Can There Be a Critical Collaborative Ethnography?: Creativity and Activism in the Seventh Ward, New Orleans

It is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation, and we cannot wield "how life really is out there" as a kind of test against which the political rightness or wrongness of a particular cultural strategy or text can be measured.

-Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?"

We're going to have to learn to fight. Everything feels good now, and we'll worry later when we disagree that we'll damage our organization or relationships to speak out about it. Really, [if we try to avoid arguments] we'll just make it worse. Knowing how to fight and how to make up builds trust and respect. It balances power.

-Shana Sassoon, community organizer, March 2006

The Neighborhood Story Project opened its doors in New Orleans in 2004 with a deceptively simple mission statement: "Our stories told by us" (Breunlin et al. 2008). The organization, which Rachel co-directs with Abram Himelstein, and in which Helen is an active board member, works with high school students and collaborates with neighbors and "community-based" organizations to create and publish books about neighborhoods around the city. NSP methodology is inspired by the eclectic backgrounds of the people who work under its umbrella. The organization was conceived by Abram after years of participating in the punk scene's Do It Yourself (DIY) movement (Himelstein and Schweser 2000). Inspired by businesses like Dischord Records, which started as a grassroots record label with a mission to help document and support the independent punk rock scene in Washington, DC, Abram envisioned the NSP being a vehicle for New Orleanians to shape the stories of their lives, networks, and neighborhoods (MacKaye 1999). To this framework, Rachel and Helen brought their thinking on feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of anthropology (Abu-Lughod 1990, 1993; Behar and Gordon 1996; di Leonardo 2000; Gilroy 1991, 1993; Harrison 1991; Lavie 1991; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Price 1998; Stacey 1988; Stack 1996; Trouillot 1997). Rachel and Helen also brought a passion for the power of ethnography to produce counter-hegemonic texts and representations of marginalized communities.¹

In combination, these backgrounds and visions have merged into a hybrid organization that teaches the writing of creative nonfiction/ethnography, sharing the profits of our books with the people with whom we work and creating other printed material that is distributed free. Everyone who participates in the project is asked to give substantial feedback before the work goes to print and receives free copies of the products when they come out. In the process, we create coalitions that come together during the production of each book and throw citywide events and block parties to celebrate the publications.

In this article we examine one of our ethnographic collaborations to investigate how our methodology and theory might contribute to the dialogues around critical, collaborative ethnography. Seventh Ward Speaks was a poster project based in the downtown neighborhood of New Orleans where we both live and work. The Neighborhood Story Project partnered with the Porch Seventh Ward Cultural Organization, a fledgling group we helped form after Hurricane Katrina, to engage other area residents in a dialogue about the neighborhood. Seventh Ward Speaks was initially conceived by the NSP to confront media distortions and the rule of experts in planning the future of our city.

During the first months after the storm, the stakes were high for residents of New Orleans. We had just experienced a mandatory evacuation, and while the vast majority of residents were in exile, the city had been cordoned off by National Guard troops manning road blocks. Some of the early reports from national media quoted powerful people pondering an empty landscape, with tabula rasa or terra nulia fantasies, proclaiming radical demographic and political restructuring (Regis, forthcoming; see also Harvey 2005; Klein 2007). There was a sense that the city was up for grabs. In...