New Orleans as Geographic Oddity and Cultural Rarity

The other day I was watching a PBS special on New Orleans (that counts as research and not TV watching, right?) and I realized how little I knew of the history of NO and yet how much I thought I knew (which resonates with what Meg said in her post, about how she and her sister would listen to the album that is linked to her dad's time there and how her understanding of NO is infused with and inseparable from her own personal stories and memories, which in turn links to what Louise brought up in her initial email about the importance of personal narratives, histories, and languages to tap into the feeling and sound of the place, which speaks to what Bryan discussed about the importance of Jazz as a musical form that is so unique to NO and how the arts have been supported and how that support is in danger, which brings up the financial survey proposed by Kathleen (and the great websites she gave us links to) and how theatre, as an art form that often struggles during times of economic hardship, is or is not being supported in NO now, which gets all wrapped up by Shelley's insights into the mosaic as a working model for our project through which we gather all of these fragments to create something powerfully new that doesn't erase the old).

Phew! I hope you are impressed with my parenthetical summarizing skills.

Two things struck me when I watched this special (remember that I started with the TV special?) that I wanted to throw into the mix:

1. Geographically, New Orleans both should not exist and must exist. It shouldn't exist because there isn't much worse terrain in the world on which to build a city. The heat, the swamp, the whole below sea level thing - it really isn't meant to support the infrastructure of an urban metropolis. And yet it must exist, also because of geography, especially when we remember that, for much of US history, waterways were the way to transport both people and goods. And with New Orleans at the delta of the Mississippi and on the Gulf, it simply had to be a point of entry to the nation. And so there had to be a city there, one that oversaw an incredible market economy. I like the necessary contradiction in this, the seeming impossibility of something (NO shouldn't exist) and its opposite (NO must exist) being true at the exact same time.

2. New Orleans had a unique history and considered itself to be a world city set apart from America. This is interesting to me in light of the whole Katrina thing because both Republicans and Democrats (and just about everyone else who spoke about New Orleans in any way - insert your own binary here) sought to define New Orleans as "America's City" after the disaster so as to shape the idea of NO to suit their objectives. And yet the history of the place, as so many of our group already mentioned in their emails, was one of extreme difference. There was a substantial (and substantially wealthy) community of Free People of Color, and as a result race relations and racism did not take the same form as it did in other Southern locales (in fact, the special pulled some comments from some 19C NO folks blaming the rise in racial tension on the influx of the Americans, meaning the white Protestants who moved into this Francophone Catholic town). The city was originally developed to model European/French cities (duh, the French Quarter) and aspired to be extremely progressive and cosmopolitan. That New Orleans held itself apart from the rest of the nation and now has come to represent in contradictory ways what it is to be an American intrigues me.

I'd like to play with these sorts of contradictions in our research and in our final project. This can be done in many ways - through movement, through juxtaposed images, through the presentation of more thorough research on these themes, through music and language. I like how these opposites can exist in tension and in harmony with each other.