Jazz Funerals and the Transcendental Politics of Struggle
by Malik JM Walker
Malik JM Walker, a New Orleans native, is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Fordham University. His dissertation is focused on rethinking the Christian doctrine of salvation within the field of urban theology. Prior to his studies at Fordham, Malik taught at Xavier University of Louisiana, his undergraduate alma mater.
As a ritual performance of grief, the jazz funeral occupies the imagination of all who know of or have participated in them. For some, the performance is truly a performance of lament, the mourning of a loved one and an expression of grief through the physical act of processing along with the departed and dancing with others, perhaps most notably the departed. For others, it is an expression of a rich culture and a unique nuance of American life generated from the “creolizing” and development of American music and the contributions of native and African Americans in southern Louisiana. The jazz funeral in itself is a reflection of the musical and “creolized” culture of Louisiana.1 Likewise, it operates as a political and cathartic response to a situation of systemic disenfranchisement. While the jazz funeral is a performance of grief, it is also a protest. The mastery of the form of the state funeral is an expression of rootedness in the civic traditions of society, and its imitation in the jazz funeral is simultaneously an undermining of the notions of power and prestige associated with the state funeral.2 For people in New Orleans, the infusion of jazz and gospel music in the funeral is a self-expression of suffering and discontent. Yet, even though the jazz funeral’s origin comes from the imitation of the form of the state funeral and is a creative use of self-expression, it is also a part of the cultural and tourist history of the city. Despite its current status as a cultural institution of the city, the jazz funeral in itself provides a lesson in how to reckon with life and death, struggle and triumph, thus providing the outline for a transcendental politics of struggle.
This essay will highlight aspects of the politics at play and the catharsis it brings for those who mourn, and the generosity of the call to dance and celebrate to those who are in earshot. From this perspective, there are a few aspects that we must address for a fuller understanding of the lessons and significance they hold: the site, the situation, and the sentiment of the jazz funeral. In addressing these three aspects, we will be able to look more deeply into the jazz funeral and see that things are not exactly what they seem, especially when gazing at the horizons of life and death.
The Site
As a unique and musical expression of grief in New Orleans, much of the funeral experience seems, to the uniniated, to be an extemporaneous, or at least improvised, performance. This is so because the jazz funeral itself is a synthesis of elements present in the culture and civic life of the people in New Orleans. Its roots go back to the syncretism of slave religion, transplanted African religion, and post-reconstruction segregation.3 These roots are, according to Richard Turner, “the culmination of the second line culture,” and are in relationship to the celebratory expressions seen in Mardi Gras, as well as in the popular Catholicism of French extraction in New Orleans.4
Yet, there are actually a few formulaic elements to a jazz funeral that typically occur. First, whether one is Catholic or Protestant, a jazz funeral is actually the procession that follows the funeral service or mass.5 The funeral service itself happens with all of the dramatics of any funeral in New Orleans. Needless to say, when it is time to carry the coffin out of the church, the pallbearers and attendants bring the coffin out of the church with care, over their shoulders, usually outside of the church (or wherever the funeral service is held) where a brass band ensemble is prepared to play the traditional music, usually hymns. Walking at the pace of a death march, the band, the pallbearers, and the bereaved march to a typical hymn—usually “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” or “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” This is what is called the “dirge section” of the jazz funeral. What one will see in this part of the funeral is the coffin raised three times in the air above the pallbearers’ heads, usually to the beat of the dirge. At this time, it is not uncommon to see mourners reach nearly convulsive states of grief. One will hear wailing and crying. In fact, the dirge itself provokes deep feelings, touching emotions of sadness, loss, and longing through music. All of the funeral attendees, and anyone who wishes to join in the march, will follow the procession.
The dirge goes on until the coffin reaches either the hearse or the final resting place, depending on the family’s preference as well as the distance to the burial location. At that point, the brass band begins a faster paced melody, usually “When the Saints Go Marching In.” This is where the “revelry” begins. From this point on, there is dancing—sometimes to a level of dervish-like ecstasy. We call this “the second line.” Traditionally, the second line is the revelry that follows the parade, or the second wave of the parade, so to speak. Dancing, revelry, and celebration break out among the bereaved, the guests, and anyone around who can hear the music (whether related to the deceased or not) join in. Everyone “marches in” and dances.
