[One of my favorite cultural works of the last year was Small Axe, filmmaker Steve McQueen’s anthology film series about the West Indian community in England from the 1960s through the 1980s. I’m not an EnglandStudier, but I think there are plenty of ways to apply the five wonderful films to AmericanStudying. So this week I’ll highlight a handful, leading up to a Guest Post on McQueen’s prior films!]
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 have this week’s posts in their own ways, despite
the specific focus on Katrina. And indeed, the responses to and aftermaths of that
horrific storm 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 one more
time a text I could definitely have featured in the 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,
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 Axe
application tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other takes on Caribbean American connections?
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