Second Lines, Creative Economies, and Gentrification: Music Cooperatives in Post-Katrina New Orleans

• In Event: Alternative Economies of Pleasure in Contemporary Southern Working-Class Cultures

Abstract

My conference paper examines how black New Orleans cooperatives struggle to reclaim control over their neighborhoods in the face of City and corporate-led disinvestment and gentrification. While academics have focused on community activism in post-Hurricane Katrina urban land use debates, little scholarly attention has been given to the role of cooperatives--member-owned and -directed businesses and organizations--in rallying New Orleans residents to strengthen local economies to mitigate the abuses of a capitalistic marketplace. Since the Civil War, black New Orleanians have organized themselves into informal cooperatives such as social aid and pleasure clubs--mutual associations that provide insurance and funeral services to impoverished neighborhood residents. Simultaneously, these cooperative institutions have nourished democratic and participatory cultural and musical forms such as brass bands, second line parades, and Mardi Gras Indian performances that constitute the backbone of the city’s modern tourism economy. Yet New Orleans’ black, working-class participatory culture also uses music and performance as tools of social critique: second lines parades, for example, have become forums for protesting gentrification of black residents' communities. I argue that contemporary cooperatives have used their city’s long tradition of innovative, egalitarian cultural production to empower working-class New Orleans citizens to alleviate the effects of structural inequality and poverty.

The public housing projects in Central City, while located in a marginalized and segregated neighborhood, constitute a locus of both creative innovation and cooperative development. During the late 1960s and 1970s, black cultural and political collectives flourished along Dryades Street, the neighborhood’s major commercial thoroughfare, as part of a grassroots project to reinvest Central City through black-owned cultural institutions and businesses. Forty years later, that cooperative impulse continues. Specifically, my paper analyzes the trajectory of cultural cooperatives in Central City land use debates from the 1960s to the present, first examining the Free Southern Theater Collective’s black liberationist organizing on Dryades Street, and concluding with Rhythm Conspiracy Productions, a worker cooperative that provides artists and musicians residing in public housing with creative support services such as management, event booking, and public relations. Rhythm Conspiracy aims to pool artists’ resources to develop a community-based, creative economy in direct opposition to the city’s economic development initiatives, which give lip-service to New Orleans’ vibrant musical traditions while simultaneously razing the public housing from which many of its musicians originated.

Throughout my paper, I address two major themes: 1) the intersection of local grassroots democratic organizing, such as mutual aid societies, with historical civil rights, antipoverty, and black self-determination movements in New Orleans; and 2) the historical grassroots strategies that inform cooperatives' response to urban land use planning today. Ultimately, I argue, cooperatives have attempted to marry New Orleans’ participatory heritage of jazz, social aid and pleasure clubs, and second line parades to the principles of the national cooperative movement so that residents can claim their share of their city’s economic and political power. These cultural traditions function as counterpoints to the City of New Orleans’ and developers’ vision of urban sustainability and creativity as commodity.

Author

• Anne Gessler, University of Texas, Austin (TX)