The Situation
The context out of which the jazz funeral comes is a little more complex. The performance is quite different because, while it has distinct roots in African and slave religion, it takes on a broader cultural and social import for New Orleans given the city’s history and culture. In one aspect, the jazz funeral communicates a history of the descendants of African slaves and ways of retaining traditions that symbolically express a desire for freedom. The use of traditional and normative forms of expression that were used as “civilizing” measures for slaves and native Americans were coopted such that they could communicate messages of hope and resistance. In terms of the jazz funeral, jazz music and the use of “off timing” functioned as a way to modify classical forms of so-called “white” music in such a way that communicated the disfiguring and reconstitution of Black selfhood.6 Richard Turner says as much in his discussion of the role of jazz funerals among disenfranchised Blacks in New Orleans and the symbolizing activity surrounding death: “Thus the spiritual and political philosophies that underlie these public musical ceremonies surrounding death in New Orleans draw on the survival and resistance techniques of ‘the vanquished’ that Patrick Bellgrade-Smith calls ‘fragments of bone.’”7 The jazz funeral, according to Turner, connects to traditions and rituals of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean and to ancestral traditions in Africa.
At the same time, however, the jazz funeral belongs to the cultural lures of the city. Yet, even as a cultural lure, it still retains its resistant current, particularly in light of the lived circumstances of many in the city. At present, while the city moves toward its tenth anniversary since hurricane Katrina, citizens of New Orleans still suffer from deep divisions along racial and economic lines. While the new façade of the city is evidence of new and growing investment in New Orleans as a travel destination, there still exists deep distrust for authoritative structures, specifically the police. Likewise, a lack of confidence in the political and civic structure continues. Hurricane Katrina revealed the gravity of the economic and social situation by unveiling the weakened social and physical infrastructure in a city whose port is a significant doorway for international trade in the United States. Further, the continuing lack of confidence in the civic infrastructure is a side effect of ongoing grinding poverty, the underground economy, and the corruption of police services.8
In this way, while there is a connection to resistant ways of meaning making for Black folk in New Orleans, the jazz funeral is also a major tourist and economic attraction in the city. One of the major conflicts involves whether or not the performance of grief and tourist attraction can coexist in the same ritual. Helen Regis raises this concern regarding the question of race and memory in New Orleans with regard to the spaces of performative meaning making. She states,
Urban areas are the locus of symbolic economies that are defined by their performance spaces and transformed into tourist destinations. Promoting spectacle performance, and historic preservation are increasingly seen as reasonable paths to economic development for urban areas. Inevitably, these concerns produce an environment ripe for highly politicized struggles over space and the ownership of the cultural capital of the city.9
The battle for space and ownership is particularly acute for New Orleans. This is due to the fact that its main economy for many years has been based in tourism. As such, the question involves whether or not ritual performances of grief carry the same currency in such a situation. In this context, the complex negotiation between the jazz funeral’s thick cultural meaning and tourist allure offers challenging questions regarding specific impacts of the process of signification and ritual performance. Can a ritual performance of grief be a “spectator sport?”
The tourist allure of the jazz funeral, however, emphasizes the public performance of a music culture, even in death. For the sake of cultural allure, the jazz funeral is often linked with Voodoo rituals, stories of ghosts, and the “dark” spiritual culture of New Orleans. The exotic experience of the jazz funeral is often clustered in the marketing of New Orleans as a party city with loose morals and an exotic history.10 This facet of the jazz funeral overlooks the social inequities, violence, and poverty of the city. Life after Hurricane Katrina is especially important when considering the marketing scheme for the city and its cultural attractions. Despite the destruction of the city, the push to rebuild, and the campaign to brand the unique culture of New Orleans complicates the spectacle and significance of the jazz funeral.
The Sentiment
As a ritual performance, the jazz funeral expresses many different layers of the social, political, and cultural experience of New Orleanians. As a ritualizing of death and mourning, the jazz funeral communicates a people’s worldview of death and memory. On one hand, the memorializing of the departed channels the community’s grief through song, dance, and revelry, transforming the pain of grief into a celebratory occasion of one’s passing from this life to the next. In this way, death is not something to be feared or loathed, but celebrated. On the other hand, this same transformation of grief to joy is also a means of coping with the immediate situation of anguish and suffering endured in the community. The procession is a lesson in death and a lesson in struggle.
