Tulane School of Liberal Arts Magazine Spring/Summer 2020: The New Orleans Issue

liberal arts TULANE SCHOOL OF

MAGAZINE

THE NEW ORLEANS ISSUE SPRING/ SUMMER 2020

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A MURAL BY NEW ORLEANS ARTIST HOUZENGA COMMEMORATES FRONTLINE WORKERS AND INSPIRES THE CITY DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

CHERYL GERBER

liberal arts TULANE SCHOOL OF

MAGAZINE

SPRING/SUMMER 2020 | VOL. 2 | NO. 1

FROM THE DEAN When we established the School of Liberal Arts Magazine one year ago, we decided that each issue would be organized around a theme. Topics would be bold, taking up subjects that matter. They would have resonance across multiple disciplines and allow us to showcase the frequently unexpected ways in which our faculty and students were thinking about big questions.

The theme of this issue—an in-depth look at New Orleans—was planned months before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the 2019-20 academic year. What was originally conceived of as new directions in understanding the supposedly familiar city, now has additional layers of resonance.

When Tulane’s leadership determined to end in-person classes in March, most students were forced to return home, putting them at a great distance from New Orleans.

Since Tulane’s undergraduates travel an average of nearly 1,000 miles to get to school, many in our community are far removed from the city—and missing it all the more profoundly as it confronts a new set of challenges.

I am frequently asked what it is that makes Tulane such a remarkable place to study, to do research, and to live. Clearly New Orleans is a key part of the answer. I have been searching for a vocabulary to describe that peculiar alchemy between Tulane and New Orleans. This city is far more than simply our hometown, or our host (the way other major universities sometimes sit at the periphery of their cities). No, New Orleans is not incidental to Tulane, but rather it is a strand in the university’s DNA.

That essential relationship goes back to our founding in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana, created to train doctors in outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera, which put a commitment to public service and the interplay of research, teaching, and geography at our foundation. It incorporates the inspiring ways in which the university and city struggled together to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Words like resilience, commitment, and community are used frequently to describe this relationship. And as we look forward to the next set of challenges and opportunities, phrases such as global port, creative city, and coastal urbanism continue to arise in conversations about the city’s past, present, and future.

As anyone who has lived in this complex, passionate, and precarious city knows, New Orleans is a city that thrives on social connections. So the stay-at-home orders that stretched for three months between March and June hit its people hard. And yet New Orleanians also know hardship, whether the memory of the long recovery from environmental devastation, or the many times in the past that public health crises have sent them or their forebears into containment.

What emerges here is a complex, global port city with profound challenges, little recognized populations, effaced historical episodes, and lessons for the world. Our writers are scholars, teachers, students, artists, and activists. And our hope is that even the most dedicated New Orleanians will find many moments of surprise.

No single word or phrase can isolate the chemistry between Tulane and New Orleans.

Let us recognize that the creative collision between them is essential, indeed existential, and build on that for the future of both.

BRIAN EDWARDS

Dean & Professor of English School of Liberal Arts

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EDITORIAL DIRECTORS BRIAN T. EDWARDS NICOLE WESTERFIELD WRITER, EDITOR EMILY WILKERSON CONTRIBUTORS RICHARD CAMPANELLA EMILY CLARK GEOFF DANCY ANNIE McNEILL GIBSON DOUGLAS N. HARRIS KENNETH HOFFMAN T. R. JOHNSON SARAH JONES MARILYN MILLER ALLISON TRUITT ANGELA TUCKER MELISSA A. WEBER ART DIRECTOR ARIELLE PENTES DESIGNERS MARIAN HERBERT-BRUNO MELINDA WHATLEY VILES SPECIAL THANKS PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO JENNIFER WAXMAN ______________ SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS LEADERSHIP DEAN BRIAN T. EDWARDS ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR FACULTY AFFAIRS HOLLY FLORA ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR GRADUATE PROGRAMS, GRANTS & RESEARCH KEVIN FOX GOTHAM ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR ACADEMIC INITIATIVES & CURRICULUM VICKI MAYER ______________ The Tulane School of Liberal Arts Magazine is published twice a year by the School of Liberal Arts Dean’s Office, 102 Newcomb Hall, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118.

Please send all magazine correspondence to the address above or libarts@tulane.edu. Material may only be reprinted with permission.

To support the School of Liberal Arts, contact Kassie Cosgrove, Director of Development, at kcosgrove@tulane.edu.

