[Last
month I got to return to my
favorite American city for the 2025 MLA Convention.
So for this year’s Valentine’s Day series I’ll be offering some love letters to
what makes New Orleans so unique, leading up to a special tribute post this
weekend!]
On how New
Orleans helps us better engage America’s defining creolizations.
I’ve
written a good bit about New Orleans in this space: from this early
city-centric post inspired by Mardi Gras and my first visit to
the city; to this one from
the same blog era on one of my favorite American novels and a
book that’s as much about New Orleans as it is about its huge,
multi-generational cast of characters, George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1881).
Those posts illustrate a few of the many reasons why I believe New Orleans is
so distinctly and powerfully American, as I hope will this week’s subsequent posts
in their own complementary ways. And as I’ll highlight a bit more in tomorrow’s
post, the responses to and aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina likewise reveal some
of the worst as well as the best of American history,
society, culture, and art; on that final note, I should highlight another
text I could definitely have featured in this week’s series and one of my
favorite 21st century American novels, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011).
To say
much more eloquently than I ever could a bit more about why I’d define New
Orleans as so deeply American, here’s one of the central characters from Treme that I didn’t get to analyze in this post, Steve
Zahn’s DJ Davis
McAlary. As a radio DJ, and a highly opinionated person to boot, Davis is
often ranting, much of it about the best and worst of his beloved New Orleans
(and all of it a combination of communal and self-aggrandizing, convincing and
frustrating). But my favorite Davis monologue, in the opening scene of the
Season 4 episode “Dippermouth Blues,” is far quieter and more thoughtful.
Coming out of playing a hugely cross-cultural song, Davis calls it, “A stellar
example of McAlary’s theory of creolization. Tin Pan
Alley, Broadway, the Great American Songbook meet African American musical
genius. And that’s what America’s all about…‘Basin Street, is the street, where
all the dark and light folks meet.’ That’s how culture gets made in this
country. That’s how we do. We’re a Creole nation, whether you like it or not.
And in three weeks, America inaugurates its first Creole president. Get used to
it.”
Those of
us who loved that
aspect of Obama and even
called him “the first American president” as a result didn’t have to “get
used to” anything, of course. And as for those whom Davis is addressing more
directly in those closing lines, well to say that they seem not
to have gotten used to it is to significantly understate the case
(which of course David Simon and his co-creators knew all too well, as that
final-season episode of Treme may
have been set around New Year’s 2008 but was made and aired in late 2013).
Indeed, when I was asked by audiences during my book talks for We the People about why
we’ve seen such an upsurge in exclusionary rhetoric and violence over the last
decade and a half, I’ve frequently argued that backlash to Obama—as a
representation of so many perceived national “changes”—has been a central
cause. Which is to say, it’s not just that we need to “get over” the reality of
our creolized history, culture, and identity—first the we who love those
elements need to do a better job making the case for them, both as valuable and
as foundationally American. There’s no place and no community through which we
can do so more potently than New Orleans.
Next love
letter tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Cities you’d love on?
