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REFLECTIONS ON JAZZ FEST 2006

My first visit to New Orleans after the storm and the levee breaks coincided with the 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. This massive celebration of music, food, and arts and crafts started in 1970 and, in recent memory, has brought hundreds of thousands of people to the city's fairgrounds over two spring weekends. At Jazz Fest and elsewhere in New Orleans that week, Lewis and I witnessed familiar, though locally inflected, patterns of consuming jazz (and other forms of African American–rooted music). We were in differently integrated and not-so-integrated audiences in different kinds of performance spaces, where we saw evidence of nonblack people's (and some black people's) deep respect and collective desire for certain aspects of blackness and their simultaneous anxieties about a threatening black (and particularly poor black) presence.

Acts of identification and disidentification via black music have long histories, which in the United States can be traced back to the antebellum period.¹ Yet such acts in the present must also be understood as part of local, national, and indeed, global cultural economies that are intimately connected to the restructuring of our society. In other words, when thinking about the future of New Orleans at Jazz Fest, it was difficult not to suspect that within the modes (institutional, financial, discursive, and affective) through which this music was cherished lay both hope for the future and the seeds of reproducing older formations of inequality and some of its recent manifestations.²

I ponder in this section how what we observed at and around Jazz Fest, amplified by what became apparent in retrospect after learning more about the history of the event, exemplifies just how complicated a notion it is that “the culture” can enable the reconstruction of New Orleans. I try to address some of the thorny issues that have emerged when jazz and other forms of music have been invoked or deployed to rebuild New Orleans, given the competing claims on the city and its musical cultures, the fault lines of race and class in play before and after the storm, the long-standing ways that local musical cultures have reflected social exclusions, and the complexities that emerge when the complicated cultural practices of the past and present collide in the context of disaster. But I try not to be too pessimistic. I also suggest here that we can locate social possibilities in the contradictions of Jazz Fest. This section thus provides a foundation for analyzing in more hopeful terms some of the social and artistic projects considered later in the book.

Wandering through the tents and arenas of Jazz Fest that spring, one could easily get swept up in the grand sense of multiracial communion promoted by the festival organizers. Also compelling was the idea, expressed by musicians and audience members alike, that a shared love for the music and the city could somehow bring them both back. The stated theme of the festival was “Homecoming.” There were simply sublime moments offered by local luminaries: Irma Thomas joining Paul Simon to sing “Bridge over Troubled Water” Marva Wright singing Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem “I Will Survive” John Boutté's revised rendition of Randy Newman's “Louisiana 1927,” a mid-1970s ode to local perseverance in the face of natural disaster and government neglect, especially poignant because of the tradition of Jazz Fest performers using the song to keep the spring rains at bay and new lyrics that spoke of the horrific flooding in the Lower Ninth; and the impromptu Sunday afternoon jam session in the Jazz Tent, which culminated with “What Does It Mean to Miss New Orleans,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and many words of appreciation for local musicians, ordinary folk, and tourists who returned to New Orleans for the first post-Katrina iteration of the event. Such homecoming rituals were played out across town. I witnessed them also at a brass band show at Donna's Bar and Grill and at an art opening and impromptu jam session at an acquaintance's home. These performances affirmed the profound attachments many have to the city that are mediated and consolidated through music.³

Culture was also deployed as a more specifically economic resource at Jazz Fest. It was clear that the good feelings of homecoming and multiracial communion were intertwined with the desire to generate capital, as when one performer thanked people for their “moral support” and for their “financial support.” Many local musicians were displaced by Katrina and had difficulty finding work in the storm's aftermath. For some of them, Jazz Fest represented a paycheck, either through the few gigs available to them on the festival grounds or for stints in clubs filled with tourists during Jazz Fest season. Perhaps more importantly, Jazz Fest represented the possibility of more paychecks if the crowds and enthusiasm accurately signified the local music industry's revival. More than one musician on stage, and cultural workers I spoke to offstage, talked about the fundamental importance of the music and tourist-friendly festivals to the city's collective spiritual resolve and to its financial health. After all, New Orleans, in this first year after Katrina, had lost most of its convention business as well as other big-name tourist events, such as the Sugar Bowl and the Essence Festival. The featured article in the Jazz Fest program commented that the event “marks a major public celebration of homecoming and rebirth for the city and its music. Musicians and singers like [Irma] Thomas are back where they belong in late Spring. But the festival also showcases the work of an entire community to rebuild and rejuvenate the Crescent City.”⁴

