Carnival Knowledge: Mardi Gras in and Beyond New Orleans

2006 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Mardi Gras

scholarly journals Keep That Lane Open!: Race, Space, and Mardi Gras in Kansas City

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Bodily Movement

This essay explores the open-ended and complex performance of an underground Mardi Gras parade in Kansas City, MO, in 2012. The sounds, movement, and route of the parade are shaped by a network of globally circulating images of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the history of race and space in Kansas City, and the intercultural exchange involved in white performances of black cultural practices as they move from the “circum-Caribbean” city of New Orleans to the U.S. heartland of Kansas City. The parade is a partially improvised performance of a historical narrative linking Kansas City’s mostly white bohemian arts culture in the present to the city’s past as a major jazz city and center for African American culture. This narrative is told by bodily movement through urban space and through improvised sound and dance, and demonstrates the complex social relations that are highlighted when a cultural form is subject to cross-cultural communication, borrowing, and appropriation.

A Tale of Two Cities II

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-67
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Social Communities ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
Two Cities

Conceived as a companion to Chapter 3, this chapter also examines movement in public spaces in two creole cities, but this time emphasizing an approach grounded in ethnography and focusing upon two relatively contemporary dance-based social communities: the rará performers of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans. It finds well-known historical and ethnographic parallels between these two social organizations within their respective urban-Caribbean contexts but also teases out more sophisticated and less familiar understandings of raráistes’ and Indians’ political intentionality--the parallel ways in which their costume, movement, and sound enables temporary, but potent, subaltern resistance to dominant culture’s control of public spaces.

The New Orleans Mardi Gras

2017 ◽  
pp. 245-258
Author(s):  
Hazel Barrett
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Mardi Gras

Tasting New Orleans: How the Mardi Gras King Cake Came to Represent the Crescent City

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-23
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Stanonis ◽  
Rachel Wallace
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Crescent City ◽  
Mardi Gras

Poor Lo

Jockomo ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Shane Lief ◽  
John McCusker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Wild West Shows ◽  
Wild West

While based on local families expressing their blended Native and African legacies, the development of the Mardi Gras Indian cultural system was also shaped by the stereotyped notion of the “American Indian.” Throughout the nineteenth century, as the United States expanded westward across the continent, theatrical and musical productions increasingly incorporated stereotypes of Native Americans, sometimes appearing in Wild West shows. This fell within a larger pattern of minstrelsy, a form of entertainment based on ethnic caricatures especially popular at that time. This chapter examines how minstrelsy, including the Wild West shows, influenced local enactments of “Indianness” in New Orleans. Conventional historiography has often seen the Wild West shows as the point of origin for Mardi Gras Indian traditions. This historical axiom is dispelled, however, and the nineteenth century entertainment industry is instead revealed as a phenomenon which reinforced previously existing cultural practices.

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