Black Arts South: Rethinking New Orleans and the Black Arts Movement in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Among the most powerful and persistent myths about the South is that the region is a starting point for both a national African American culture and a truly “American” art. For more than a century various genres of music associated with African Americans of the rural and urban South, particularly spirituals, the blues, and jazz, have been declared the first or, as W. E. B. Du Bois said in the 1903 The Souls of Black Folk “the sole American music” (186). Such monikers as “the birthplace of jazz” and “the land where the blues were born” mark the South as a special cradle of African American expression that in turn becomes transmuted into a more generically “American” art, a transmutation that a long line of cultural commentators have claimed expresses an American democratic spirit and/or a common humanity. New Orleans, given its long association with early jazz, is a prominent topos of this mythic landscape of a comparatively remote past—despite the more recent musical prominence of the Marsalis family and the Neville Brothers.