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

Lynnell Thomas, native of New Orleans and an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, demonstrates how tourism contributed to one-sided and often distorted popular memories about New Orleans. On the one hand, New Orleans is a very popular tourist destination. It is a place of “desire.” Many tourists from all over the U.S. visit the city looking for African-American culture including music and food. On the other hand, it is also a city characterized by “disaster,” not just because of Hurricane Katrina, but also because of racism and politics. Commonly, New Orleans is viewed as a city that has overcome various hurdles and now welcomes visitors from all over the U.S. and the world.

Thomas suggests, however, that such a view on New Orleans is far from its reality. The city’s history of tourism has not been simple. Thomas explores this gap between “desire” (what tourists see) and “disaster” (what tourists do not see) by examining the ways in which African American tour guides, tour owners, and the tourism industry used their own Black heritage to reveal the reality of New Orleans. In other words, the book records how African American heritage tourism enabled more accurate remembering of the city’s history, interpretation of its racial and cultural dynamics, and establishment of “a blueprint for reenvisioning New Orleans’s future (25).

To provide historical contexts, Thomas outlines the recent history of New Orleans tourism. Although she recognizes the positive role that tourism played in New Orleans and for its African American population, especially after the civil rights period, she is critical of the negative impact it had on the city’s Black population. As New Orleans became a popular tourist destination, African-American culture such as jazz music, parades, voodoo ceremonies, and creole cuisine were turned into objects of consumption. Additionally, many Black tourism workers were often confined to low-paying jobs. Although such a narrative about gentrification and commodification of African American culture that mostly benefits non-Black businesses is common outside of New Orleans, Thomas’s work provides valuable and little-documented evidence of African-American heritage tours resisting the mainstream tourism industry and discourse while simultaneously “craft[ing] counternarratives to the city’s racialized mythology” (12). For Thomas, New Orleans is not only a popular tourist destination, but is a place where popular memories and public policies are discussed and formulated. In other words, for many African Americans, tourism has become a political tool to showcase their Black heritage and to create the future of the city based on proper historical memories.

In the process of revealing the intricate relationship between “desire” and “disaster,” Thomas touches upon various facets of the city’s history. For example, commodification and consumption of African American culture that was often problematic in itself also enhanced the tourism industry’s interests in Black culture, leading to the increased African-American cultural representation in New Orleans. It eventually translated to the rise of Black political agency. Furthermore, African American guides utilized their own racial and ethnic background in their tours by showing parts of New Orleans that mainstream tour guides intentionally or unintentionally miss or ignore. Thomas’s case study about Le Monde Creole French Quarter Courtyards Tour also reflects similar revisionist efforts to recognize the city’s pluralistic ethnic background.

Since 2005, much has been written about New Orleans. Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water (2006), Keith Wailoo and Karen O’Neill’s Katrina’s Imprint (2010), and others have captured the racial dynamics of the city suffering from the consequence of the disaster. Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke (2006) also recorded the lives of New Orleans’s residents. Desire and Disaster is a significant addition to these works on the city and its African American residents. First, it reminds its readers that the city’s recovery was not an equal process. Many...