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

In Desire & Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory, Lynnell Thomas provides an important critique of the problematic racial politics of New Orleans’ tourism industry while also elucidating the moments when the city’s African Americans challenged its mythical white past. Thomas uses varied sources, including tourism websites and promotional materials, material culture, a thick description of actual tours, and media and popular culture representations. Desire & Disaster in New Orleans is a concise and engrossing story that speaks to both local culture and history while also connecting New Orleans’ story to larger trends in US cities struggling with the growing dominance of tourism and entertainment as economic engines. The book contributes to the scholarship on southern tourism as well as recent debates in the popular realm on cultural appropriation.

The first chapter begins with unforgettable images drawn from the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which catered to the desires of outsiders through representations that “lacked adequate terms and conventions to represent New Orleans’ rich black experience as diverse, varied, and sometimes conflicted” (2). Thomas applies both an insider’s lens and a critical perspective to read the moment of Katrina in a way that provides the reader with a better understanding of how desire and disaster are embedded in the past and the future of New Orleans.

Thomas traces the history of New Orleans’ specific “place identity,” attending to the ways the tourism industry has participated in the fraught process of historicizing and remembering the city while also creating the very “sense of place” that is marketed to visitors and inflicted upon residents. Thomas writes, “In effect, the city’s promotion of black cultural consumption produced a desire for blackness at the same time that this blackness was used to signify the disaster of black emancipation and desegregation” (7). The strength of Thomas’s analysis lies in her ability to read the history and culture of the city’s tourism narrative for both its structural inequalities and its moments of resistance. Uncovering “the reality of black agency, autonomy, and community,” Thomas describes the book as “an attempt to affirm that lived experience and to present a counternarrative to the tourist-oriented construction of New Orleans” (8).

The second chapter of the book explores the desire for representations of blackness that exclude black voices and the agency of black bodies. While tracing the well-documented tendency of southern tourism to focus on the antebellum period through a romantic lens, Thomas documents the framing of New Orleans’ own distinct diversity.

The third chapter tracks the emergence of the city’s post-Civil Rights imagery in the form of a neoliberal, “touristic notion of gumbo-pot multiculturalism” (162). For example, Thomas provides a close reading of the Le Mondo Creole French Quarter Courtyard Tours, which emerged in the late-1990s and attempted to include the voices of historical African American characters. The disjuncture between what Thomas reads as the sincere, noble intent of this liberal, white tourist company to provide a more inclusive history of New Orleans and the unsuccessful outcome illustrates “the tenacity of the organizing themes of desire and disaster even in multicultural tourism” (91).

The fourth chapter addresses the rising power of African Americans within the tourism landscape with the establishment of the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Center in 1986. The chapter provides a reading of “kissing ass” as a “performative act of resistance” from the times of slavery and within today’s tourism industry. Thomas also traces the emerging success of black tourism events, from black family reunions to the establishment of the first Essence Festival in the city in 1995. In an especially strong concluding chapter, Thomas examines how post-Katrina tourism “thrust the images and stories of black New Orleanians into the national imagination” (127). Thomas describes how the city’s tourist landscape was remapped after the hurricane to include a focus on historic African American neighborhoods...