Hearing Sappho in New Orleans
Hearing Sappho in New Orleans

Author: Ruth Salvaggio

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2012-06-13

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0807144428

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While sifting through trash in her flooded New Orleans home, Ruth Salvaggio discovered an old volume of Sappho's poetry stained with muck and mold. In her efforts to restore the book, Salvaggio realized that the process reflected how Sappho's own words were unearthed from the refuse of the ancient world. Undertaking such a task in New Orleans, she sets out to recover the city's rich poetic heritage while searching through its flooded debris. Hearing Sappho in New Orleans is at once a meditation on this poetic city, its many languages and cultures, and a history of its forgotten poetry. Using Sappho's fragments as a guide, Salvaggio roams the streets and neighborhoods of the city as she explores the migrations of lyric poetry from ancient Greece through the African slave trade to indigenous America and ultimately to New Orleans. The book also directs us to the lyric call of poetry, the voice always in search of a listener. Writing in a post-Katrina landscape, Salvaggio recovers and ponders the social consequences of the "long song" -- lyric chants, especially the voices of women lost in time -- as it resonates from New Orleans's "poetic sites" like Congo Square, where Africans and Indians gathered in the early eighteenth century, to the modern-day Maple Leaf Bar, where poets still convene on Sunday afternoons. She recovers, for example, an all-but-forgotten young Creole woman named Lélé and leads us all the way up to celebrated contemporary writers such as former Louisiana poet laureate Brenda Marie Osbey, Sybil Kein, Nicole Cooley, and Katherine Soniat. Hearing Sappho in New Orleans is a reminder of poetry's ability to restore and secure fragile and fragmented connections in a vulnerable and imperiled world.

The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans
The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans

Author: Susan Larson

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2013-09-05

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0807153095

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The literary tradition of New Orleans spans centuries and touches every genre; its living heritage winds through storied neighborhoods and is celebrated at numerous festivals across the city. For booklovers, a visit to the Big Easy isn't complete without whiling away the hours in an antiquarian bookstore in the French Quarter or stepping out on a literary walking tour. Perhaps only among the oak-lined avenues, Creole town houses, and famed hotels of New Orleans can the lust of A Streetcar Named Desire, the zaniness of A Confederacy of Dunces, the chill of Interview with the Vampire, and the heartbreak of Walker Percy's Moviegoer begin to resonate. Susan Larson's revised and updated edition of The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans not only explores the legacy of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, but also visits the haunts of celebrated writers of today, including Anne Rice and James Lee Burke. This definitive guide provides a key to the books, authors, festivals, stores, and famed addresses that make the Crescent City a literary destination.

Popular New Orleans
Popular New Orleans

Author: Florian Freitag

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 100019695X

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New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner’s Monthly/Century Magazine; the translation of this image into three-dimensional immersive spaces during the twentieth century in Disney’s theme parks and resorts in California, Florida, and Japan; and the radical transformation of this image following Hurricane Katrina in public performances such as Mardi Gras parades and operas. Covering visions of the Crescent City from George W. Cable’s Old Creole Days stories (1873-1876) to Disneyland’s "New Orleans Square" (1966) to Rosalyn Story’s opera Wading Home (2015), Popular New Orleans traces how popular images of New Orleans have changed from exceptional to exemplary.

Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina
Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina

Author: John Wharton Lowe

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2008-12-15

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780807133378

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In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson acquired 828,000 square miles of French territory in what became known as the Louisiana Purchase. Although today Louisiana makes up only a small portion of this immense territory, this exceptional state embraces a larger-than-life history and a cultural blend unlike any other in the nation. Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, a collection of fourteen essays compiled and edited by John Lowe, captures all of the flavor and richness of the state’s heritage, illuminating how Louisiana, despite its differences from the rest of the United States, is a microcosm of key national concerns—including regionalism, race, politics, immigration, global connections, folklore, musical traditions, ethnicity, and hybridity. Divided into five parts, the volume opens with an examination of Louisiana’s origins, with pieces on Native Americans, French and German explorers, and slavery. Two very different but complementary essays follow with investigations into the ongoing attempts to define Creoles and creolization. No collection on Louisiana would be complete without attention to its remarkable literary traditions, and several contributors offer tantalizing readings of some of the Pelican State’s most distinguished writers—a dazzling array of artists any state would be proud to claim. The volume also includes pieces on a couple of eccentric mythologies distinct to Louisiana and explorations of Louisiana’s unique musical heritage. Throughout, the international slate of contributors explores the idea of place, particularly the concept of Louisiana as the center of the Caribbean wheel, where Cajuns, Creoles, Cubans, Haitians, Jamaicans, and others are part of a New World configuration, connected by their linguistic identity, landscape and climate, religion, and French and Spanish heritage. A poignant conclusion considers the devastating impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and what the storms mean for Louisiana’s cultural future. A rich portrait of Louisiana culture, this volume stands as a reminder of why that culture must be preserved.

