Diasporic Kings and Queens: Lafayette’s Black Mardi Gras Performances in Historical and Hemispheric Contexts

In 2012, David Wharton, director of documentary studies at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and I began to consider a documentary photography project on historically black Mardi Gras celebrations in Louisiana’s Acadiana region. Wharton had been photographing rural celebrations (more specifically white Cajun) in the region for several years. As a Lafayette native, I grew up participating in Mardi Gras events in both Lafayette and St. Martin parishes. We both realized the potential of examining the festival practices of seldom documented black populations.

After making several contacts, in 2013 we documented Lafayette Mardi Gras Festival (LMGF) Inc.’s ball, pageant, and parade through still photography and oral interviews. Based on that work, this article explores the development and function of this Carnival institution established to meet the needs of Lafayette’s local black community. It presents the historical and social contexts of the organization’s development in a segregated South, and then frames the current functions of its pageant/ball and parade traditions as performance.

Public performance studies are rooted in dramaturgical perspectives, which evidence Shakespeare’s metaphor of the whole world as a stage. These studies emphasize how people negotiate everyday interactions through carefully managed social performances. Public performances “are more than entertainment, more than didactic or persuasive formulations, and more than cathartic indulgences” (MacAloon 1). They tell us about how people identify themselves.

Like the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club and the black Indian Tribes of New Orleans, LMGF members created spaces for themselves in Carnival activities where there were none and, divergently, protested white racial frames. The Zulus, established in 1909, “took their inspiration from a staged minstrel number,” using “a burlesque African stereotype...[to] play upon the white physical stereotype of the Negro and mental stereotype of his African savagery” (Roach 19, de Caro and Ireland 35). The existence of the appropriated “stereotype is acknowledged but also parodied and made ridiculous, the Carnival occasion allowing for a mocking repudiation of the social position associated with the damning stereotype” (de Caro and Ireland 35). Comparably, “neighborhood based Mardi Gras Indian tribes protest white domination and entitlement” through cultural performance (de Caro and Ireland 35).

Several years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, LMGF’s charter members protested in similar terms through the symbolism of Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century Saint Domingue slave revolt. This focus can be seen as an act of nonviolent civil rights era protest against the white South’s general refusal to shift the new law into fact. As Wharton and I planned this project, we had not given enough consideration to the more universal themes and motivating factors, which could explain much of what we might see, yet what we observed helped me to more fully comprehend the social significances of these cultural performances.

The LMGF, a historically African American social organization organized in Lafayette, Louisiana, was organized during the mid to late 1950s. Through a series of events that define Carnival season, organization members and event participants span several modes of public performance including ethnic festivals and celebrations (Ray 15). Through class and ethnic boundary lines, as well as explicit and nuanced hemispheric and transnational connections to a broader African diaspora, I examine how members of LMGF define themselves, dramatize their collective myths and history, present themselves with alternatives, and change and/or remain the same (MacAloon 1).

Lafayette is the hub, or center, of the Acadiana region, also known as Cajun country. Located along the Vermilion Bayou, it is the fourth largest city in the state of Louisiana and boasts the second largest Mardi Gras celebration in the state, with a total attendance at the city’s Tuesday festivities averaging around 250,000 persons (Simon). Lafayette’s first recorded celebration of Mardi Gras took place in 1869. The city held its first formal Mardi Gras ball and parade nearly thirty years later. Several other celebrations followed, but an annual citywide celebration was not organized until 1934, under the guise...