The jazz funeral as a public performance “[emphasizes] communal admiration and respect for men and women who have successfully negotiated lives of integrity in a highly inequitable society . . . .”11 As such, the memorial of these people are public recognitions of their role in the community. Helen Regis indicates that those memorialized are honored in an oppressed context. They are memorialized as role models for a community that “[has] been described as lacking in role models.”12 The community gathering around local “saints” expresses profound respect and grief for the departed. At another level, however, the funeral is an occasion to make public the grief of historic oppression and inequity in New Orleans. In this way, the jazz funeral is a key expression of the culture of the poor, Black majority in New Orleans.
The Funeral and the Politics of Survival
So we have a complicated situation here: on one hand, the history of slavery and conquest come full circle in the mourning of one who passes. This “mock state funeral” for one who would not be honored by the state is caught up in the cultural and tourist nexus of a recovering city.13 On the other hand, the jazz funeral becomes a site that fixes the white gaze. So what is real? What can we learn from this lesson in death and tourism?
We may want to take a different position in our view of the situation. The ritual performance of grief represents a resistant and, if anything, parallel criteria for gauging health, life, and death. In the ritual’s resistance to oppression, there emerges a “politics of survival” that is fully attuned with the circumstances of the surrounding environment that is organic in nature. Death is not a negative horizon, but a constant reality that folks face on a daily basis—whether it is through street violence, feuds, political and social violence, or poverty. Death is not the enemy: life is. The signifiers of life—normative “measuring sticks” that say what life should be— are the problem. By signifiers, I am referring to values and norms of health, wealth, and insulation from the immediate need to survive and struggle, typically represented by those who are not directly or closely affected by death dealing social and political factors.
Malik JM Walker, a New Orleans native, is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Fordham University. His dissertation is focused on rethinking the Christian doctrine of salvation within the field of urban theology. Prior to his studies at Fordham, Malik taught at Xavier University of Louisiana, his undergraduate alma mater.
As a ritual performance of grief, the jazz funeral occupies the imagination of all who know of or have participated in them. For some, the performance is truly a performance of lament, the mourning of a loved one and an expression of grief through the physical act of processing along with the departed and dancing with others, perhaps most notably the departed. For others, it is an expression of a rich culture and a unique nuance of American life generated from the “creolizing” and development of American music and the contributions of native and African Americans in southern Louisiana. The jazz funeral in itself is a reflection of the musical and “creolized” culture of Louisiana.1 Likewise, it operates as a political and cathartic response to a situation of systemic disenfranchisement. While the jazz funeral is a performance of grief, it is also a protest. The mastery of the form of the state funeral is an expression of rootedness in the civic traditions of society, and its imitation in the jazz funeral is simultaneously an undermining of the notions of power and prestige associated with the state funeral.2 For people in New Orleans, the infusion of jazz and gospel music in the funeral is a self-expression of suffering and discontent. Yet, even though the jazz funeral’s origin comes from the imitation of the form of the state funeral and is a creative use of self-expression, it is also a part of the cultural and tourist history of the city. Despite its current status as a cultural institution of the city, the jazz funeral in itself provides a lesson in how to reckon with life and death, struggle and triumph, thus providing the outline for a transcendental politics of struggle.
This essay will highlight aspects of the politics at play and the catharsis it brings for those who mourn, and the generosity of the call to dance and celebrate to those who are in earshot. From this perspective, there are a few aspects that we must address for a fuller understanding of the lessons and significance they hold: the site, the situation, and the sentiment of the jazz funeral. In addressing these three aspects, we will be able to look more deeply into the jazz funeral and see that things are not exactly what they seem, especially when gazing at the horizons of life and death.