Another message in the aforementioned performer's thank-yous was the notion that the tourists themselves were empowered to shape the direction of the city's recovery. As one local writer offered to Jazz Fest visitors, “I hope you'll be able to get some idea of what makes this place so unique, so special, so different, and worthy of saving. Stand up for New Orleans, and do something tangible to help the city. Just coming here and spending time with us certainly helps—not only economically—and it lets us know that you care.”⁵

These invocations of culture as a tool for reconstructing New Orleans speak to cultural studies scholar George Yudice's account of the complex ways that “culture as resource” serves and constitutes residual and emergent forms of power and knowledge in the current neoliberal political-economic order. Geographer David Harvey describes neoliberalism as being supported by the idea that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”⁶ In Yudice's view, culture under neoliberalism takes on a new and pronounced role as a resource in the formation of ideology and identities, the production of social norms, and the consolidation and distribution of resources. Culture as resource also fills the political void caused by the neoliberal shrinking of government and a decline in normative civic participation.⁷ This perspective has been commonly voiced in New Orleans after the storm. As local artist and radio producer Jacqueline Bishop put it early in 2007, “In post-Katrina, most New Orleanians are convinced that it is the role of art and artists to rebuild our city, especially since we have no leadership.”⁸

We must be attuned, of course, to both the progressive and regressive ways that culture as resource fills the political void. Culture is central to the new economy of the global era and its attendant divisions of labor, as well as to the formation of “communities,” which are understood, depending on the context, as economic development projects, marketable commodities, political blocs, or social problems. The creative economy, as Yudice notes, enables the upward flow of capital to a multiculturalism-friendly professional managerial class, while people with lower status and income (particularly members of racially subordinate groups) are often relegated to being low-level service workers or “providers of ‘life giving’ ethnic and other cultural experiences.” Yet, in the void created by the retreat of the welfare state, the “'disorganized’ capitalism that spawns myriad networks for the sake of accumulation also makes possible the networking of all kinds of affinity associations working in solidarity and cooperation.” And cultural practices, as vehicles for consolidating group awareness, self-worth, and distinction, can also serve as a “foundation for claims to recognition and resources.”⁹ Voicing and acting upon such “claims to recognition” are, of course, a delicate dance. Such claims can be used to enhance the lives of those on the margins, but they can easily be manipulated to benefit instead the market, the state, or individuals with power. In various ways, they can be redeployed to extract value from, contain and surveil, and even terrorize the communities that produce them.

Jazz Fest fits into a pattern long established at other jazz festivals. As the list of artists mentioned earlier indicates, a wide range of sounds are often sold and celebrated under the rubric “jazz,” which in turn signifies an array of musical meanings and functions. When thinking about how Jazz Fest exemplifies the role of culture in the reconstruction of New Orleans, we should consider what literary studies scholar Lisa Lowe has termed the “multiplicity of the festival-object.” Examining a 1990 multicultural arts festival in Los Angeles, she identifies competing narratives at work in the exhibits, performances, spatial arrangements, and acts of consumption evident at that festival. The challenge, she argues, is not to “reconcile the narratives or to determine one as dominant.” Rather, it is to understand how competing narratives may produce “both a mode of pluralist containment and a vehicle for intervention in that containment,” as they simultaneously elide “material differentiations” among racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities and expose cracks in the slick, pluralistic facade.¹⁰

There is a relevant historical foundation to this, of course—one that emerged during the early twentieth century, wherein deployments of culture set forth discursive, ideological, and transactional arrangements that are manifested somewhat differently in the neoliberal era. Jazz has for about a century been an often exploitative business that is reflective of broader racial, class, gender, and geographic inequalities. Yet it has also been a visible signifier of the possibilities of multiracial democracy in the United States and of black achievement and distinction. Jazz histories, of course, often begin in New Orleans, which, as a port city in a succession of empires and an important crossroads in the southern United States, provided the multicultural milieu that musicians, most notably black and Creole musicians, drew upon as they created a variety of urban and urbane musical styles that they eventually synthesized into something called jazz near the beginning of the twentieth century. New Orleans has since been seen as the “cradle” of a music that was uniquely “American” because of its hybrid composition and also because of the heroism of musicians, such as Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet, who created great art despite, and in the face of, white supremacy. Such perspectives have been voiced both from liberal and radical perspectives, by musicians and others. For some, jazz history and culture affirm the nation's success in overcoming its racist legacy. For others, the jazz world betrays many of the racial contradictions of the nation, while illustrating the need for further struggle.¹¹

