helped define the post–civil rights sphere by altering racial geographies, economic policies, and political priorities” (p. 159). Thomas grounds this argument in careful study of a wide range of primary sources, including interviews, tour itineraries, tourism-related websites, and manuscripts from New Orleans archives.

Thomas focuses first on the theme of “desire,” which historically defined the public perception of New Orleans. Tourism narratives offered predominantly white city visitors a commoditized interpretation of African American culture, complete with jazz music, voodoo, and street parades. Undergirding this performance was a nostalgic longing for the antebellum era, embodied in the perennially popular plantation tours. Thomas astutely observes, “New Orleans’s tourism narrative, then, was part of the historically paradoxical construction of blackness that acknowledges and celebrates black cultural contributions while simultaneously insisting on black social and cultural inferiority” (p. 7). To maintain this narrative, the tourist industry focused on the city’s colonial and antebellum periods. In so doing, tour operators reinforced popular understandings of New Orleans as an exception to the brutal racial politics of slavery.

Thomas dedicates a chapter to Le Monde Créole, presenting an ethnographic analysis of the company’s historic tours carried out between 2000 and 2004. While the tours included references to slavery, defined créole as referring to a non-Anglo population, and acknowledged free people of color, the company struggled to break free from the dominant cultural narratives framing the city as exceptional.

In another excellent chapter Thomas focuses on black heritage tourism, a subject worthy of far more scholarly attention. New Orleans emerged as a popular destination for African American tourists in the 1980s, sparking the rise of the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Center and the Essence Festival. The emerging black heritage tours offered visitors a critique of the white-dominated tourist narrative by promising more authentic itineraries. Significantly, while these tour operators recognized black lieux de mémoire, they struggled to present them due to the lack of preservation attention to such sites and because of perceptions of the city’s African American neighborhoods as dangerous.

Thomas’s final analytical chapter tackles the “reconstruction of race” after Hurricane Katrina. The catastrophe laid bare the “racial fantasy” that had structured the tourist industry for generations (p. 129). During a brief window from 2006 to 2008 “disaster” demanded attention, prompting tours to venture into the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards, New Orleans East, and the Tremé. Soon, however, scenes of devastation were replaced by familiar images of whites posing before antebellum mansions. Through an analysis of the dialogue surrounding the New Orleans Saints’ 2010 Super Bowl victory, Thomas argues that the emerging tourist landscape of New Orleans is one of “postracial romanticism” (p. 165).

The analytical framework Thomas proposes sparks questions extending beyond the confines of New Orleans. Were these shifting constructions of race and place in the tourist landscape paralleled in other southern cities? Tourist merchandise and narratives can be so reductive that they are difficult to analyze, but such studies may reveal the relative influence of the realities of history and the tastes of the contemporary public in their development. Thomas has crafted a fascinating and well-written book that will be useful for courses not only in heritage tourism and public memory, but also in African American history, American studies, and urban history.