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Performing Africa in New Orleans

Cynthia Becker, Rachel Breunlin, and Helen A. Regis

In the 1979 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival pro-gram, the New Orleans Museum of Art took out a two-page advertisement in the form of a quiz to promote a new sculpture exhibit. On the first page, it poses a challenge to festival goers: “The New Orleans Museum of Art wants to help you find out just how much you really know about

art. Can you identify the origin of the objects?” (Fig. 1). Pieces of ancient art are on display, seemingly from different cultures and time periods. The choices are: “A. Ancient Egypt, B. Ancient Rome, C. Renaissance Italy, E. Ancient Nubia, and F. Ancient Greece (Cor-rect Answers on page 56).” Turn the page to the answer key (Fig. 2), and the solution is deliberately provocative:

Nubia, possibly the oldest monarchy in human history, is the answer to many questions. This African civilization—black, beautiful and 5000 years old, preceded the rise of Egyptian kings by hundreds of years.1

It might be surprising that the language of black power has been adopted by the New Orleans Museum of Art, an institution that had only recently desegregated.2 For decades, the museum had only allowed African Americans to visit the museum in highly controlled circumstances—often after normal visiting hours.3 Ironically, this institution became one of the leading art museums in the United States to collect African art in the mid-1960s, when it hired African art curator William Fagaly. In a city with a majority African American population, Fagaly believed it was important for all residents of the city to have access to significant body of African art (Fagaly 2011:11).4 In addition to bringing this collection into being, Fagaly often organized exhib-its that directly explored the links between New Orleans and Africa: for instance, “Roots of American Jazz: African Musical Instruments from the New Orleans Collections” in 1995 and “‘He’s the Prettiest’: A Tribute to Big Chief Allison Tootie Mon-

tana’s Fifty Years of Mardi Gras Indian Suiting” in 1997 and, in collaboration with Frank Herreman and the Museum for Afri-can Art, “Resonance from the Past: African Sculpture from the New Orleans Museum of Art” in 2005. The title of Fagaly’s most recent publication, Ancestors of Congo Square: African Art in the New Orleans Museum of Art (2011), further connects New Orleans to its African heritage.

This special edition began in Bill Fagaly’s French Quarter home, where he hosted a gathering during Mardi Gras 2009. His townhouse’s shrinelike living room is full of African figurines and African American paintings. Everywhere you turn, there is a painting, beadwork, carvings, or cloth. Calabashes are hang-ing from the ceiling. Our meeting grew out of a dialogue around beading when Rachel Breunlin and Helen Regis were working on a catalogue for a small museum in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans dedicated to African American performance tradi-tions. Breunlin had reached out to Henry Drewal to bring in a comparative perspective between Yoruba beadwork and Mardi Gras Indians sewing (Drewal 1998). Drewal introduced them to Becker, who, in addition to her longterm research in Morocco, had begun, in conversation with Fagaly, to repatriate her research agenda to her hometown. During that meeting, we drafted a possible session for African Studies Association at the Roos-evelt Hotel in New Orleans the following November. The panel was interdisciplinary—two art historians, a literary theorist, and three anthropologists whose previous work bridged North Africa, West Africa, Australia, Amazonia, North America, and the Africa Diaspora (see, for example, Becker 2006, 2011; Breun-lin and Regis 2009; Drewal 1998; Ehrenreich 1996; Smith 1998, 2010). After the conference session, we drank at the Sazerac Bar and decided that the papers, in conversation with one another, opened up a window into how Africa is performed in the city.

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Henry Drewal, who served as the panel’s discussant, encouraged us to publish them and agreed to write the envoi for the volume. Drewal has been working on issues of diaspora his entire career, in productive counterpoint with his longterm research with Yor-uba arts in Nigeria, marking out a path for Black Atlantic schol-arship (see for example Drewal 1975, 1989, 2008, 2012; Abiodun, Drewal and Pemberton 1994).

In Drewal’s recent catalog and exhibition on Mami Wata, for example, he stressed that African beliefs and practices are con-stantly revitalized and reconfigured in the diaspora where artists often give them new meanings (Drewal 2008). This collection of essays also recognizes that the relationship of people of African descent to Africa is constantly changing. Krista Thompson dis-cusses this dynamic in her recent essay on the state of African diaspora art history. She calls for scholars to consider the proces-sual nature of diaspora, stating that the field of African diaspora art history not only grapples with how “African diaspora subjects approached, viewed, and visualized the broader environments in which they lived and forged creative lives,” it also reveals much about modern Western culture (Thompson 2011:10). This special issue of African Arts considers the DuBoisian “double conscious-ness” embedded in performance traditions in New Orleans and how they are enacted on the body, at festivals, and in the city at large, illustrating how racial politics influenced the city’s changing relationship with the African diaspora.