The Site
As a unique and musical expression of grief in New Orleans, much of the funeral experience seems, to the uniniated, to be an extemporaneous, or at least improvised, performance. This is so because the jazz funeral itself is a synthesis of elements present in the culture and civic life of the people in New Orleans. Its roots go back to the syncretism of slave religion, transplanted African religion, and post-reconstruction segregation.3 These roots are, according to Richard Turner, “the culmination of the second line culture,” and are in relationship to the celebratory expressions seen in Mardi Gras, as well as in the popular Catholicism of French extraction in New Orleans.4
Yet, there are actually a few formulaic elements to a jazz funeral that typically occur. First, whether one is Catholic or Protestant, a jazz funeral is actually the procession that follows the funeral service or mass.5 The funeral service itself happens with all of the dramatics of any funeral in New Orleans. Needless to say, when it is time to carry the coffin out of the church, the pallbearers and attendants bring the coffin out of the church with care, over their shoulders, usually outside of the church (or wherever the funeral service is held) where a brass band ensemble is prepared to play the traditional music, usually hymns. Walking at the pace of a death march, the band, the pallbearers, and the bereaved march to a typical hymn—usually “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” or “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” This is what is called the “dirge section” of the jazz funeral. What one will see in this part of the funeral is the coffin raised three times in the air above the pallbearers’ heads, usually to the beat of the dirge. At this time, it is not uncommon to see mourners reach nearly convulsive states of grief. One will hear wailing and crying. In fact, the dirge itself provokes deep feelings, touching emotions of sadness, loss, and longing through music. All of the funeral attendees, and anyone who wishes to join in the march, will follow the procession.
The dirge goes on until the coffin reaches either the hearse or the final resting place, depending on the family’s preference as well as the distance to the burial location. At that point, the brass band begins a faster paced melody, usually “When the Saints Go Marching In.” This is where the “revelry” begins. From this point on, there is dancing—sometimes to a level of dervish-like ecstasy. We call this “the second line.” Traditionally, the second line is the revelry that follows the parade, or the second wave of the parade, so to speak. Dancing, revelry, and celebration break out among the bereaved, the guests, and anyone around who can hear the music (whether related to the deceased or not) join in. Everyone “marches in” and dances.
The Situation
The context out of which the jazz funeral comes is a little more complex. The performance is quite different because, while it has distinct roots in African and slave religion, it takes on a broader cultural and social import for New Orleans given the city’s history and culture. In one aspect, the jazz funeral communicates a history of the descendants of African slaves and ways of retaining traditions that symbolically express a desire for freedom. The use of traditional and normative forms of expression that were used as “civilizing” measures for slaves and native Americans were coopted such that they could communicate messages of hope and resistance. In terms of the jazz funeral, jazz music and the use of “off timing” functioned as a way to modify classical forms of so-called “white” music in such a way that communicated the disfiguring and reconstitution of Black selfhood.6 Richard Turner says as much in his discussion of the role of jazz funerals among disenfranchised Blacks in New Orleans and the symbolizing activity surrounding death: “Thus the spiritual and political philosophies that underlie these public musical ceremonies surrounding death in New Orleans draw on the survival and resistance techniques of ‘the vanquished’ that Patrick Bellgrade-Smith calls ‘fragments of bone.’”7 The jazz funeral, according to Turner, connects to traditions and rituals of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean and to ancestral traditions in Africa.
At the same time, however, the jazz funeral belongs to the cultural lures of the city. Yet, even as a cultural lure, it still retains its resistant current, particularly in light of the lived circumstances of many in the city. At present, while the city moves toward its tenth anniversary since hurricane Katrina, citizens of New Orleans still suffer from deep divisions along racial and economic lines. While the new façade of the city is evidence of new and growing investment in New Orleans as a travel destination, there still exists deep distrust for authoritative structures, specifically the police. Likewise, a lack of confidence in the political and civic structure continues. Hurricane Katrina revealed the gravity of the economic and social situation by unveiling the weakened social and physical infrastructure in a city whose port is a significant doorway for international trade in the United States. Further, the continuing lack of confidence in the civic infrastructure is a side effect of ongoing grinding poverty, the underground economy, and the corruption of police services.8
In this way, while there is a connection to resistant ways of meaning making for Black folk in New Orleans, the jazz funeral is also a major tourist and economic attraction in the city. One of the major conflicts involves whether or not the performance of grief and tourist attraction can coexist in the same ritual. Helen Regis raises this concern regarding the question of race and memory in New Orleans with regard to the spaces of performative meaning making. She states,
Urban areas are the locus of symbolic economies that are defined by their performance spaces and transformed into tourist destinations. Promoting spectacle performance, and historic preservation are increasingly seen as reasonable paths to economic development for urban areas. Inevitably, these concerns produce an environment ripe for highly politicized struggles over space and the ownership of the cultural capital of the city.9
The battle for space and ownership is particularly acute for New Orleans. This is due to the fact that its main economy for many years has been based in tourism. As such, the question involves whether or not ritual performances of grief carry the same currency in such a situation. In this context, the complex negotiation between the jazz funeral’s thick cultural meaning and tourist allure offers challenging questions regarding specific impacts of the process of signification and ritual performance. Can a ritual performance of grief be a “spectator sport?”
