Re-reading the Mardi Gras Indians: Performance and Identity

Mardi Gras Indian in New Orleans, 16 February 2010. Photo by Derek Bridges.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In Immigration and the Political Economy of Home, Rachel Buff writes, “nation has always been defined at its transnational margins” (16). The Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans help shed light on Buff’s statement. Since the late nineteenth century, groups of African American males have participated in an alternate Mardi Gras performance, dressing in elaborate costumes reminiscent of Plains Indians. Many elements of the performance are also associated with Africa, by way of the Caribbean. The tribes are community-based organizations serving purposes of self-defense, social solidarity, and artistic expression. The first tribes responded to a racially divided nation, whose mass culture nonetheless drew heavily on imagery of African American and American Indian performance.

Recent scholarship on the Mardi Gras Indians has reflected the model of black cultural studies influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Particularly, the hybridity theory has been put forth to challenge narrowly nationalist and racially essentialist views of black experience (see Young). However, in the hurry to embrace a diaspora framework, Robin D.G. Kelley and Tiffany Ruby Patterson claim that scholars “forget that diaspora itself is a process and condition, mirroring the history of imperialism and Western racism” (qtd. in Mullen xxii).

The Mardi Gras Indians create an opportunity to move beyond the hybridity model and instead examine the limits and possibilities of diaspora and black internationalism. Elements of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Bill Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism, and Nikal Pal Singh’s Black is a Country, among others, offer new units of analysis by which to explore the Mardi Gras Indians. In this article, I explore the conditions that gave rise to the Mardi Gras Indians, the cultural play involved in masking Indian, and the resulting negotiation over public spaces. The Mardi Gras Indians allow us to consider the way that cultural interactions, migrations, and struggles over citizenship and national belonging are embodied in performative actions.

New Orleans

The Mardi Gras Indians operate in the urban neighborhoods of New Orleans, where the term creolization is used to describe the city’s unique mix of African, pan-Caribbean, and North American influences. In the late nineteenth century, New Orleans, Louisiana had fallen on hard times. The economic depression of 1873-1877 had taken a heavy toll and had vastly undermined public morale. In Lords of Misrule, James Gill describes the situation this way: “New Orleans was probably the filthiest and least salubrious city in the Union, while the government starved the public schools of money, ensuring that the populace would remain largely ignorant and illiterate” (142). Further, the post-Reconstruction era was a period of racist repression and constant racial terror.

New Orleans had known slavery under the French and Spanish, but the city had always been racially mixed with a sizable free black population. However, during the transition of ex-slaves into citizens, masses of black people entered America’s “shared, if fiercely contested symbolic, social, and political space” (Singh 23). In New Orleans alone, the black population surged—from twenty-five thousand in 1860 to sixty thousand in 1880 (Mitchell 117). Blacks were cast as “anti-citizens” and every effort was made to force them into a separate sphere of public life. Segregation, enforced by Jim Crow laws, ensured that the Indians would be restricted to black or racially mixed neighborhoods. During this time, it was dangerous for blacks to assert themselves in the political arena. The population growth did provide new cultural possibilities, however. West Africans transplanted to Louisiana found themselves in a region already rich in American Indian performance culture. Practices of people of African, Caribbean, European, and American ancestry came together in arnival, festivals, music and dance.

No social services existed in black neighborhoods, and they were overwhelmingly poor and congested. Further, social barriers were prevalent within the black community (Kinser 177). Divides were felt between downtown (where many blacks descended from slaves imported from the Senegal River Basin) and uptown...