THE NEW ORLEANS ISSUE

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THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY IN NEW ORLEANS

PRESERVING MUSIC AND MEMORY

A TEMPLE IN LITTLE WOODS

LET NEW ORLEANS PLAY ITSELF

By Melissa A. Weber

By Richard Campanella

By Allison Truitt

By Angela Tucker

also in this issue 16 THE SILICON VALLEY OF SCHOOL REFORM 18 WRITING NEW ORLEANS INTO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

FACING DYNAMIC REALITIES

By Emily Wilkerson

26 WHAT HAPPENED TO WALT WHITMAN IN NEW ORLEANS? 27

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LESSONS FOR THE PRESENT

28 STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND NO MORE 30

STUDENT REVOLUTIONARIES

32

OPERATION RESTORATION

34 A CENTER FOR BRAZILIAN SCHOLARSHIP 36

GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

37 WHAT DO YOU WISH PEOPLE KNEW ABOUT NEW ORLEANS? 38 NEW TENURED AND TENURE-TRACK FACULTY

PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO

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BY EMILY WILKERSON

Across New Orleans, locals and visitors alike are posing an imperative question: how can we learn from New Orleans culture without taking advantage of it?

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PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE NEIGHBORHOOD STORY PROJECT

PREVIOUS PAGE: SABINE AND THE DEW DROPS PERFORM AT THE NEIGHBORHOOD STORY PROJECT AS PART OF THE L’UNION CREOLE CONCERT SERIES. THIS PAGE: SHUTTERS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD STORY PROJECT IN THE 7TH WARD.

Within the School of Liberal Arts, faculty and staff support New Orleans culture bearers by teaching understandings of New Orleans’ roots. Through coursework, lectures by faculty and community members, and a wide variety of public programs, the school addresses how individuals can responsibly engage with the city’s history and culture rather than treating it as an inexhaustible natural resource to extract for pleasure or profit. Denise Frazier, a Latin Americanist, Tulane Liberal Arts alumna, and performance artist, is the Assistant Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (NOCGS), a center within Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts. Frazier and NOCGS Executive Director Rebecca Snedeker return to the question of responsible engagement often when developing their programs and events, which are designed with Tulane students, international and local scholars and artists, and New Orleans community members in mind. As Frazier explains, “Forging reciprocal partnerships, providing just compensation for culture bearers, and making space for uncensored truth-telling all help foster equitable relationships and create opportunities for presenters to shine.”

NOCGS operates under the belief that the more one understands where they are, the more they are able to participate in our democracy and collective destiny. Focusing primarily on the culture and environment of the Gulf South region stretching from Texas to Florida, NOCGS organizes public programs that highlight the cultural manifestations of this area by focusing on the inclusion of less commonly heard voices. For example, NOCGS co-hosts the concert series L’Union Creole

with local nonprofits the Neighborhood Story Project and the Preservation Hall Foundation.

Together, the three organizations have hosted family-friendly concerts by local musicians on Sunday evenings, a historic time for local musicians to gather and practice together.

The evenings begin with an interview with each member of the band, which, as Frazier describes, “helps educate audiences about the person playing, and the roots of the instrument and music they’re playing.”

“Culture isn’t something that you do on the side,” says Frazier. “By encouraging attention not only to the historical and contemporary practices of this region, but to futuristic trends as well, NOCGS hopes to support our audience members’ abilities to understand why things are the way they are, so they can find a greater appreciation for the area’s rituals and cycles and how these relate to our geographies.” In March 2021 (postponed for a year), NOCGS will host the third iteration of the Annual Indigenous Symposium. The theme of the symposium is “Being Native Today: Indigenous Identities in the Gulf South,” and the program will focus on the cultural and ecological realities of Native American life in this region. Scholars, artists, and activists will explore Native identity and life today—how southeastern tribes relate identity to land and the federal government, and how racial exclusion and inclusion complicate stereotypical views of Indigenous communities. Sessions will explore issues such as how race-mixing within Indigenous communities has impacted who identifies as Native and which tribes receive federal recognition, as well as how federal

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“Culture isn’t something you do on the side.”

DENISE FRAZIER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE NEW ORLEANS CENTER FOR THE GULF SOUTH

recognition relates to questions surrounding funding, migration, and climate change. The final panel of each Indigenous Symposium offers a platform for Tulane students and faculty across several schools to present their research, prompting a university-wide reflection on the ethics of Tulane’s collaborations with tribes. “The symposium, a space for contemplation,” as Frazier describes, “is emblematic of the center’s programming and invites individuals to consider the region’s music, culinary and artistic traditions, inhabitants, archaeology, geology, and more.”

Skau Art and Music Fund, and Nola4Women, NOCGS hosts one event each semester.

