Roger D. Abrahams, Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, Robert Farris Thompson. Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2006. 102 pp. $22.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-3959-1.
Reviewed by Charles Hersch (Department of Political Science, Cleveland State University)
Published on H-Urban (May, 2006)
Carnival, Culture, and Creolization
flung back and forth across the Atlantic as well as backward and forward in time: “During the same period when
musicians and dance leaders were achieving a place in
New Orleans, on Martinique and Guadeloupe the adaptation of European musical instruments to African-based
time-lines was creating a music not unlike jazz, an independent invention but so like what occurred at the
birth of ragtime that the parallels are worth much further
study, as are the developments that occurred in Havana
with the birth of the son style, rediscovered by American
audiences in Ry Cooder’s film and recording of the Buena
Vista Social Club” (pp. 56-57).
“Mardi Gras Will Never Die” is the title of the last
chapter of this thought-provoking book, penned by four
eminent scholars of (African) American culture in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.
The book is a reflection on the past, present, and future of
Carnival, as they call “Fat Tuesday” in the Crescent City.
Yet it is more than that, for the authors use Mardi Gras
as a symbol of a larger cultural process they call “creolization,” the process by which different cultures come
into contact and create hybrid products, characterized by
surprising juxtapositions of seemingly incompatible elements. Yet the resulting culture is not simply a mixture,
for it creates something new that is more than the sum
of its parts. Blues for New Orleans describes the creolized
nature of the music, dance, and costumes surrounding
Carnival, from Congo Square, New Orleans, to the Congo
region in Africa.
Such connections, many of them not available in
other literature on New Orleans, jazz and Mardi Gras,
are fascinating. At the same time, the reader is left
wanting to know more about creolization. What connects the various elements, and what precisely is the
Roger Abrahams, Nick Spitzer, John Szwed, and nature of the connections? Is there a causal link beRobert Thompson criticize others who have written tween them? The authors drop some intriguing clues,
about these subjects for their “failure to think across na- like the argument that the marketplace (Congo Square
tional borders” (p. 5). In contrast, the authors of this book or the French Marketplace) is central to creolization, but
strive to connect cultural activities in the American Gulf this idea (like many others) is never fully developed. At
Coast, the Caribbean, and Africa, the diasporic region times they speak of “give and take, invention and reinthey call the “Black Atlantic” or “the Greater Caribbean” vention” and “dialogue and disagreement” (p. 28). In gen(p. 13). They find common features in early New Or- eral, however, they sidestep these larger issues: “It would
leans jazz and the music of Martinique and West Africa. be tempting to try to trace influences or sources one way
The use of batons by Mardi Gras Indians is connected to or another. But there are complex truths beyond reflexstick fighting in Trinidad, parades in Montevideo and the ive interactions. Most likely, parallel and independent
Kongo, and the African-American cakewalk. At times invention was taking place” (p. 35).
the effect of this approach is dizzying, as the reader is
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In particular, I wanted to know more about the politics of creolization. What about issues of power and domination? Creolization was tied to colonialism, slavery,
and racism–the partners in the mixing were not equals.
The authors take two approaches to such issues. At times
they speak of Mardi Gras as a site of resistance to racism,
a vehicle for self- assertion and affirmation in the face
of repression. In other places they argue that Carnival
reflected racial divisions rather than challenged them.
The relationship between these competing hypotheses is
unclear, and at times they fall back on the melting pot
or “gumbo” model, which avoids issues of power altogether. The book would have benefited from a clearer
and more sustained theoretical perspective; while there
is some reference to racial theory, important books like
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and the literature
on hybridity curiously go unmentioned.
producing a creative and illuminating response to Hurricane Katrina, in the process shedding new light on the
culture of New Orleans. At the same time, I wish it had
striven for more. The book contains no index, bibliography, or footnotes, for which the authors ask forgiveness:
“as academics driven by the urgency of recent events to
produce this book in record time, we felt that we wanted
the liberating force of the moment” (p. 5). Yet capturing “the moment” has its cost for the scholar hoping to
expand on the book’s insights, who will remain unaware
of the primary sources used by the authors. This omission is particularly frustrating since so much of what is
in the book is fresh and exciting. Had the authors eschewed time pressures and created a book that elaborated
on its arguments, more fully grounded them in theory,
and backed them up with proper documentation, it would
have been a real gift for years to come. As it stands now,
Blues for New Orleans is a good one-hundred-page book,
but it could have been a great two-hundred-page book.
Blues for New Orleans accomplishes its objective of
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Citation: Charles Hersch. Review of Abrahams, Roger D.; Spitzer, Nick; Szwed, John F.; Thompson, Robert Farris,
Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. May, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11762
Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
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editorial staff at [email protected].
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