Size Matters: ’tit Rǝx

This chapter focuses on a parade that through its name and practice presents an inversion of traditional Mardi Gras’s emphasis on excess. The ’tit Rəx parade offers an ironic twist on the gigantic, expensive, and traditional krewe and parade, Rex, whose king is THE King of Carnival, and whose parade runs the traditional Uptown route. Using interviews and images, this chapter analyzes ’tit Rəx through representative participants and floats. ’tit Rəx provides an example of how parades can be read as resisting and revising traditional Carnival. Like the other new parades, ’tit Rəx raises issues of gender and class. ’tit Rəx also accords with Errol Laborde’s observation that “downtowns are inherently adult” (55), as this Downtown parade is salacious in aspect. While ’tit Rəx floats are tiny, evoking schoolchildren’s Mardi Gras floats made from shoeboxes, they are political and often sexually explicit.

The St. Joan of Arc Parade, Gender, and Pride of Place

This chapter explores the history of the Joan of Arc parade, a women’s enterprise that celebrates the birthday of the famous saint, which happens to fall upon January 6th, Twelfth Night, the traditional commencement of the Carnival season. The parade runs through the French Quarter, concluding at the gilded Joan of Arc statue on Decatur Street (Joanie on a pony). The chapter looks at the feminist aspect of the group, which celebrates this female icon, a woman who spoke truth to power and actively fought against it. The parade also is significant for drawing upon European history in a way that underscores the French heritage of the city.

The Red Beans Krewe: An Iconic Dish and a New Parade

This chapter focuses on a new parade, a new surrogation, that has assumed an empty spot in the Carnival calendar, Lundi Gras, the Monday before Fat Tuesday. This chapter explores the Krewe of Red Beans and the ways that this new parade draws on New Orleans culture, from its signature red beans and rice dish, to the Mardi Gras Indians’ costumes, to the second-line tradition. Like the other new Downtown parades, the Red Beans fosters artistic expression (and competition); displays whimsical and political humor based on local culture; and valorizes the domestic (a common meal and food stuff), and thus the feminine. And like the other new Mardi Gras parades, Red Beans wrestles with an evolving New Orleans and the role transplants play in precipitating change.

Skeletons Rising in Skinz n Bonez

This chapter highlights a new invocation of the skull and bones tradition—the Downtown women’s group Skinz n Bonez, who recast elements of a traditionally African-American, all-male practice in their performance of female solidarity. The chapter surveys the bone gang history, focusing on the lineage and enactments of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang, the inheritor of this practice. The chapter then examines the emergence of the all-female group, chiefly white in membership, and how it has advanced its own style and identity.

Downtown Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras functions as the city’s principle synecdoche; yet, the holiday can also serve as a barometer or indicator of fluctuating civic tensions, as Carnival has remained fluid and changeable, sensitive to the altering complexions of the city—its demographics, politics, economics, and social organization.

Exceptional Performance, Exceptional Place

This chapter assesses New Orleans’ situation in 2018. One can see Downtown Mardi Gras as a vast piece of egalitarian street theatre, whose process may witness ego-rivalries and identity contestations, but whose final performance achieves something greater than the sum of its parts—the physical manifestation of an aspirant desire, for a reanimated city, of tolerance, equity, and mutual respect. Downtown Mardi Gras may portend a new future for Carnival practices, the opening of the door to further, yet-to-be-realized ludic expressions and energies; it may also point to new civic constellations, themselves yet unmaterialized, that could help elevate actual lives, spreading more widely the benefits of post-Katrina recovery.

Reclaiming Life and History: The Amazons Benevolent Society and the Black Storyville Baby Dolls

This chapter focuses on The Amazons Social Aid and Benevolent Society and The Black Storyville Baby Dolls. The Amazons is group of breast cancer survivors, both natives and transplants, who provide support to other survivors while celebrating life through costuming and parading. Wearing breastplates and brandishing swords, the group commandeers a militaristic posture that exudes strength and power. While the group’s main focus is social aid and support, the members use Mardi Gras parades to make a public statement of women’s empowerment. The Black Storyville Baby Dolls, also founded by Dianne Honoré, draw directly on the African-American tradition of Baby Dolls, the historical practice of adult women dressing as young girls, in beautiful outfits made of satin, dancing in the streets, and acting tough (smoking cigars). Both groups exemplify the use of Carnival as an opportunity to resist gender and race stereotypes.

Chewbacchus and Science-Fiction Carnival

This chapter features the fastest growing of the new Downtown Mardi Gras organizations, the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus. New Orleans culture is not conventionally associated with science-fiction or futurism; however, this krewe has tapped a rich and vibrant vein, blending conventional Carnival with science-fiction fandom—the mash-up of Bacchus and Chewbacca from Star Wars. This chapter examines the egalitarian impulse of Chewbacchus, which clearly situates itself in opposition to traditional Uptown krewes. The chapter also investigates its relation to the Downtown neighborhood of Bywater and how the color and energy of the enterprise both reflects and contributes to the gentrification of the area. Finally, the chapter speculates upon the krewe’s fantastical expressions and implicit utopianism, how its carnivalesque, otherworldly aspect might alter or impact actual social realities.