Jazz Fest's own history reproduces this story while making visible the late twentieth-century institutionalization of “culture as resource” at the local level. The establishment of Jazz Fest, the expansion of Mardi Gras, and the appearance of other high-profile, tourist-friendly urban spectacles that developed in New Orleans after 1970 betrayed a rapidly expanding tourism infrastructure, strategically developed in response to deindustrialization, a declining tax base, and cuts to public infrastructures. As such, these festivals have been “contested terrain,” representing at their core the interests of economic and political elites while also providing opportunities to challenge the status quo from below at the levels of meaning making and the distribution of resources.¹²

The first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where Ellington's suite premiered, was held from April 22 to 26, 1970. Musicians appeared at several venues in the city, but the main site, where a “Heritage Fair” consisting of crafts, food, and local music was held, was Beauregard Square, alongside Rampart Street in the Faubourg Tremé. This site, of course, was previously known as Congo Square, the legendary place of Sunday marketplaces during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where slaves and free blacks gathered to market, drum, and dance. In other words, Jazz Fest's original site represented, at least potentially, and among New Orleanians who did not identify with General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard and the Confederacy, the possibilities of Afro-diasporic music for enacting social change.

The story goes that the roughly 350 performers, staff, and volunteers outnumbered the audience members at the daytime performances in the square at the first Jazz Fest (although more attended evening concerts at other venues), but the event quickly grew. The festival moved to the New Orleans Fair Grounds Race Course in 1972, in order to accommodate an audience that reached 50,000 over the course of four days. In 1976 the schedule was expanded to include two weekends. At its apex, in 2001, before a post-9/11 decline in tourism, 664,000 people attended Jazz Fest, pumping $300 million into the local economy. Although the scope of what has become an internationally famous and massive music, arts and crafts, and culinary festival has changed dramatically since 1970, the original gatherings can be seen as a product of a number of forces that continue to define Jazz Fest's programming, the festival's economic role in and around New Orleans, its racial politics, and the celebratory narratives that surround the event.

The 1970 event came together after pianist and impresario George Wein, who was performing in the city in late 1969, was asked by local businessman Durel Black to take over the city's jazz festival, which had run for two seasons. Wein, of course, was one of the most prominent live music promoters in the world, having established the Newport Jazz and Newport Folk Festivals as well as other ventures. According to Wein, the emergence of such a jazz festival in New Orleans was only possible because of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. Wein had been approached by local boosters in 1962 about organizing a major jazz festival in the city, but they eventually came to the shared conclusion that a big-time jazz festival would not work in an unreconstructed, segregationist city whose hotels would exclude black guests, whose audiences might well be segregated, and whose cultural gatekeepers would frown upon mixed groups on the bandstand. A second attempt to mount a major festival with Wein at the helm was canceled after American Football League athletes, no doubt buoyed by the recent passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, organized a boycott of New Orleans in early 1965, after African American players arriving for the league's all-star game were refused service by taxi drivers, hotels, and other businesses. A smaller event did go forward but received little attention within or outside of the city. The New Orleans International Jazz Festival finally did get off the ground in 1968, although the invitation for Wein to produce it was rescinded. The job instead went to Tommy Walker's Entertainment Attractions. In Wein's view, the issue was that he was married to an African American woman. Others claimed that Wein had demanded too much compensation. Willis Conover produced the 1969 festival, before Wein was brought on board the following year, in his own account at least, because of Conover's disagreements with festival board members and because the racial climate loosened up to the point where his mixed marriage was less of an issue.¹³

According to various origin stories, Wein brought to the festival not only years of promotional experience but also the ethos of eclecticism and the commitment to blurring generic and aesthetic boundaries that had defined his Newport projects. In large part because of the influence of Allison Miner and Quint Davis, the young local producers Wein's company hired to help run the festival, The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns Jazz Fest, was from the beginning invested in highlighting the local and “giving back” to the community, even as it sought to create a festival with popular appeal. The foundation's articles of incorporation defined a mission of promoting New Orleans jazz, folk, blues, gospel, Cajun, and soul music; employing musicians from Louisiana to perform at the festival; promoting New Orleans as a tourist destination; bringing favorable attention to the city generally while helping the business community; and working with business and civic organizations for the “economic betterment” and “cultural advancement” of the city.¹⁴

