Desire and Disaster in New Orleans

Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory

Lynnell L. Thomas

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780822357285
  9780822357148
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822376354
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Most of the narratives packaged for New Orleans's many tourists cultivate a desire for black culture—jazz, cuisine, dance—while simultaneously targeting black people and their communities as sources and sites of political, social, and natural disaster. In this timely book, the Americanist and New Orleans native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into the relationship between tourism, cultural production, and racial politics. She carefully interprets the racial narratives embedded in tourism websites, travel guides, business periodicals, and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both before and after Katrina. She describes how, with varying degrees of success, African American tour guides, tour owners, and tourism industry officials have used their own black heritage tours and tourism-focused businesses to challenge exclusionary tourist representations. Taking readers from the Lower Ninth Ward to the White House, Thomas highlights the ways that popular culture and public policy converge to create a mythology of racial harmony that masks a long history of racial inequality and structural inequity.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One. “The City I Used to Come to Visit” - Heritage Tourism and Racialized Disaster in New Orleans
• Two. “Life the Way It Used to Be in the Old South” - The Construction of Black Desire in New Orleans’s Post–Civil Rights Tourism Narrative
• Three. “Urbane, Educated, and Well-To-Do Free Blacks” - The Challenge of a Creole World in Le Monde Créole French Quarter Courtyards Tour
• Four. “Wasn’t Nothing Like That” - New Orleans’s Black Heritage Tourism and Counternarratives of Resistance
• Five. “Starting All Over Again” - Post-Katrina Tourism and the Reconstruction of Race
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index