New Orleans: A Cultural History (review)

This is the twenty-second volume in the series that Oxford University Press calls Cityscapes, and although its author, Louise McKinney, is a native of Toronto who now lives in Atlanta, she raised her family in New Orleans and she deeply knows – and loves – the Crescent City. She worked for several years for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival’s ‘Jazz Fest’ publication, and she has taught creative writing, journalism, and composition at universities in New Orleans.

Her scholarship on New Orleans and her grace in delivering her material are considerable. She organizes her book by neighbourhood –an excellent approach, for New Orleans is a city of distinct districts, each with its own rich history and cultural traditions. She engages the French Quarter, of course, but also the Faubourgs Treme and Marigny, as well as the Bywater, the Irish Channel, Lakeview and the university area, even the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain and the Cajun territories to the city’s west and southwest. She updates and upgrades the previous introductions to the city for tourists who hope to make a well-informed visit (see Delehanty; also Cowan et al.), for she brings a degree of sophistication – particularly literary, musical, architectural, and culinary – to her subject that one misses in her rivals. In fact, so rich is the book’s coverage of the various purlieus of the storied city that it transcends the travel-writing or tourist-guide genre to seek a place alongside other recent, more academic histories and geographies of the city by Ned Sublette, Richard Campanella, and Kevin Fox Gotham.

McKinney moves deftly around the city, navigating her unique collision of centuries, art forms, social classes, races, and meanings as well as anyone. For example, in a chapter toward the middle of the book, she touches on the timeless musical chants of the street vendors, which leads her to the poetry of Arthur Pfister and then some dozen decades back to the cultural commentary of Lafcadio Hearn, then to the contemporary trumpeting of Kermit Ruffins, then back to a discussion of the New Orleans roots of Edgar Degas, with notes about the Little Peoples Place, Saint Augustine Church, Vaughn’s Pub, and the house on Saint Ann Street where voodoo priestess and beautician Marie Laveau lived: yes, all of this, in a dozen pages, and with the same elegant grace one imagines McKinney exuding as she moves through a crowded, jostling street-party at carnival time without spilling a single sip from her glass or pausing to straighten her mask. The easy density and wild diversity of the book match the old city herself in pitch-perfect harmony. McKinney, in sum, knows her way around.

McKinney’s book was finished in the months immediately preceding Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure of 29 August 2005, events many feared had finished the city itself forever. As McKinney writes, ‘It will take a long time before sickening views of New Orleans rooftops, near submerged in dark channels of water, drain entirely from memory.’ However, as the city struggles back to life, McKinney’s book serves as some of the dressing on her wounds and a vividly woven map to the cultural treasures she embodies, invaluable to any newcomer who wants to know what to look for and how to savour it.