Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South

6. Gender, Race, Ritual, & Social Power: Memphis and the Paradoxes of Tradition

You know, I guess it is in my blood since I had a mom who was queen in ’73, my dad was king in ’94, my great-grandfather was king in ’37, my grandfather was king in ’56, so as far as I can think back, there’s a king and queen almost every couple of years.— camilla brinner, 2000 queen of Carnival Memphis, quoted in Lance Murphey, ‘‘The Land of Cotton— The Carnival Queen Camilla Brinner,’’ Memphis Commercial Appeal, 4 December 2005 6 gender, race, ritual, & social power Memphis and the Paradoxes of Tradition Carnival Memphis, sponsor of an annual festival involving the coronation of a king and queen, presentation of a royal court, a salute to business and industry , and support for local charities, celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in June 2006. Members of the original Carnival association organized in 1931 during the throes of the Great Depression. They intended to showcase Memphis to the region and the world as a modern, progressive city capable of hosting a festival promoting commerce, community, and celebration. Carnival founders included the presidents of the Retail Clothiers Association, the Cotton Exchange, and the Junior League. Supported by the directors of the Cotton Exchange, they tapped into the city’s nineteenth-century commercial and social roots to find business sponsors and festival themes. Cotton Carnival founders succeeded in fostering civic participation, boosting community identity, attracting spectators and media attention, and promoting the region ’s most vital economic product at the time—cotton. Today, cotton no longer dominates the local economy, but Carnival Memphis continues to promote commerce and civic engagement. In 1931, the founders established a collective ritual and a form of local associational life that helped identify 153 154 ⭈ Gender, Race, Ritual, and Social Power Memphis as a unique place. Today, the rituals and symbols of Carnival Memphis , conducted within a historically generated social space, perpetuate place distinctiveness and reproduce the social order. Initially, Cotton Carnival enlisted volunteer support and promoted civic engagement but restricted African American participation. The founders’ vision of civic pride, despite claims of providing a festival for all people, actually established racially segregated events. Cotton Carnival reproduced forms of exclusion and otherness associated with patriarchy, namely, racial and gender subordination, which characterized Memphis and other racially divided communities in the Jim Crow South. Hence, racialized representations of community pride and honor, in the region described by organizers as the Cotton Kingdom, naturalized whiteness, incorporated traditional gender roles, and produced degrading images of blacks. Paradoxically, however, the racially exclusive organizational framework challenged African Americans to contest racism and Jim Crow, to actively engage in civic participation, and to rearticulate racial identity through their own ‘‘embedded agency.’’∞ Black Memphians, working within constraints and privileges of the local context, created a parallel civic organization and festival that became known as Cotton Maker’s Jubilee. This organization’s reinterpretation of Cotton Carnival used local material and symbolic resources, and incorporated conventional gender representations, to portray blacks as people of substance and to work for community change. These actions of Cotton Maker’s Jubilee founders not only helped preserve the dignity of the African American community during the Jim Crow era but also helped build social capital networks that linked the ‘‘separate city’’ to the region, the nation, and the world. Today, Cotton Maker ’s Jubilee, renamed Kemet Jubilee, focuses on promoting civic engagement and racial identity. Jubilee organizers publicize their festival as ‘‘the party with a mission.’’ Today, following decades of change, a racially integrated and organizationally restructured Cotton Carnival, renamed Carnival Memphis, promotes its June festival as ‘‘the party with a purpose.’’ By scaling back the public spectacle associated with the original Carnival, continuing an emphasis on the three C’s—commerce, community, and celebration—and stressing the importance of doing ‘‘good deeds,’’ primarily fund-raising for charitable organizations , Carnival Memphis actively promotes civic engagement and commerce . Some Carnival traditions, especially formal rituals presided over by kings and queens wearing ceremonial regalia and following scripted gender roles, seem anachronistic, irrelevant, or incomprehensible to many twenty- Gender, Race, Ritual, and Social Power ⭈ 155 first-century observers, especially non-Memphians. Yet Carnival Memphis, headed by an executive director, supported by a small o≈ce sta√, and funded by individual and corporate sponsors, remains a viable part of contemporary city life. The rituals of Carnival Memphis are meaningful for local participants , who share many things, including membership in an active civic organization...