New Orleans, a city in folklore, photography and literary imagination
To complement the current small exhibition of books on Mardi Gras in our Reading Room and the next one in May on jazz photography during the European Month of Photography, we pay tribute to this fascinating city with a difficult past, a melting pot of European, Creole and African influences. New Orleans hosted the Super Bowl this year and Trump was the first sitting president to attend.
Downtown Mardi Gras. New carnival practices in post-Katrina New Orleans (Leslie A. Wade, Robin Roberts, Frank de Caro)
Written by three university teachers, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach, mixing studies in ethnicity, sociology, feminist studies, urban geography and carnival history. It focuses on seven walking krewes that offer an alternative to the traditional uptown Mardi Gras with its enormous floats. These marching parades are more inclusive in race and gender, more egalitarian and emphasize civic belonging. The festivities of Mardi Gras organize “relationships and rivalries between its citizens. For locals Mardi Gras stands as a key constituent of identity and belonging.” The folkloric practices of carnival reinterpret and reinvent history, like the St. Joan of Arc parade or the Black Storyville baby dolls. The original group of Baby dolls were sex workers who paraded in 1912 to mark their presence in the public space as women and contest their position in the societal hierarchy. This book, neatly divided in chapters that can be read separately, is very interesting and helps to understand the cultural history of New Orleans and its resilience. The slogan for the New Orleans Mardi Gras, the Cajun expression “Laissez les bons temps rouler” – “Let the good times roll!” embodies the festive spirit.
New Orleans. A cultural and literary history (Louise McKinney)
This book is part of the collection “Cities of the imagination” which I can recommend for its in-depth cultural and historic coverage. New Orleans is called “The Big Easy” because of its laid-back style, as the birthplace of Jazz and the lax interpretation of the Prohibition rules in the 1920s. Its French, Spanish, Creole, Cajun influences are reflected in its architecture, language and cuisine.
McKinney often alludes to the spiritual side of the city, the jazz funerals, the gospel and voodoo queens. It always attracted writers and even Simone de Beauvoir is quoted, describing her time in the jazz clubs of the French Quarter (“Vieux Carré”) with her lover Nelson Algren. A walk on the wild side is the novel by Algren that has New Orleans as
a backdrop and that inspired the title of Lou Reed’s famous song. You will wish to explore the place yourself after reading this book with alluring black and white illustrations.
Les Suds profonds de l’Amérique. Alex Harris, Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (Textes Gilles Mora)
L’auteur, spécialiste de la photographie américaine, a lui-même vécu en Louisiane dans les années 1970. Le photographe Laughlin, résident de la Nouvelle-Orléans, connu pour ses photographies de plantations dans son célèbre livre Ghosts along the Mississippi, s’insurgea contre la destruction du patrimoine de sa ville. Il fut influencé par le mouvement surréaliste de Breton et on retrouve cet aspect dans sa photographie en noir et blanc, mêlant ruines et personnages inquiétants. Les photos en couleur d’Alex Harris documentent le passage de l’ouragan Katrina et sont présentées en triptyque. Il photographie le détail, ce qui rend son travail intimiste. La photographie de Meatyard s’apparente à celle de Laughlin par sa mise en scène et ses sujets photographiés dans des maisons en ruine. Un livre qui est visuellement très stimulant.
Creole world. Photographs of New Orleans and the Latin Caribbean sphere (Richard Sexton)
Sexton states that Creole history and identity make New Orleans different from the rest of the US, while linking it to Caribbean and Latin American cities with resembling colonial history. His photographs combine architectural and city views in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Cartagena, Buenos Aires and New Orleans to mark his point. The texts are written by a creole architecture specialist and a photography historian.
The French Quarter of New Orleans (Jim Fraiser; photogr. by West Freeman)
A fascinating book covering the history of the Vieux Carré in reviewing its buildings owned by generals, ladies of the night, jazz musicians, voodoo queens and even pirates. The photographs can be enjoyed along the well-researched text and, as the author says, “the Queen City of the South is a jealous mistress […] and you may never cease to behold her in [your] dreams.”
Eudora Welty. Photographs (introd. by Reynold Price)
Eudora Welty is famous in Europe foremost as a writer of the South, few know that she took photographs for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which sent some of the country’s best photographers and writers to chronicle New Deal America. “Poverty in Mississippi, white and black, really didn’t have too much to do with the Depression,” Ms. Welty states, “it was ongoing. […] I took picture of our poverty because that was reality, and I was recording it.” These pictures of Mississippi and New Orleans in the 1930s show daily life how it unfolded before her. They not only have artistic merit but represent an invaluable record of time and place.
New Orleans sketches (William Faulkner; introd. by Carvel Collins)
Eudora Welty said that “William Faulkner, a man of small physical stature but large literary worth, cast a long shadow in every direction. It spread not only over the writers of his native Mississippi and the South but also into the many corners of literary America and abroad.” Faulkner moved to New Orleans in 1925 and, like Tennessee Williams, his literary transformation took place there. He moved from poetry to fiction and the sketches are the pieces he wrote for the newspaper Times-Picayune and the literary journal The double Dealer. They have engaging titles like “The cop”, “The tourist”, “Jealousy” and are easy to read, constituting a nice introduction to Faulkner’s writing.
Voices and visions. Essays on New Orleans’s literary history (ed. by Nancy Dixon et al.)
These essays were written for a conference held in New Orleans, organized by the American literature Association Symposium on the theme “The city in American literature”. Novels like Martin R. Delany’s Blake, Kate Chopin’s Awakening, Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C, Walter Percy’s The moviegoer are examined among others. One particularly interesting essay compares the influence of New Orleans on Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston. Poetry is treated in the second part of the book. All essays can be read separately, so you can choose and pick subjects of interest, no need to read everything.
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