Tag: New Orleans

Mémwa Nwa

Mémwa Nwa

Denise Frazier and Sultana Isham

Mémwa Nwa (Black Memory) traces how themes of love and memory in AfroCreole music by modern Louisiana composers and musicians rearticulate and reaffirm the socio-political and historical condition and context in which they were created. This generated a practice of performative resistance to the forgotten memory of AfroCreole sonic contributions in the nineteenth century.

“We’re Not Just Shooting the Breeze”

“We’re Not Just Shooting the Breeze”

Matt Sakakeeny, photographs by Abdul Aziz

This is a coming-of-age story of kids who play in southern marching bands and the teachers who mentor them. In the South, "show-style" bands are Black excellence personified.

The Great Unbuilding

The Great Unbuilding

Deniz Daser and Sarah Fouts

Examining the Hard Rock Hotel collapse of October 2019 in New Orleans and the Indura Resort in coastal Honduras through a transnational and comparative lens reveals two landscapes of redevelopment in the US South. These places are linked by narratives of cultural extractivism, disaster capitalism, and labor exploitation. Due to increasing privatization, they have also undergone a loss of public oversight and workers' rights. Deregulation driven by economic development stretches beyond New Orleans to Honduras, where residents have been displaced due to similar forms of corporate privatization that seize land for an ever-hungry tourism industry. These landscapes of development reveal the historical and transnational characteristics of the Hard Rock Hotel site by situating the US South within the circum-Caribbean and linking it to Honduras via extractive, globalized models of privatization.

A Totally Different Form of Living

A Totally Different Form of Living

Justin Hosbey

This article is a critical reflection that explores the histories of water, marronage, and Black placemaking in the southern United States. It uses insights from history, ethnography, and cultural geography to connect the dual histories of racial slavery and environmental degradation in the Tidewater region of Virginia and the Mississippi Delta. This essay argues that, during slavery, swamps, bayous, rivers, and wetlands were geographies in which a fleeting Black commons could be sustained hidden away from the violence of the plantation. These same ecologies are now under extreme duress from coastal subsidence, the petrochemical industry, and climate change. This reflection argues that by charting the meaningful cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and practical insights of Black southern communities, an alternative ecological practice born of maroon imaginaries might be developed that could resist the degradation of these vulnerable southern ecologies.

Malik Rahim’s Black Radical Environmentalism

Malik Rahim’s Black Radical Environmentalism

Joshua B. Guild, photographs by Jeff Whetstone

This essay examines the environmental thinking and activism of Malik Rahim, a member of the New Orleans chapter of the Black Panther Party, Green Party political candidate, and co-founder of Common Ground Relief, a grassroots mutual aid organization established in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Rahim’s influences and career help illuminate an alternative history of Black environmentalism whose evolution runs parallel to the mainstream US environmental movement of the 1970s, but also diverges from it in terms of its primary concerns. Drawing from media accounts and extensive oral interviews, the article traces the development of Rahim’s environmental advocacy, locating him in a wider tradition of southern Black environmental justice activism.

A Humane Vision

A Humane Vision

Andy Horowitz

Introduction to the Human/Nature issue (vol. 27, no. 1: Spring 2021), guest edited by Andy Horowitz.

Forty Sundays a Year

Forty Sundays a Year

Pableaux Johnson
Finding New Orleans in Zululand

Finding New Orleans in Zululand

Millicent Johnnie in Conversation with Jennifer Atkins
New Orleans Second Line Parades

New Orleans Second Line Parades

Pableaux Johnson
Tasting New Orleans

Tasting New Orleans

Anthony J. Stanonis and Rachel Wallace, with illustrations by Kristen Solecki
“Release Your Wiggle”

“Release Your Wiggle”

Christin Marie Taylor
Sundays in the Streets

Sundays in the Streets

Leslie Parr