The papers in this volume consider how Africa has been seen, understood, and performed in New Orleans from the nineteenth century to the present. They critically analyze how African heri-tage has been linked to issues of authenticity, cultural revival, and tourism in both pre-and post-Katrina New Orleans. While the city’s African heritage is performed at museums, festivals, and other sites, Africanness is also worn on the body, as members of masking groups such as the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club and

Mardi Gras Indians wear costumes to emphasize their connection to Africa and Afro-Caribbean cultures. These essays emphasize how New Orleanians of African descent came to see, understand, and represent themselves as connected to or disconnected from their African heritage. They locate Africa in the performing arts of New Orleans’ black communities and consider the relationship between conceptions of Africa and circumstances of oppression and struggle as well as social movements for civil rights, cultural equity, and black power.

Taken together, these papers can be seen as critical genealo-gies of performance (Roach 1993). All the papers plum archives as well as draw on in-depth interviews, ethnographies, and discourse analysis. They confront how people are claiming or recovering African heritage in the city, a move that brings us all face to face with racism—the colonial erasure of the complex-ity of Africa and African American creative work (Dawdy 2008, Collins 2008). For example, the early sources on Congo Square are almost all created by outsiders in the city. Locals did not find them worthy of documentation, except in arrest records (John-son 1993; Evans 2011). And some of the best evidence of the cre-ative practices employed by people of African descent comes from the laws that were intended to control or prohibit them (see Roach 1993).

Finding AFricA in new OrleAns

The rhetorical move of identifying similarities in form, sym-bolism, or process, and asserting that one came from the other (that is, that the new world art or performance came from the African one) has been immensely popular in Afrocentric dis-course. Robert Farris Thompson, renowned for his publication Flash of the Spirit (1983), identified African influences in Amer-ica in a way that generated a spirited debate. Many scholars

1 “The Question: The New Orleans Museum of Art wants to help you find out just how much you really do know about art: Can you identify the origin of the objects on this page?” 1979 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Program, page 53. COurTesy OF THe New OrleANs

JAzz & HeriTAge FOuNdATiON

ArCHive

2 The Answer: Nubia. “Black, Beautiful, and 5000 years old.” 1979 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Program, page 56. COurTesy OF THe New OrleANs

JAzz & HeriTAge FOuNdATiON

ArCHive

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object that the connections he identifies cannot be proven his-torically, but his essays and enormously popular public lectures have nonetheless been important for understanding how art can be a multisensory, moving experience for both the creators and the audience (see Steiner 1984, Drewal 2012).

Significantly for this issue of African Arts, Thompson’s work, and that of his allies and students, influenced artists and educa-tors, shaping popular understandings of diaspora heritage cre-ated in New Orleans (Hollis 1995).5 For example, folklorist Alan Lomax’s film Jazz Parade: Feet Don’t Fail Me Now (1990), about African American performance traditions in New Orleans, enacts a similar rhetorical move of cutting between contemporary danc-ing in street parades in the city and film footage from dancing in different parts of Africa. Referring to the melée of social aid and pleasure club parades, he enthused: “This isn’t chaos, it’s black tra-dition right out of Africa.” Describing the jazz parades he filmed in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, he reflects: “The words are English but the sentiment is African” (Lomax 1990).

Matt Sakakeeny (2011) examines these sequences in his article “New Orleans Music as Circulatory System.” He states, “Despite my misgivings about decontextualized images portraying con-temporary Africa as the site of African American cultural ori-gins, I too find the visual evidence of cultural affinities striking and ultimately convincing (Sakakeeny 2011:293). But Sakakeeny also argues for the consideration of how such identifications of African cultural continuities by scholars, revivalists, musi-cians, and promoters become part of a process of purification, in which singular origin claims lead to other cultural influences to be omitted, and he suggests these claims generate their own cre-ations and transformations, processes, which are always a part of musical and cultural circulation (Sakakeeny 2011:293–95).