The initial presentation of high-profile traditional and modern jazz artists, black and nonblack popular musicians, gospel and blues artists, brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, Cajun performers, and other musicians, alongside local culinary delights and crafts, served a somewhat contradictory but ultimately synergistic function. The festival was designed to appeal to jazz aficionados and a cosmopolitan consuming public interested in broadening experience and working against aesthetic as well as social boundaries. However, its organizers were invested in presenting and preserving “authentic” local cultures in ways that mirrored various countercultural folk and youth pop festivals of the moment. Such festivals positioned “roots” (and ideally black roots) musical expressions as anodynes against commercialization, mass production, and other restrictive and alienating aspects of modernity.¹⁵

Jazz Fest principals and many fans believed it was precisely this fusion of genres, orientations, and goals that made the ongoing event successful. Many point to New Orleans–born gospel star Mahalia Jackson's impromptu 1970 performance of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” on a Eureka Brass Band–led second line on the festival grounds, as embodying and initiating the event's dedication to spontaneity, collaboration, mixing of musical styles, celebration of place and history, and simultaneous commitments to “jazz and heritage.”¹⁶

Wein, Miner, and others associated with the festival have claimed that the festival's emergence and its genre-blending ethos represented an active, albeit challenging, attempt to ameliorate racial divides. According to Miner's recollection of the first Jazz Fest, “It was just the beginning of an opportunity for people to party together, to hear each other. . . . So celebrating their culture with everyone there, black and white, became an opportunity for people to say ‘Hey, this is spectacular! I've never heard anything like this because my parents didn't allow me to go out and hear it, but now I'm really gonna party, and I'm really gonna enjoy it, and I'm going to forget all of my prejudices from childhood and I'm gonna see things differently.’ “¹⁷

Closely related to the perceived commitment to racial amelioration permeating the memories of Jazz Fest principals was the foundation's commitment (Miner is especially praised in this regard) to assisting local and “traditional” (and especially black local and black traditional) musicians, both financially and in terms of generating attention and respect for their work. Many claim that Jazz Fest has been critical to raising national and, indeed, global awareness of New Orleans music and culture. Some emphasize that Jazz Fest, which has featured brass bands and Mardi Gras Indian groups since the very beginning, has played a particularly important role in promoting these community-based cultural expressions, in effect rescuing them from obscurity. And while such claims by Jazz Fest insiders may be to a degree self-serving, prominent figures from the second line and Indian communities have made similar comments over the years.¹⁸

Of course the scale of these projects has changed over the decades of Jazz Fest's extraordinary growth, which has expanded the national and global market for New Orleans music and contributed significantly to the “branding” of New Orleans as a musical city. This growth has been accompanied by increasing and often controversial corporate sponsorship—though a certain level of that sponsorship was there from the beginning—that positions Jazz Fest firmly within a larger story of the expanding culture industry across the globe over the past several decades.¹⁹ In-the-know music fans, the wealthier of whom have an increasing disposable income, consume a growing array of multicultural forms made available and knowable (even when deemed “traditional") by the speed of global markets and emergent communication technologies. Such experiences are made possible not only by the corporations that profit dramatically from the production of these cultural forms but also by increasingly powerful private businesses and foundations that sponsor culture to facilitate tax relief and name recognition.²⁰

In addition to its growth in scale, Jazz Fest's imbrication in the global culture industry is symbolized by the increasing international flavor of the event, a trend that took off in the early 1990s with the introduction of the International Pavilion, designed to highlight each year the cultural expressions of a particular nation. Some have pointed to this internationalization not only as a reflection of an emergent global consciousness and a local cultural terrain that is increasingly cosmopolitan, but also as a marker of an increasingly sophisticated and well-traveled (read wealthy) festival audience.²¹

As it has grown over the decades, Jazz Fest has established itself as a powerful financial engine for the local economy. It has become integral to the local tourism industry, which has been a critical financial sector in the postindustrial period, by bringing large number of music fans to the city over two spring weekends and by helping to define New Orleans more generally as a musical city, which encourages tourism at other times of the year. But with Jazz Fest's growth have come questions about and, at times, conflicts over who should and who has actually benefited from the festival's commitment to enhancing New Orleans's cultural life and giving back to the community.

