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

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans examines the complexities of tourism by offering a counternarrative to the dominant tourist discourse. Thomas presents the stories of New Orleans’s historically marginalized African American population and does much to highlight and unpack the relationships between tourism, heritage, and politics in New Orleans. She also contextualizes the social, political, and racial tensions associated with tourism and does so within the context of the natural and man-made disasters that have touched the city—each of which further exacerbated the already present, systematically oppressive conditions. The book is organized into five main chapters, each presenting a different aspect of New Orleans’s tourism history from the post-Civil Rights Era through today’s post-Katrina reconstruction; each chapter is constructed around the broad concepts of desire and disaster, as the title suggests, which the author uses as key frames to analyze tourism’s development in New Orleans.

The first chapter sets the tone and structure for the subsequent sections of the book, providing historical context and a discussion of the cultural production of blackness in New Orleans, which, as Thomas argues, parallels the dominant tourism narrative. The second chapter looks at post-civil rights tourism, which focused on history and diversity as key touristic assets. As Thomas notes, New Orleans’s tourism began to shift in the 1980s from a purely historic focus—events happened in certain places at certain times—to a multicultural approach that engaged with ideas about who did what and why, because of economic, political, and social pressures. This shift is addressed more in depth within the third chapter, using a Creole tour group located in the city’s famous French Quarter as a case study. Thomas’s use of direct quotes here helps to highlight the various negotiations many tour guides have to make regarding the presentation of touristic history, especially in regard to racial aspects of this history and its relationship to modernity. Throughout the chapter, Thomas recounts how many members of the New Orleans tourist sector recognize that presenting information that emphasizes the African American experience may “hurt feelings, evoke negative memories, and force visitors to confront suppressed histories, which work against their goal to challenge mainstream narratives” (59).

These intricacies are analyzed further in the penultimate chapter: using black heritage as her focus, Thomas focuses her study on the production of counternarratives of tourism, counternarratives that presented black culture and black history as the primary storyline. While doing so, she also highlights the performative acts of resistance and the formalized ways in which African Americans—tour guides and community members—were able to operate within the more mainstream tourist narratives framed within a context of institutionalized racism; although 70 percent of the New Orleans population was African American, black tourism continued to remain along the margins. Here, too, Thomas notes the major irony of tourism in New Orleans: as African Americans successfully gained the economic and political agency needed to carve a space for more prominent black narratives within the tourist sector, tourists continued to travel to New Orleans to seek out ways to satisfy their misconceived notions of blackness in the city. In this way, the African American community was (and still is) faced with the dilemma of whether to tell their history or the history tourists wanted to pay to hear.

This paradox pervaded most touristic histories and the tours themselves. Overcoming these challenges became even more burdensome following Hurricane Katrina. As Thomas notes, “For better or worse, following the storm, New Orleans’s tourism industry was forced to contend with the city’s black past and future” (126). While Hurricane Katrina has remained at the forefront of discourse surrounding New Orleans over the past decade, Thomas situates the storm within the city’s greater history. By shifting the focus away from the storm itself, she is able to highlight not only the sociopolitical...