The desire to find Africa in New Orleans also inspired local visual artists to generate new work. New Orleans native and art-ist Willie Birch was working in Baltimore when Thompson first

wrote Flash of the Spirit. He read an unpublished draft of the book, recalling that many artists believed that Thompson had difficulties finding a publisher, “because of racism. Understand-ing the reaction to the book, we come to some hard core truths.”6 When Birch began to research his own family history in Louisi-ana, he returned to Flash of the Spirit for inspiration in looking for African retentions in African American performance tradi-tions and the vernacular landscapes of the city (Sothern 2007) (Fig. 3). Birch began to see how many of the New York artists of the 1960s had been influenced by this Southern vernacular as well. Echoing the writer Toni Morrison, who called for an inves-tigation into the way an “Africanist” presence is embedded into literary culture often considered “white” (Morrison 1993), Birch argues, “when you talk about a southern aesthetic, you are talk-ing about a black aesthetic as well.”7

The dialectic of experience in New Orleans, the reading of books like Thompson’s, and making new art in the city is also manifested in the work of Ron Bechet (Fig. 4).8 His family is related to the early jazz musician Sidney Bechet, and growing up, he read the saxophonist’s autobiography, Treat It Gentle (2002). In the book, Sidney Bechet describes the way the past and the pres-ent are interwoven in his music, tying his own musical journey in New Orleans to a lineage back to Africa through Congo Square (see Smith, this issue). Bechet calls out the memory of his grand-father, a slave, whom he says drummed at the square, and links it to “the voice the wind had in Africa, and the cries from Congo Square, and the fine shouting that came up from Free Day. The blues, and the spirituals, and the remembering and the waiting, and the suffering, and the looking at the sky watching the dark come down—that’s all inside the music” (Bechet 2002:218).

It wasn’t until Ron Bechet went to school at Yale and heard Thompson lecture that he began to understand the connections that Sidney Bechet was making. It was Thompson, an art histo-rian, who showed him the way:

3 willie Birch The Parking Lot of Circle Food Store (2012)in search of a sacred Place seriesAcrylic and charcoal on paper; 152 cm x 229 cmPHOTO: COurTesy OF THe ArTisT

Birch explains, “i was looking for African retentions in southern vernacular aesthetics and religion.”

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I went to Robert Ferris Thompson’s class at Yale. The back door flings open and the drummers are playing and here comes this little white dude dancing down the aisle, going towards the stage. We’re going, “What the hell is this?! We thought we were in class!” It just fasci-nated me about this. It got me to read his book, Flash of the Spirit, and come back to the class to listen to him.

I started to research a lot about African and Haitian art, and remem-bered my mom’s side of the family—when I looked back to those dress-ers with pictures, candles, and holy cards, it hit me—they were altars, African retentions. I also read more about Sidney Bechet and realized he was primarily an improvisationalist. I realized I could draw on his strength as a player—knowing your craft enough to allow your craft to take you over. I could let go instead of forcing it (Bechet 2008).

Thus, the study of African art has inspired Bechet’s own art, as well as his work at Xavier University with artists like John Scott (Fig. 5). Thompson’s work spurred a mindfulness of African lin-eages that circulated beyond the university, animating Afrocen-tric discourse and influencing the work of community-based artists like Mardi Gras Indians. These artists often work in dia-logue with each other. For example, at the 2002 unveiling of John Scott and Martin Payton’s Spirit House sculpture on St. Bernard Avenue at Gentilly Road and DeSaix Circle, Big Chief Daryl Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas performed in his Mardi Gras Indian regalia along with the Treme Brass Band and Bamboula 2000, an African-inspired percussion ensemble led by Luther Gray (Regis, this issue).9 Montana often carries a staff created by John Scott when he performs (Becker, this issue).

The New Orleans-based group Bamboula 2000, in particu-lar, has been instrumental in summoning the spirit of African Heritage in numerous public venues and ceremonies, including the Maafa (from a Kiswahili word meaning “great tragedy”) pro-cession held in memory of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which begins every July in Congo Square (Fig. 6). Band Leader Luther

Gray has advocated for the public recognition of Congo Square and plays with his band at nearly every Africa-related art open-ing at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

In addition to the search for and recognition of Africanisms in New Orleans by artists and musicians, scholarship typi-cally emphasizes that New Orleans is “America’s most African city,” with closer historical and cultural links to the Caribbean than the continental United States (Fagaly 1997:7, Hall 1992, Hirsch and Logdson 1992). With increasing frequency, one can hear public figures, from elected officials to festival organizers, emphasizing New Orleans’ African heritage, turning the city’s Africanness into a commodity to be conserved, preserved, and displayed. They characterize New Orleans’ jazz music, second-line parades, jazz funerals (Fig. 7), and black carnival traditions as part of a larger Black Atlantic performance tradition, making generalized connections between New Orleans, the Caribbean, and Africa (see Abrahams, et al. 2006). Folklorist Stephen Weh-meyer (2012), for instance, mapped out connections between the black New Orleans parading group called the Northside Skull and Bone Gang and the Haitian lwa Gede.

