Desire and disaster in New Orleans : tourism, race, and historical memory / Lynnell L. Thomas.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thomas, Lynnell L., 1971-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans.

Tourism.

New Orleans (La.)--Description and travel.

New Orleans (La.).

Tourism--Louisiana--New Orleans.

African Americans--Louisiana--New Orleans.

Travel.

Louisiana--New Orleans.

Physical Description:

xii, 256 pages : illustrations, map ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Most of the narratives packaged for New Orleans's many tourists cultivate a desire for blade 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

"The city I used to come to visit" : heritage tourism and racialized disaster in New Orleans

"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

"Urbane, educated, and well-to-do free blacks" : the challenge of a creole world in le Monde Creole French Quarter courtyards tour

"Wasn't nothing like that" : New Orleans's black heritage tourism and counternarratives of resistance

"Starting all over again" : post-Katrina tourism and the reconstruction of race.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822357148

0822357143

9780822357285

0822357283

OCLC:

871186931