The tourist allure of the jazz funeral, however, emphasizes the public performance of a music culture, even in death. For the sake of cultural allure, the jazz funeral is often linked with Voodoo rituals, stories of ghosts, and the “dark” spiritual culture of New Orleans. The exotic experience of the jazz funeral is often clustered in the marketing of New Orleans as a party city with loose morals and an exotic history.10 This facet of the jazz funeral overlooks the social inequities, violence, and poverty of the city. Life after Hurricane Katrina is especially important when considering the marketing scheme for the city and its cultural attractions. Despite the destruction of the city, the push to rebuild, and the campaign to brand the unique culture of New Orleans complicates the spectacle and significance of the jazz funeral.
The Sentiment
As a ritual performance, the jazz funeral expresses many different layers of the social, political, and cultural experience of New Orleanians. As a ritualizing of death and mourning, the jazz funeral communicates a people’s worldview of death and memory. On one hand, the memorializing of the departed channels the community’s grief through song, dance, and revelry, transforming the pain of grief into a celebratory occasion of one’s passing from this life to the next. In this way, death is not something to be feared or loathed, but celebrated. On the other hand, this same transformation of grief to joy is also a means of coping with the immediate situation of anguish and suffering endured in the community. The procession is a lesson in death and a lesson in struggle.
The jazz funeral as a public performance “[emphasizes] communal admiration and respect for men and women who have successfully negotiated lives of integrity in a highly inequitable society . . . .”11 As such, the memorial of these people are public recognitions of their role in the community. Helen Regis indicates that those memorialized are honored in an oppressed context. They are memorialized as role models for a community that “[has] been described as lacking in role models.”12 The community gathering around local “saints” expresses profound respect and grief for the departed. At another level, however, the funeral is an occasion to make public the grief of historic oppression and inequity in New Orleans. In this way, the jazz funeral is a key expression of the culture of the poor, Black majority in New Orleans.
The Funeral and the Politics of Survival
So we have a complicated situation here: on one hand, the history of slavery and conquest come full circle in the mourning of one who passes. This “mock state funeral” for one who would not be honored by the state is caught up in the cultural and tourist nexus of a recovering city.13 On the other hand, the jazz funeral becomes a site that fixes the white gaze. So what is real? What can we learn from this lesson in death and tourism?
We may want to take a different position in our view of the situation. The ritual performance of grief represents a resistant and, if anything, parallel criteria for gauging health, life, and death. In the ritual’s resistance to oppression, there emerges a “politics of survival” that is fully attuned with the circumstances of the surrounding environment that is organic in nature. Death is not a negative horizon, but a constant reality that folks face on a daily basis—whether it is through street violence, feuds, political and social violence, or poverty. Death is not the enemy: life is. The signifiers of life—normative “measuring sticks” that say what life should be— are the problem. By signifiers, I am referring to values and norms of health, wealth, and insulation from the immediate need to survive and struggle, typically represented by those who are not directly or closely affected by death dealing social and political factors.
Charles Gillam, “Jazz Funeral,” Reprinted with permission of Primitivekool Gallery,
http://www.primitvekool.com.
Furthermore, this politics of survival and of struggle is spatial in orientation, in that it is organically linked with the urban reality and historical (“new world”) experience that prompts such a politics. Jazz processions are a realization of this politics of survival in their resistant stance to the state, and in their generosity of revelry in the midst of loss—a marked contrast in attitude from the exclusionary and segregated society with which people normally must negotiate. This politics of survival is transcendental in the sense that it goes beyond the stated parameters of the exclusionary and inequitable economic, social, and political institutions in New Orleans. Its beyond-ness is not parallel or counter to the reality, but a constructive response to the harsh realities that are received as givens. As a constructive response, jazz processions manifest a process within which death, life, health, and notions of prestige are re-signified in terms of survival and struggle. The perceived negative horizons in western society become instances for constructive and transformative engagement with all who want to join in the second line.