The Northside Skull and Bone Gang “comes out” each year at the Backstreet Cultural Museum—the first community-based museum dedicated to African American performance traditions in New Orleans (Fig. 8). This museum has been an inspiration to many others around the city, including the House of Dance & Feathers (Breunlin, this issue). In a city where public spaces, monuments and institutions overwhelmingly emphasize the city’s French, Spanish, and “American” heritage, spaces like the Back-street and groups like the Northside Skull and Bone Gang become important for performing, preserving and nurturing the connec-tions between New Orleans and the African Diaspora. In fact, it was in following the connections between these museums, and the broader African Diaspora that this special issue emerged.

4 ron Bechet Reconciliation (2006)Charcoal on paper; 182.9 cm x 182.9 cmCollection of dorian BennettPHOTO: COurTesy OF THe ArTisT

Bechet described the painting: “The black and whites … have to do with philosophy out of Africa, that has to do with the tree holding everything together at the root. if there were no tree, the whole world would fall apart. The concept of reconciliation as an idea of rethinking and forgiveness.”

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AFricA in new OrleAns

The papers in this special issue of African Arts demonstrate how black New Orleanians are engaged in a struggle around their own representation, which have been recognized since W.E.B. Du Bois’s work on double consciousness, outlining how people of African descent are forced to see themselves through the distorted lens of racism and develop two ways of under-standing themselves and each other (Du Bois 1997). Whether in the parading practices of Zulu, masking traditions of Mardi Gras Indians, or the creation of African-inspired spaces in public fes-tivals, this double consciousness is at work. Smith returns to the archives to revisit and recontextualize images into a history of American performance traditions, while Becker considers them from the vantage point of African art history. Both Smith and

Becker rely on historical photographs to tell their stories. In fact, archivists, along with African art curators, educators, artists, and cultural activists, have played a critical role in not only in mak-ing this collection possible, but in stimulating new avenues of research on African heritage.10

While this issue centers on visual expressions in performance, many other aspects of African heritage have been explored in previous scholarship on architecture (Edwards 2011), cuisine (Beriss 2007, 2012; Harris 1999; Palmié 2009), religion (Estes 1998, Wehmeyer 2000) and music (Feld 2012; Sakakeeny 2011 and forthcoming; Lipsitz 2011; Sublette 2008). There remains much work to be done and we hope this collection of essays offers some indication of the richness of New Orleans’ cultural heritage and the rewards of engaging with the full complexity of tracking the history of claims, erasures, contestations, transfor-mation, and circulation of African heritage in the city.

There is a lot of talk of neighborhoods in New Orleans and their role in nurturing performance traditions has long been rec-ognized. Recently, Tremé has come into national focus because of the eponymous HBO televisions series and the documentary Faubourg Tremé by Dawn Logson and Lolis Eric Elie. In popu-lar discourse and some scholarly work, there is a conflation of the neighborhood of Tremé with Congo Square as a fulcrum of cultural creativity and Herskovitsian retentions (or survivals) of African culture (see Herskovits 1990, Price and Price 2003). In this collection, African heritage appears in other neighborhoods as well. Zulu emerges uptown while Mardi Gras Indian groups mask (or perform) from the Lower Ninth Ward to the Seventh Ward and in the uptown neighborhoods of Carrollton and Central City, while festival history respatializes Congo Square into Mid-City Fair Grounds. Whereas the scholars in this collection generally depart from the diffusionist search for roots and African cultural survivals initiated in anthropology by Melville Herskovits (1990) and deployed in a dynamic rethinking of canonical art history by Robert Farris Thompson, we take up Thompson’s generous chal-lenge and invitation to take African heritage in the Americas seri-ously and enthusiastically (Cosentino 1992, Thompson 1999).

5 John T. scott and Martin Payton Spirit House (2002, restored 2011)Commissioned by the Percent for Art Program Administered by the Arts Council of New Orleans, city of New Orleans, Marc H. Morial, Mayor. Fabricated with ½ � sheet marine aluminum painted with enamel. 16 ft. wide X 21 ft. long X 19 ft. high. PHOTO: susANNA POwers

“The overall structure is a shotgun house supported by flying buttresses and raised on pylons to create an “urban tabernacle” which “celebrates the con-tributions of unnamed African Americans who were instrumental in the cultural and physical develop-ment of New Orleans and louisiana” (Arts Council).

