Literary New Orleans

The French called it the ‘wet grave’ and soon gave up on making it a profitable and stable commercial center, but a proud community arose in New Orleans anyway – the Creoles. They preserved elements of their European heritage but blended them with what they learned from Africans about how to thrive in this environment. No longer strictly European (or African), this culture also understood itself as quite distinct from that of America, as it improvised its way through floods, storms, fevers, and the tragedies always inherent in slave societies to become one of the continent’s major cities. In this unit, we’ll ultimately seek to locate the origins of New Orleans in a complex confluence between an array of other places: France, Spain, Haiti, Cuba, the Congo, the Senegambia, Kentucky, and Virginia.

After the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans became the capital of what was then the southwest, and the natural hub for the commerce upon which all the other large scale commerce of region would be built: the slave trade. In the encounter between slave-trader, slave-buyer, and slave, argues Walter Johnson, some fundamental dynamics of American subjectivity were born, and the trauma inherent in the chattel principle, in turn, would require an outpouring of art of various forms over the many decades that followed in order to heal.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, as the United States began to reconstitute itself in anew, a number of eloquent voices began to reckon with that part of the U. S. that seemed least like the others: New Orleans. As a place deeply marked by slavery and yet not exactly part of the American South, it was alternately the object of sharp critique and praised as an alternative cultural reality, a sort of paradise. In this era, the themes most often associated with New Orleans, the ideas that persist at the heart of today’s tourist industry — pirates, voodoo, creole cuisine, cemeteries, ghosts, sexual license, saloons — were first unleashed in the popular press, thanks, most pointedly, to the extraordinary prose of Lafcadio Hearn.

A number of the canonical literary classics of New Orleans as well as the newer works that are held in highest esteem share a preoccupation with the general landscape of the city, and, in turn, with questions about the precise dynamics between sexuality and spirituality. As such, they provide endless opportunities to reflect on what an ethics of body and soul might mean in this highly eroticized landscape, where the potential, moreover, for both traumatic and transcendental experience would seem to wait around each corner. We’ll consider, moreover, the tensions between the human and the monstrous as we trace the dynamics of gender and sexuality, and race and class, through the different parts of the city, from the Garden District to Gentilly to the French Quarter to Treme to the Ninth Ward, and, of course, through Storyville. In particular, we’ll test the thesis that Storyville was a sort of unwitting memorial to the slave-markets of the preceding century, and that jazz, in turn, was – with voodoo and Mardi Gras Indian masking – a primary strategy of recovering from the agonizing divisions of the chattel principle.

This third phase of the course explores the most central characters and plots of the region’s extraordinarily complex, colorful, and checkered political culture: from Huey Long’s radically populist, Depression-era uprising against the entrenched, old-guard aristocracy that had controlled the state since the eighteenth century — an uprising that effectively modernized the state through bold infrastructural projects (roads, hospitals, schools) – to the undoing of the Long machine by a political movement in the late 1950s that resisted further change and, specifically, that sought to preserve racial segregation and to purge many African Americans from the welfare system and even the electorate. Soon after the Long machine collapsed, the President of the United States was murdered, and the person accused of pulling the trigger was a young New Orleanian named Lee Harvey Oswald, a figure with many shadowy links to a variety of figures in the radical, political underground of the French Quarter.

In the final unit of the course, we’ll revisit some scholarship on the situation of African Americans in the decades just before and immediately following the Civil War; we’ll then read about the music of Storyville and the rise of careers in Jazz as that music became a part of mass-culture throughout the U. S in the first half of the twentieth century; we’ll then consider the way the rhythm’n’blues community here changed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and finally we’ll read about the contemporary street music of New Orleans. Rather than a simple, chronological study however, we’ll consider the narratives and ideas and personalities laced through these texts, from the philosophic musings of Sidney Bechet to the voodoo spirituality of Dr. John, from the situation of music in the murderous streets of 100 years ago to its analogous circumstances today. We’ll pay particular attention to questions of money and mortality, and the way music would seem to bring a reverse-logic to the lives of New Orleanians and to serve as a primary vehicle by which “New Orleans,” as a cultural force, travels far beyond the particular confines of Southeast Louisiana. In a sense, then, we’ll conclude the course by studying a series of departures from the city, from Buddy Bolden’s to Souljah Slim’s.