During Jazz Fest's early years, a growing chorus of African American voices raised such questions. At a presentation on the roots of soul music at the first Jazz Fest, Reverend Fred Kirkpatrick shouted out “Where are the black people?"—probably referring to the relatively small percentage of African Americans in the audience at this event in what would become a black-majority city during the 1970s. But Kirkpatrick's comment would also have been accurate if he was referring to the relatively small percentage of black people among Jazz Fest's staff and producers, despite the presence of pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis as adviser.²² In 1978 a group of black activists calling itself the Afrikan American Jazz Festival Coalition showed up at a foundation board meeting and called for a boycott and disruption of Jazz Fest if more was not done to give back to and include members of the African American community. Although the now profitable festival had recently developed a small grant program for community projects, with some money put aside for African American–initiated projects in particular, members of the coalition, whose prominent voices included Kalamu ya Salaam, Sekou Fela, Michael Williams, and Mohammad Yungai, argued that there was inadequate black representation on the board and Jazz Fest staff and among arts and crafts vendors. The activists also charged that the economic benefits from the festival were primarily flowing to white society.²³

This activism caused no small amount of friction among Jazz Fest staff and board members, and some white members resigned. Wein and other principals responded quickly, even if some of their recollections of the conflict are a little defensive and self–serving—especially their claims that protesters could not quite grasp the organizers’ commitment to the New Orleans black community.²⁴ Jazz Fest subsequently underwent significant changes in response to the activists’ demands. Among the first was the creation in 1979 of the Koindu stage and crafts area for black artists, which, in Salaam's view, represented an emergent ethos of creating a stake in Jazz Fest for the black community and giving back to it financially. In 1988 Koindu was reinvented as “Congo Square” in an attempt to reflect some of cultural and spiritual “reality” created at that New Orleans site so many years ago.²⁵ The year 1979 also witnessed the naming of the first African American as foundation board president and invitations to other blacks to join the board. Eventually, the board became majority African American, with some presidents and executive directors also of African descent. Black representation on the Jazz Fest staff also grew.²⁶

Many of these black members of Jazz Fest's board and staff expressed a commitment, as former president Dan Williams put it, to ensure “that the wishes and desires of the community are taken into consideration” and to make Jazz Fest a “365-day organization.” Jazz Fest subsequently established a number of programs to increase African American involvement and “give back” to the community. A “community grants” program for artists and cultural workers was initiated in 1979. Other community-focused programs instituted over the next few decades include the distribution of low-cost Jazz Fest tickets to nonprofit and community groups, the creation of the Heritage School of Jazz Education, a community lecture series, off-festival music programming and neighborhood festivals, a newsletter, microlending programs for local small businesses, support for a local Musicians’ Clinic that provides health care for low-income musicians, a home ownership program for musicians called “Raisin’ the Roof,” the purchase of the license and subsequent administration of radio station WWOZ, and various attempts via Jazz Fest programming to highlight African American contributions to New Orleans culture.²⁷

Despite such efforts, however, the questions of whether Jazz Fest serves New Orleans's black community in a significant way and whether it might even help to reproduce racial inequality in the city have remained. Looking back on his tenure as executive director of the foundation from 1983 to 1987, Kalamu ya Salaam invokes the image of a slave who, after gaining access to the plantation house, “tries to slip as much food as he can back to the people in the field.” Eventually he became frustrated in this position “because ultimately, the better I did my job, the more I built up the status quo.”²⁸

With this history in mind, the representations of democracy in action and African American distinction we witnessed at the 2006 Jazz Fest indeed present competing narratives, especially if one also considers the widely held perception that this particular iteration of the festival was a critical juncture in determining whether the future New Orleans cultural scene would be adequately responsible to local communities. One journalist said the 2006 festival “represent[ed] the two most crucial weekends in New Orleans’ cultural history.” Not only was there the question of whether the city's music scene would come back; also critical was the issue of whether it would be adequately rebuilt on the foundation of the “sounds of the streets.”²⁹

At the African American–oriented Congo Square we saw a shrine where one could honor both “the Ancestors of the Diaspora” and “those affected by our recent national tragedies.”³⁰ And one could certainly read the brass bands and Mardi Gras Indian performances on the Jazz Heritage Stage, the second line processions winding their way through the fairgrounds, and the educational exhibits under the race course grandstand on Mardi Gras Indians and second lining as an explicit validation of unique, local musical cultures and also of the black working-class communities that have sustained them.

Second lining is a tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century. It involves public processions generally led by members of sponsoring organizations, brass bands, and dancers. These individuals constitute the “first” or “main” line of the parade. The term second line refers to members of the public who fall in behind them and join the parade. In New Orleans, one may see ersatz second lines at tourist-friendly or society events, but there is a much more communally focused tradition of second lining in black neighborhoods that is sponsored by social aid and pleasure clubs, some of which have also been around since the late nineteenth century. There are approximately forty active clubs at present, although many club members are still displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the policies that defined its aftermath. Each typically sponsors a yearly Sunday parade—some of which drew as many as five thousand people before the storm—but the clubs also hold dances and other functions and may parade for other reasons, such as jazz funerals.