6 Maafa procession, July 2012PHOTO: BruCe suNPie BArNes

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Felipe Smith’s essay considers the astonishing history of racial signification in New Orleans carnival, examining the uncom-fortable relationship that many New Orleanians have with Afri-can heritage through his analysis of the public performances of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Grounded in the close critical analysis of historical texts, ranging from newspapers to theater, Smith challenges the facile interpretation of Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club simply as a black satire of white carnival. Rather, he situates Zulu in dominant (mainstream) American representations of African Americans in theater, literature, and performance. His analysis of the historical record demonstrates ongoing ambivalence in the discourse about Africa. The essay reveals subtle historical shifts in the many layers of meanings of Zulu blackface masquerading, and its transformations as racial politics changed in the city and Zulu became aligned with the city’s political and economic elite.

Three essays consider the Mardi Gras Indians who, as early as the 1880s, paraded through New Orleans neighborhoods dressed in elaborate handmade outfits that featured beaded headpieces (called crowns) with long trails of feathers, as well as pants, vests, shoes, and aprons covered with two- and three-dimensional beadwork, ribbon, and dyed feathers. Contemporary Mardi Gras Indians perform a few times a year (Mardi Gras Day, St. Joseph’s Day, Super Sunday, and the Jazz & Heritage Festival) wearing costumes that may weigh as much 125 pounds while marching and dancing to the accompaniment of chanting and syncopated rhythms played on tambourines, drums, and cow bells by sup-porters called “second liners.”

Cynthia Becker’s essay provides a historical look at Mardi Gras Indian dress, asking what happens when Indians, who were largely ignored by New Orleans’ white establishment, move from the periphery and into the mainstream. In other words, Mardi Gras Indian performances gradually moved from the city’s back-streets, which she defines as New Orleans’ working class neigh-borhoods, and into white dominated establishments as public museums and festivals. Mardi Gras Indians use dress to con-

struct, perform, and manipulate racial constructs as they journey from the backstreets to Main Street as well as to define their con-nection to Africa as they negotiate issues of heritage and com-moditization. Often the subjects of mass-produced postcards, calendars, and coffee mugs, Indians also appear in New Orleans’ numerous art galleries, where their artistic labor is simultane-ously recognized and displaced by those of professional photog-raphers, whose names are more likely to appear as authors.

Mardi Gras Indians are sensitive to photographers making a profit off of their labor-intensive suits, which many have begun to characterize as fine art. Recognizing the way that scholarship intersects with the political economy, we made a decision that, whenever possible, we would only publish contemporary photo-graphs of Indians whose names we were able to identify, giving them credit for their artistic creativity.11

Becker highlights the stories of some of New Orleans’ most famous Indian maskers, Victor Harris and Darryl Montana, demonstrating how photographers, museum curators, and scholars have contributed to their own self-definition. Harris and Montana have been extremely active in defining their own particular artistic styles and unique relationships to their African heritage. They, like most Indians in contemporary New Orleans, use their suits to take control over their own self-representation. While Montana presents himself as a fine artist, Harris empha-sizes the relationship of black New Orleanians to Africa. Nelson Burke’s work, on the other hand, illustrates the diverse trajectory of an artist whose beadwork is created to dialogue with other Mardi Gras Indian beaders and engage in the peer review of street performance.

Rachel Breunlin’s essay looks at the way the role of docu-mentation of Mardi Gras Indians—through the development of community-based archives and museums, as well as photogra-phy—illuminates the larger struggles for representation in New Orleans. Breunlin is director of the Neighborhood Story Project (NSP), a collaborative ethnography organization run in partner-ship with the University of New Orleans. Collaborative ethnog-

7 impromptu jazz funeral for uncle lionel Batiste, the bass drummer for the Tremé Brass Band, in 2012, goes through Tremé, with musicians gregg stafford, Kerry Brown, and Benny Jones. PHOTO: BruCe suNPie BArNes

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raphies, such as those advocated by the NSP, rely on the expertise of both an ethnographer and the lived experiences and critical analysis of people involved in a subject to create bodies of work where people feel empowered to tell their own stories. As illus-trated in Breunlin’s essay, a deeper understanding of a perform-ing artistic culture can be garnered when people are not treated as ethnographic objects but authors who have an opportunity to reflect and edit the ethnography, just as they spend time refining versions of their art. Working with a community-based museum called the House of Dance & Feathers, Breunlin and the muse-um’s director, Ronald W. Lewis, engaged on a “photographic repatriation” project—returning images from the museum to the people represented in them (Brown and Peers 2006, Breun-lin and Lewis 2009). The essay explores what happened when people involved in Mardi Gras Indian tradition had a chance to respond to particular moments in time in their art practice cap-tured in photographs. In the process, the complexity of the social relationships embedded in the art practice came to life.