The politics of survival represented in the jazz funeral are thus already embedded ways of resistance to exclusionary politics, exploitative economic paradigms, and oppressive institutions. These politics of survival and of struggle take the point of view of those who are perceived as the oppressed— yet, do they define themselves as the oppressed? Most likely not.14 To assume self-identification with the metrics of poverty and lack is to assume an acceptance of an imposed value system that narrowly defines a people and their struggle to survive. As a result, grief may not always be about loss or sadness, but it may also be a communication of alternative realities and present, though unrecognized, ethical systems that challenge and transcend established and dominant ways of thinking, political perceptions, and economic systems.
Performances of grief like those present in the jazz funeral indicate in a powerful way that the so-called “poor” operate under a different sense of self. Instead, the terms by which those who live a politics of survival offer a lived experience of emerging paradigms of thought that draw from the generosity of the second line and resistance to being defined by external authority. They provide an opportunity to see the new systems and challenge us to engage the world from the angle of the situated wisdom of those who daily struggle to meet their needs and under the weight of history. Yet, in this struggle is generosity and compassion, despite a societal and cultural violence generated by hopelessness. The jazz funeral thus ritualizes a worldview and politics that absorb all facets of life—the beautiful and the disfigured as well as the peaceful and the violent—and offers itself to life with nuance and creativity. In the end, the second line offers a different sensibility that is resistant and cathartic, fully rooted in the situation, while willing to touch the very edges of ecstasy in longing for the promise of beyond.
NOTES
The politics of survival represented in the jazz funeral are thus already embedded ways of resistance to exclusionary politics, exploitative economic paradigms, and oppressive institutions. These politics of survival and of struggle take the point of view of those who are perceived as the oppressed— yet, do they define themselves as the oppressed? Most likely not.14 To assume self-identification with the metrics of poverty and lack is to assume an acceptance of an imposed value system that narrowly defines a people and their struggle to survive. As a result, grief may not always be about loss or sadness, but it may also be a communication of alternative realities and present, though unrecognized, ethical systems that challenge and transcend established and dominant ways of thinking, political perceptions, and economic systems.
Performances of grief like those present in the jazz funeral indicate in a powerful way that the so-called “poor” operate under a different sense of self. Instead, the terms by which those who live a politics of survival offer a lived experience of emerging paradigms of thought that draw from the generosity of the second line and resistance to being defined by external authority. They provide an opportunity to see the new systems and challenge us to engage the world from the angle of the situated wisdom of those who daily struggle to meet their needs and under the weight of history. Yet, in this struggle is generosity and compassion, despite a societal and cultural violence generated by hopelessness. The jazz funeral thus ritualizes a worldview and politics that absorb all facets of life—the beautiful and the disfigured as well as the peaceful and the violent—and offers itself to life with nuance and creativity. In the end, the second line offers a different sensibility that is resistant and cathartic, fully rooted in the situation, while willing to touch the very edges of ecstasy in longing for the promise of beyond.
NOTES
- Jon Michael Spencer, The Rhythms of Black Folk: Race, Religion, and Pan-Africanism (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1995), xv.
- Spencer, 141.
- Richard Brent Turner, Jazz religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2009), 89.
- Turner, 89.
- The dominant religious expressions in New Orleans are Catholic and Protestant. This is not to the exclusion of other religious traditions, for it is not unheard of or uncommon for non-Christians to celebrate using the jazz funeral procession. In fact, it is an expression of what it means to be from New Orleans and not necessarily religious.
- Spencer, 144.
- Turner, 90.
- Desmond Shondell Miller and Jason David Rivera, Katrina and the Redefinition of Landscape (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), 118. For an extended examination of the economy in New Orleans, see Robert K. Whelan’s “An Old Economy for the ‘New’ New Orleans?: Post-Hurricane Katrina Economic Development Efforts,” in There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina, Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2006), esp. 229-231.
- Helen Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line,” American Ethnologist, 28.4 (November 2001), 753.
- Regis, 754.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- I use the term recovering very loosely because New Orleans was once called “the city that care forgot.” It is always in a state of rehab, if you will. Hurricane Katrina provided a more acute way of reckoning with this recovery effort.
- This does not necessarily mean that folks do not understand their oppression or that the situation is oppressive. Instead, there is a difference in identifying oppression and identifying as “the oppressed.”