These continually evolving, community-based second line events have long played important social roles in black New Orleans. Although diverse interests and orientations inform these participatory rituals, collectively they may be understood as facilitating a sense of connection to place, affirming members’ neighborhoods and their histories, constituting alternative forms of community and civil society, reclaiming urban space for the community in the face of material and symbolic marginalization as well as police and drug trade violence, and engaging in implicit and occasionally explicit political protest against police brutality, gentrification, and other issues facing black working-class and poor people.³¹

As noted, second line clubs and Mardi Gras Indian performers have been featured onstage since the first Jazz Fest and continue to be central to its identity. They provide a kind of anchoring authenticity, as Helen Regis and Shanna Walton point out, that legitimizes the festival as remaining true to its roots and committed to its community, even with all the corporate sponsorship and big-name pop acts. Second line parades that snake across the Jazz Fest grounds create a sense of spontaneous community, again reproducing the aura of the early years and enabling fans to become performers in a sense. Mardi Gras Indian parades not only “infuse the atmosphere with the sacred mystery of their masquerade,” but they also evoke a legacy of “maroonage,” interracial (i.e., black/indigenous) collaboration, and diasporic cultural memory and pride.³²

And given that at least some members of these social aid and pleasure clubs and Indian groups see it as their mission to share and generate respect for their musical traditions and their communities by making these rituals more public and by reaching out across racial and class lines, we may see in these Jazz Fest performances and exhibitions after the storm a kind of grassroots attempt, with official support, to cash in these cultural resources as a means of generating wider respect for and knowledge about New Orleans's working-class black communities that could go hand in hand with an equitable reconstruction of the city.³³

Equitable reconstruction, of course, has not been the dominant trend since the storm. The suddenly apparent social conditions of poor (primarily black) people in New Orleans brought to light, for many, not only the white supremacist legacies of slavery and Jim Crow but also the continuing effects of a generation of deindustrialization, urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and neoliberal social and economic policies (cuts in education, health care, and welfare), often enacted against and justified through the lives of the black urban poor. So did the subsequent horrors many people experienced because of the government's slow and limited response to the crisis; officials’ failure to improvise around bureaucratic roadblocks; the “passive indifference” and outright hostility toward poor black New Orleanians expressed by local, state, and federal officials; and the privileging of corporate profits rather than workers’ or residents’ rights through no-bid contracts, tax relief, and the relaxation of labor and environmental laws during the initial phases of rebuilding.³⁴

Yet the fact that others read the government's failures as proof that the state should play a smaller role in society (outside of the military and criminal justice system, that is) illustrated the effectiveness of the power elite's cultural work around neoliberalism. Also serving the project of neoliberalism was the media hysteria surrounding black people's behavior during and after the event, which began with reports that they were irresponsibly slow to evacuate, continued through racially differentiated descriptions of removing food from shuttered grocery stores, and culminated with hysteria over a perceived return to savagery in the Superdome. Such media coverage played a functional role, justifying the state's neglect after the fact and reproducing the idea that black people represent a continuing threat to civil society.

In the wake of such devastation and representation, discussions about how New Orleans will be rebuilt and just who will populate the city in the future have been paramount. Local residents and activists across the country have argued eloquently for a right of return for all New Orleanians, regardless of race, class, or status as homeowners, as well as for their visions for the city to be realized when reconstructing the city. Yet, from the very beginning, the reconstruction of New Orleans, whether by design, indifference, or incompetence, has seemed geared toward excluding at least some of its lower-income population, especially poor black residents receiving some form of public assistance. Many New Orleanians are still displaced seven years after the storm. According to the 2010 census, the city's population is only 70 percent of its 2000 level. The number of displaced people, who are disproportionately black and poor, is no doubt greater than that represented by a 30 percent population loss, as there has also been an in-migration of Latino/a workers, young white professionals, and others. Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB) defined the terms of reconstruction for the first several months after Katrina. While the commission included Wynton Marsalis—the trumpeter/composer and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who was born and raised in New Orleans—and allies who publicly argued that all neighborhoods should be restored, others on the commission, primarily local business elites, voiced an exclusionist agenda. The BNOB report, released several months after the storm, suggested that it might not be economically or environmentally feasible to bring back certain neighborhoods, like the Lower Ninth Ward, giving validation instead to efforts to downsize the city, focusing redevelopment on its wealthier, higher grounded, and generally whiter areas, and making the city more amenable to corporate investment.