As a way of exploring some of the theoretical and ethical issues brought up in Becker and Breunlin’s essays on Mardi Gras Indians, we have included an experimental photo essay and conversation that has emerged out of a collaborative ethnogra-phy facilitated by the Neighborhood Story Project with a visual anthropologist, Jeffrey David Ehrenreich, and The Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors. For over ten years, Ehrenreich has been photographing the tribe—well known in New Orleans and beyond for their African-inspired masking and drumming.

Victor Harris, Collins “Coach” Lewis, Wesley Phillips, and Jack Robertson led a conversation with Ehrenreich about their on-going collaboration as makers of their own art and the sub-jects of an extensive photography collection that contains more than 10,000 images. Many of the images highlight the collective efforts involved in the creation of the suits. In this photo essay, this creative process is explored through weaving the images through the life histories the group and Ehrenreich share with each other. In this dialogue, the ethnographer and the members of The Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors come to the table as co-creators of knowledge about their art making. In the process, they discuss what spirituality means to them, as Ehren-reich’s ethnographic experience of shamanism comes into dia-logue with Lewis’s theory of spirit work.

Helen Regis’s essay examines how the personal and the col-lective intertwine in the public dialogues about Africa held at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Since its inception in 1970, the festival linked various African diasporic music forms, such as jazz, gospel, and soul, to each other and to American popular music. This was later extended to their African ances-tral roots across the Atlantic. Festival organizers produced a spe-cific vision of New Orleans’ African heritage that often reveals more about the present than the past. Through over ten years of fieldwork at the festival and a study of the festival’s archive, Regis considers the divergent ways that Africa is conceptualized and performed by different power brokers involved in the festi-val productions. In the 1970s, the Pan-African and Black Power movement in New Orleans used Africa as an organizing strat-egy for challenging white control, creating a space—a built land-scape—within the festival with its own aesthetic and political economy. At the same time, other parts of the festival produc-tion emphasized Africa as roots and as the source of specifically valued cultural traits. In her essay, Regis contrasts the legacy of black economic self-empowerment in the form of “Congo Square” with the patronage model of the cultural pavilion that sponsors African diasporic dialogues between New Orleanians

8 skeletons at the Backstreet Cultural Museum, Mardi gras 2012PHOTO: COurTesy OF BruCe suNPie BArNes

9 The Black Men of labor social Aid and Pleasure Club has hired Abdoullah diwey, a tailor based in dakar, senegal, to work on their suits since 1994. each year, the club chooses fabrics and artwork to honor their west African ancestry. President Fred Johnson (in orange) emphasizes that “the parades are part of a lineage of African retentions” (Breunlin and lewis 2009:168). in 2008, for their fifteenth anniver-sary, they commissioned him to make their gowns, umbrellas, and hats. They also wore ostrich and python leather shoes as a call-out to Africa as well. PHOTO: MAriA rOdriguez BArNes

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and Africans, showing how different agendas and visions for dia-logue came into play when musicians and dancers from Benin participated in the 2009 Festival.

In addition to the theoretical and empirical links, there are further social ties connecting the artists and organizations dis-cussed in the articles. Smith, for instance, identifies Mardi Gras Indian influences in the recent reworkings of Zulu carnival cos-tumes. And several of the Indians discussed in the articles by Becker, Breunlin, and the members of Mandingo Warriors have participated in the Jazz & Heritage Festival, where members of the Zulu organization also run a general store.

As demonstrated in these essays, New Orleanians’ relationship with Africa has changed from one based on racism and unequal power relations to one where Africa signals cultural performance, preservation, creativity, and resistance. For example, since 1994, the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club has hired Abdoullah Diwey, a tailor from Dakar, Senegal, to work on their suits. In 2008, for their fifteenth anniversary, they commissioned Diwey to make West African-style gowns and hats that they paired with New Orleans-style “second line” umbrellas, carrying a replica Kuba headdress in their procession (Fig. 9). Their public performances demonstrate how African American cultural activ-ists invoke a memory of Africa and the earliest enslaved Africans performing in Congo Square as a “weapon for political and social action in the present” (Regis, this issue).

