Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy » (1st Edition)

Kevin Fox Gotham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Tulane University. He is the author of Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000 and the editor of Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment.

Mardi Gras, jazz, voodoo, gumbo, Bourbon Street, the French Quarter — all evoke that place that is unlike any other: New Orleans. In Authentic New Orleans, Kevin Fox Gotham explains how New Orleans became a tourist town, a spectacular locale known as much for its excesses as for its quirky Southern charm.

Gotham begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amid the whirlwind of speculation about the rebuilding of the city and the dread of outsiders wiping New Orleans clean of the grit that made it great. He continues with the origins of Carnival and the Mardi Gras celebration in the nineteenth century, showing how, through careful planning and promotion, the city constructed itself as a major tourist attraction. By examining various image-building campaigns and promotional strategies to disseminate a palatable image of New Orleans on a national scale Gotham ultimately establishes New Orleans as one of the originators of the mass tourism industry — which linked leisure to travel, promoted international expositions, and developed the concept of pleasure travel.

Gotham shows how New Orleans was able to become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the United States, especially through the transformation of Mardi Gras into a national, even international, event. All the while Gotham is concerned with showing the difference between tourism from above and tourism from below — that is, how New Orleans' distinctiveness is both maximized, some might say exploited, to serve the global economy of tourism as well as how local groups and individuals use tourism to preserve and anchor longstanding communal traditions.

Preface     vii
Introduction: Authentic New Orleans     1
Processions and Parades: Carnival Krewes and the Development of Modern Mardi Gras     22
"Of Incomprehensible Magnitude and Bewildering Variety": The 1884 World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition     45
Authenticity in Black and White: The Rise of Tourism in the Twentieth Century     69
Boosting the Big Easy: New Orleans Goes Global     95
From a Culture of Tourism to a Touristic Culture: The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition and the Holy Trinity of New Orleans Tourism     116
A Repertoire of Authenticity: Contested Space and Transformation of the French Quarter     142
"The Greatest Free Show on Earth": Intimations and Antinomies of Commodification and Carnival     169
Conclusion: The Future of New Orleans     197
Notes     213
Selected Bibliography     255
Index     271
About the Author     281