Abstracts

Jason Berry
"Spirit Tides from Congo Square"
This presentation is based on a chapter from Berry's current book project, which focuses on funeral traditions, using these as a lens through which to view the history of New Orleans. Beginning with a discussion of slave dances as recreations of African burial choreographies, the narrative will then touch on a series of related phenomena, ranging from Indian burial customs to the death of a maroon slave, concluding with a commemorative funeral for Carlos III, king of Spain, in 1789.

Samuel Kinser
"No Words without a Beat, No Flesh without the Spirit: Kinetics, Mixture, Identity"
The emphasis of this conference on theorizing black music derives, if I understand correctly, from the conviction that one cannot comprehend the spread of black musical modes simply by cataloging appearances in time and space in a simple material process. Theorization of the expansion is necessary because it has occurred in spite of an array of repressions, rather than simply flowing out of expression. The spread of black music modes occurred and still occurs because of the peculiar character of persistent mental structures no less than because of material resistance and cautionary secrecy. The perception of black music as only a negligible material facility or emotional versatility lends itself to the persistence of  the elite Euro-American idea of culture, which has remained hegemonic in large sectors of the Western world.
It is obvious that we need a theory of black music’s structures—bodily, spiritual, mental—to explain that music’s successful resistance to this Euro-American presumption. My contribution to such a theory has two aspects because, as it happens, I have investigated the problem in two directions. First, I have done so as a cultural historian particularly concerned with the European Renaissance between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the very period of increased European contact with Africa and the Americas. Second, I have investigated, as a historian and as an ethnographer, Carnival festivity in the New World, primarily in Louisiana and in the island nation of Trinidad.
My presentation thus has three parts. First, I will define two assumptions in Euro-American metaphysics--logocentric abstraction and ethical verticalism--that underlie the way Western music has developed from the liturgical music of the Middle Ages to the present day.
Next, I will briefly illustrate these two assumptions by contrasting them with those underlying African-American musical practices. From this illustration, I derive the first two phrases in the title of my address.
Third, I apply the hypotheses generated in the first two parts to the festive practice of black “Indians,” the so-called Mardi Gras Indians, in New Orleans’ Carnival. In order to sharpen this application, I compare this festive practice with that of the white Cajun Mardi Gras in adjacent south central Louisiana. I say festive practice, not simply musical practice, because one of my assertions will be that, however central music is to the festivities of both groups, it cannot be disconnected from the associated arts of costuming, rhetoricizing, and dancing. Hence I arrive at my subtitle: kinetics, mixture, and finally cultural identity.

George Lipsitz
"New Orleans in the World and the World in New Orleans"
The cultures of New Orleans demonstrate the importance of historical and social times and spaces. The shameful responses to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by the U.S. government, philanthropic foundations, and investors reveals how neoliberalism privileges market space and time over social and historical space and time. Preserving the culture of New Orleans by supporting the people’s right to return, rebuild, and participate democratically in designing their own future is a fundamental obligation and responsibility for all of us at the present time.
The percussive polyrhythms and parade paraphernalia of second liners make New Orleans loom large in the global imagination as one of the most important capitals of the black diaspora. Indeed, African influences permeate every aspect of everyday life in the Crescent City from its cuisine to its craft work, from its religiosity to its ribald revelry. Yet the diasporic model of exile and return does not quite capture the nature or significance of the African presence in New Orleans. The city’s pre-Lenten rituals, its habanera and rara musical influences, and its spiritualist churches and vodou practitioners reveal it to be a city where connection, cooperation, conflict, and coalescence produce not just an Afro-diasporic culture but a culture of world-traversing and world-transcending citizenship as well. Afro-diasporic intimacy and Afrological improvisation and community making constitute core qualities in New Orleans culture, but the twin histories of African roots and trans-Atlantic routes cannot tell us as much about New Orleans culture as the ways in which the city’s location as a node in several simultaneous networks establishes rhizomatic relations with a variety of local, subnational, national, and transnational entities that give the city’s culture, politics, and social relations their determinant shape and meaning.