As this issue goes to press, we are especially aware of the rel-atively small presence of women in the public performance of African heritage in the city. Men dominate Zulu and Mardi Gras Indian parading traditions, but women have made their pres-ence known in Social and Pleasure Clubs. While women play a leadership role in several African-centered dance troupes12 and in numerous arts and culture-related non-profits13 and educa-tional initiatives like the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame (co-founded by Dr. Roslyn J. Smith and Cherice Harrison-Nelson), they tend not to be the primary public voices of African heri-

10 One of the oldest women’s social and pleasure clubs in New Orleans, the Original New Orleans lady Buck Jumpers social and Pleasure Club is known for carrying one of the biggest crowds—reaching into the thousands—of the second line season. Their fans are made to match their suits, and are decorated with dyed ostrich plumes. linda Por-ter, president of the club, says, “A lot of clubs like small [fans] but the lady Buck Jumpers always have big fans. you can be two or three blocks away, and you can see us coming before we get to you” (Nine Times 2006:214). PHOTO: BruCe suNPie BArNes

11 women walking with Nine Times social and Pleasure Club’s second line parade in the Ninth ward of New Orleans in 2007. The festivity of the parade extends beyond the club itself—many people who come make a special point to dress up for the occa-sion. As Phillip Frazier, the bandleader of rebirth Brass Band said, “At one time, people use to come out there in their regular clothes. Now you’ve got the beautiful women who come out there full shine. ‘i got to look good…you never know who you gonna meet out there!’” (Nine Times 2006:155). PHOTO: rACHel BreuNliN

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tage nor do they garner as much attention from scholars.14 The gendered dynamics of public performance and Afro-Atlantic dialogue clearly deserve further consideration, and we end this introduction with a photograph of one of the most prominent women’s parading organizations in New Orleans, the Origi-nal New Orleans Lady Buck Jumpers Social and Pleasure Club (Fig. 10). Coming out of a history of men’s benevolent societies being supported by ladies auxiliaries, the Lady Buck Jumpers, organized in 1984, produce a spectacular Thanksgiving weekend parade coinciding with the Bayou Classic football game between Grambling and Southern Universities, and drawing crowds that rival the largest men’s organization, the Young Men Olympian Junior Benevolent Aid, founded in 1882.15

While groups like the Lady Buck Jumpers eschew explicit Afrocentric imagery, their powerfully interactive processions echo Alan Lomax’s remarks: “The words are English but the sen-timent is African” (Fig. 11). As female-led clubs dialogue with male-centered groups, so do the Zulus, the Mardi Gras Indi-ans, and visual artists, as they perform, transform, and recreate Africa—often through radically divergent strategies—adopting West African dress, working through African designs and phi-losophy, sounding out through call and response singing, recre-ating African masking styles, or harnessing processional power. African performances circulate through high art, street perfor-

mance, scholarship, nonprofits, and everyday experiences of contemporary New Orleanians and, like all vibrant, living cul-tural traditions are constantly being revised to meet the aesthet-ics of the now.

Cynthia Becker, a New Orleans native, is associate professor in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. She specializes in visual culture from northwestern Africa, specifically Morocco, Algeria, and Niger. Her current research concentrates on the impact of the trans-Saharan slave trade on visual and performing arts in the Maghreb as well as the history of Black Indian carnival traditions in New Orleans. cjbecker@bu.edu

Rachel Breunlin is ethnographer-in-residence in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans, and the co-director of the Neighborhood Story Project, a book-making organization in partnership with the university that creates collaborative ethnographies of the city. rsbreunl@uno.edu

Helen A. Regis is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Fulbe Voices: Marriage, Islam, and Medicine in Northern Cameroon and, with John Bartkowski, Charitable Choices: Religion, Race, and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era. Her work on second-line parades and the intersections of culture and commerce has appeared in American Ethnologist and Col-laborative Anthropologies. hregis1@lsu.edu

Notes

The authors are grateful to Henry Drewal, who served as discussant for the 2009 African Studies Association panel, and who suggested that we submit them for pub-lication in African Arts. His encouragement and lively intellect were the spark that brought us all together.

1 1979 Jazz & Heritage Festival Program, pages 53 and 56. Courtesy of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archive.