Sweet Spots
Sweet Spots

Author: Teresa A. Toulouse

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1496817036

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Contributions by Carrie Bernhard, Scott Bernhard, Marilyn R. Brown, Richard Campanella, John P. Clark, Joel Dinerstein, Pableaux Johnson, John P. Klingman, Angel Adams Parham, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Ruth Salvaggio, Christopher Schaberg, Teresa A. Toulouse, and Beth Willinger Much has been written about New Orleans's distinctive architecture and urban fabric, as well as the city's art, literature, and music. There is, however, little discussion connecting these features. Sweet Spots--a title drawn from jazz musicians' name for the space "in-between" performers and dancers where music best resonates--provides multiple connections between the city's spaces, its complex culture, and its future. Drawing on the late Tulane architect Malcolm Heard's ideas about "interstitial" spaces, this collection examines how a variety of literal and represented "in-between" spaces in New Orleans have addressed race, class, gender, community, and environment. As scholars of architecture, art, African American studies, English, history, jazz, philosophy, and sociology, the authors incorporate materials from architectural history and practice, literary texts, paintings, drawings, music, dance, and even statistical analyses. Interstitial space refers not only to functional elements inside and outside of many New Orleans houses--high ceilings, hidden staircases, galleries, and courtyards--but also to compelling spatial relations between the city's houses, streets, and neighborhoods. Rich with visual materials, Sweet Spots reveals the ways that diverse New Orleans spaces take on meanings and accrete stories that promote certain consequences both for those who live in them and for those who read such stories. The volume evokes, preserves, criticizes, and amends understanding of a powerful and often-missed feature of New Orleans's elusive reality.

Louisiana Creole Literature
Louisiana Creole Literature

Author: Catharine Savage Brosman

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2013-10-17

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 161703911X

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Louisiana Creole Literature is a broad-ranging critical reading of belles lettres—in both French and English—connected to and generally produced by the distinctive Louisiana Creole peoples, chiefly in the southeastern part of the state. The book covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the flourishing period during which the term Creole had broad and contested cultural reference in Louisiana. The study consists in part of literary history and biography. When available and appropriate, each discussion—arranged chronologically—provides pertinent personal information on authors, as well as publishing facts. Readers will find also summaries and evaluation of key texts, some virtually unknown, others of difficult access. Brosman illuminates the biographies and works of Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Adolphe Duhart, among others. In addition, she challenges views that appear to be skewed regarding canon formation. The book places emphasis on poetry and fiction, reaching from early nineteenth-century writing through the twentieth century to selected works by poets still writing in the early twenty-first century. A few plays are treated also, especially by Victor Séjour. Louisiana Creole Literature examines at length the writings of important Francophone figures, and certain Anglophone novelists likewise receive extended treatment. Since much of nineteenth-century Louisiana literature was transnational, the book considers Creole-based works which appeared in Paris as well as those published locally.

Brassroots Democracy
Brassroots Democracy

Author: Benjamin Barson

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0819501131

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Brassroots Democracy recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation. Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed "Brassroots Democracy," this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today.

Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways
Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways

Author: Keith Cartwright

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0820345997

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“We're seeing people that we didn't know exist,” the director of FEMA acknowledged in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways offers a corrective to some of America's institutionalized invisibilities by delving into the submerged networks of ritual performance, writing, intercultural history, and migration that have linked the coastal U.S. South with the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. This interdisciplinary study slips beneath the bar of rigid national and literary periods, embarking upon deeper—more rhythmic and embodied—signatures of time. It swings low through ecologies and symbolic orders of creolized space. And it reappraises pluralistic modes of knowledge, kinship, and authority that have sustained vital forms of agency (such as jazz) amid abysses of racialized trauma. Drawing from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Voudou and from Cuban and South Floridian Santería, as well as from Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness, this book reemplaces deep-southern texts within the counterclockwise ring-stepping of a long Afro-Atlantic modernity. Turning to an orphan girl's West African initiation tale to follow a remarkably traveled body of feminine rites and writing (in works by Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Cabrera, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and LeAnne Howe, among others), Cartwright argues that only in holistic form, emergent from gulfs of cross-cultural witness, can literary and humanistic authority find legitimacy. Without such grounding, he contends, our educational institutions blind and even poison students, bringing them to “swallow lye,” like the grandson of Phoenix Jackson in Eudora Welty's “A Worn Path.” Here, literary study may open pathways to alternative medicines—fetched by tenacious avatars like Phoenix (or an orphan Kumba or a shell-shaking Turtle)—to remedy the lies our partial histories have made us swallow.

Three Hundred Years of Decadence
Three Hundred Years of Decadence

Author: Robert Azzarello

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0807170879

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New Orleans’s reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged “vices,” encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello’s Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance. Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city’s future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable’s “Creole Slave Songs” and Mary Haas’s Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein’s German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt’s novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance—historically, politically, and aesthetically—that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city’s position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.

New Orleans
New Orleans

Author: T. R. Johnson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-03-02

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1316512061

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A comprehensive literary history of New Orleans, one of the most storied cities in the world.