Carnival in Alabama : marked bodies and invented traditions in Mobile / Isabel Machado.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Machado, Isabel (Cultural historian), author.

Contributor:

James Lader Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Carnival--Alabama--Mobile.

Carnival.

Manners and customs.

Mobile (Ala.)--History.

Mobile (Ala.).

Mobile (Ala.)--Social life and customs.

Alabama--Mobile.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xxii, 237 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2023]

Summary:

"Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was followed by a period of rapid urban decline and subsequent attempts at revitalizing (or gentrifying) its downtown area. As in many other US cities, urban renewal, integration, and other socioeconomic developments led to white flight, marginalized the African American population, and set the stage for the development of LGBTQ community building and subculture. Yet these usually segregated segments of society in Mobile converged once a year to create a common identity, that of a Carnival City. Carnival in Alabama looks not only at the people who participated in Mardi Gras organizations divided by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation, but also investigates the experience of "marked bodies" outside of these organizations, or people involved in Carnival through their labor or as audiences (or publics) of the spectacle. It also expands the definition of Mobile's Carnival "tradition" beyond the official pageantry by including street maskers and laborers and neighborhood cookouts. Using archival sources and oral history interviews to investigate and analyze the roles assigned, inaccessible to, or claimed and appropriated by straight-identified African American men and women and people who defied gender and sexuality normativity in the festivities (regardless of their racial identity), this book seeks to understand power dynamics through culture and ritual. By looking at Carnival as an "invented tradition" and as a semiotic system associated with discourses of power, it joins a transnational conversation about the phenomenon"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

List of abbreviations

Preface: on Carnival cities and language choices

Introduction

Chapter 1. Official narratives, origin myths, and tradition invention

Chapter 2. Regulating, controlling, and sanctioning revelry

Chapter 3. Downtown: Mobile's "Negro Main Street" and the emergence of the "Fruit Loop"

Chapter 4. Official "Colored" Mardi Gras and Mobile's Black liberation struggle

Chapter 5. Queering Mobile's Mardi Gras

Chapter 6. Carnivalesque bodies: defying the white gaze and respectability politics

Chapter 7. Plus Ça change?

Conclusion: Now you do watcha wanna

Appendix: narrators Index

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the James Lader Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Machado, Isabel. Carnival in alabama

ISBN:

9781496842589

1496842588

9781496842596

1496842596

OCLC:

1316777286

Publisher Number:

99992600547