2 Like most major public institutions in the city, the New Orleans Museum of Art did not effectively desegregate until the 1960s. One artist we spoke with remembered it as being as late as 1969 or 1970.

3 While teaching at Dillard, a historically black university in New Orleans, the sculptor Elizabeth Catlett had to organize a fieldtrip to see a Picasso sculp-ture exhibit on a day the museum was closed because it was officially a segregated institution. The irony of going to see Picasso’s work, which was heavily influenced by African sculpture, in these oppressive circumstances became a powerful metaphor for Catlett’s spirit of resistance throughout her career. She has been quoted saying, “I have always wanted my art to service my people — to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life.” In New Orleans, she did this partly by creating sculptures of Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson that are on public display in a park next to Congo Square. Congo Square is the eighteenth and nineteenth century meeting place where enslaved Africans (along with Native Americans, Free People of Color, and a few visitors) congregated on Sunday after-noons for marketing, music, dance, and religious prac-tice– an axis mundi of African memory New Orleans

4 Fagaly credits this vision to then museum direc-tor James Byrnes (Fagaly 2011:11).

5 Sara Hollis, a professor of art and museum studies at Southern University at New Orleans was the first curator of the university’s African art collection. She also shaped many New Orleanians understandings

about African and African Diaspora art, making the links in her classes, public lectures, museum tours, and her columns for the Tribune. Helen Regis was a student in her LEH summer teacher’s institute on African Art in the summer of 1995.

6 Willie Birch, personal conversation with Rachel Breunlin, November 21, 2012.

7 Ibid.8 “The black and whites that I’ve been doing, have

to do with philosophy out of Africa, that has to do with the tree holding everything together at the root. If there were no tree, the whole world would fall apart. Reconcili-ation – the whole idea for me is a very African idea. We went from confession, when I was a kid, to reconciliation [in the Catholic faith]. The concept of reconciliation as an idea of rethinking and forgiveness, I think comes out of the philosophy of African thought. Particularly West African. So that’s part of working collectively, in terms of whenever something goes wrong, if you want to be part of a group again, you have to be reconciled back into the group. That’s an idea that we don’t often take seriously enough in the Western context.” (personal conversation with Helen A. Regis, November 23, 2012).

9 Spirit House was dedicated April 14, 2002 with great celebration. “John Scott and Martin Payton’s Spirit House scupture is a work that celebrates the contribu-tion of unnamed African Americans to the building and culture of New Orleans … The Design of the structure itself was created to represent the influences of both African and European styles. The scupture is part of the citys’ public art collection funded through the Percent for Art program” (www.artscouncilofnew orleans.org, accessed November 23, 2012)

10 Felipe Smith, Cynthia Becker, and Helen Regis worked closely with Daniel Hammer, Eric Seifert, and Jude Solomon at The Historic New Orleans Collec-tion. Rachel Lyons, Dolores Hooper, Bruce Rayburn, and Lynn Abott, archivists at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation archive and the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane were also critical to the

success of this project. We are very grateful for the gen-erous and collegial support of these archivists.

11 This was not possible for many archival photo-graphs, when the photographers did not note the names of the artists wearing the suits.

12 For example, N’Kafu director Mariama Curry, Kumbuka African Dance and Drum Collective direc-tor Ausetua Amor Amenkhum, and Tekrema Arts and Dance Center director Greer Mendy

13 Such as Junebug Productions artistic director Stephanie McKee.

14 Several recent initiatives promise to begin redressing this imbalance as the Louisiana State Museum hosts an exhibit on the baby dolls (a woman-centered carnival masking tradition), in partnership with Prof. Kim Vaz of Xavier University and Xavier students. “They Call Me Baby Doll” opened in January 2013. At Tulane, a Feminist Documentation and New Media film class taught by Betsy Weiss is partnering with Cherice Harrison-Nelson to create Queens Rule, a series of short films at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women. Simultaneously, Ann Marie Covi-ello has organized Ladies Make Parades, a group that since 2011 stages the annual YeMaYa parade, featuring a wide array of marching women, including several social aid and pleasure clubs and Mardi Gras Indian Queens. In 2012, they began their parade chanting a Yoruba song to Yemaya.

15 The Lady Buck Jumpers still parade with a men’s and a junior division, but they no longer play a sup-porting role to the men. The location of the women’s division at the back of the procession, where for over 20 years, they were powered by the Rebirth Brass Band, was a recognition that they consistently drew the big-gest crowd of followers, or second-liners.

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