The latest program in the series, “African American Women Affecting the Arts in New Orleans,” included a panel of five African-descended women who lead arts organizations, centers, and companies who met to discuss the nuanced work of supporting culture-bearers. Now in its second year, Women in Movement continues to take on different platforms, such as workshops on reproductive justice and maternal health to city outings on a party bus tracing the history of New Orleans bounce music. These engaging programs become a portal between Tulane University and New

Orleans to reconsider women as cultural producers and creators, not to mention funders, logistical leaders, and activists.

NOCGS’s programs remind us that as New Orleans and the Gulf South are undergoing continual transformation, learning about the deep history of the region’s environment and culture allow us to engage with one another and our surroundings more responsibly. NOCGS continues to encourage Tulanians and community members alike to “de-program” what we think we know about any culture, and to offer immersive educational settings—virtual for now, of course—where we face dynamic realities together.

A NEW MINOR IN

Native American Studies

PHOTO COURTESY OF TUNICA-BILOXI POW WOW

In another effort to support interdisciplinary learning, NOCGS often pairs individuals in the region together in conversation or through special programs. As Frazier explains, by examining subjects from various perspectives—a strategy that lies at the heart of a liberal arts education—we can learn so much more. Recognizing the erasure of women’s stories from musical, political, and civil rights histories, two years ago NOCGS launched Women in Movement, a dynamic public programming series that foregrounds the socio-political and cultural work of African-descended women in the Gulf South. With support from the Newcomb College Institute,

The School of Liberal Arts’ new minor in Native American Studies offers students the opportunity to increase their knowledge of indigenous peoples of the Americas, their (pre)history, their lifeways, their languages, and the issues they face today. Researchers at Tulane are actively involved with Native American tribes of Louisiana, working with them on issues of language and culture revitalization, displacement due to coastal erosion, health concerns and services, and equity issues. Students will have opportunities to collaborate with Native communities, learning as they contribute to projects bolstering indigenous lifeways both in and outside the classroom.

There are many courses at Tulane that explore Native American culture, history, and languages, such as “Introduction to Native America,” “Native American Languages and Linguistics,” “North American Prehistory,” “Arts of Native North America,” and “Tunica: Louisiana’s Sleeping Language.” Through a structured introduction to Native Americans and cultures, Tulane students can gain an appreciation for the continuing contributions of these communities to the American story.

For more information, visit https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/programs/native-american-studies.

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SKETCH OF OPEN AIR MARKET SUNDAY IN NEW ORLEANS THE FRENCH MARKET (ALFRED R. WAUD, HARPER'S WEEKLY, AUGUST 18, 1866)

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THREE HUNDRED YEARS of HUMAN GEOGRAPHY in

New Orleans W

BY RICHARD CAMPANELLA SENIOR PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE TULANE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

hen we discuss the history of New Orleans, we often touch upon the common thread of human geography: where and how we have occupied this deltaic metropolis, and what those historical settlement patterns imply for future prosperity and sustainability—or alternately, hardship and risk.

Key to understanding New Orleans’ human geography is that adjective, “deltaic.”

This region is a prime example of a river-dominated (fluvial) delta, in which the Mississippi’s enormous deposition of sediment overwhelmed the ability of Gulf currents to sweep it away. This explains why lower Louisiana, unlike adjacent coasts, protrudes into the Gulf of Mexico, and why the landscape rose only a dozen or so feet above the sea, with the highest areas (natural levees) occurring exclusively along current or former river banks. Smaller amounts of finer alluvium, meanwhile, settled farther back, becoming swamplands, while the thinnest deposits formed a marshy coastal fringe.

Being a fluvial delta means that freshwater is an intrinsic part of the soil body, and that renewed inputs of freshwater and sediment are needed to prevent this river-dominated delta from becoming sea-dominated, and subsiding into the Gulf of Mexico.

Enter humans into this equation, and the only long-term agricultural settlement opportunities for indigenous populations were on the higher natural levees. Coastal environs, rich in estuarine resources, were used only conditionally; when high water came, Natives relocated accordingly.

French, Spanish, and American engineers, on the other hand, set out to subdue the delta unconditionally—by building engineered structures such as levees and drainage canals to control water and make the land permanently habitable. But because that task was enormous and the technology rudimentary, early New Orleanians had little choice but to build New Orleans exclusively on the natural levees. How they sorted themselves thereupon brings us to the topic of human geography—specifically, residential settlement patterns by class, ethnicity, and race.

In terms of class, empowered families in early-1800s New Orleans tended to occupy the urban core, namely the upper French Quarter and the Faubourg St. Mary (today’s CBD). Why? Lack of mechanized transportation made inner-city living convenient, prestigious, and expensive, whereas life in the banlieues (outskirts) was quite the opposite.

The pattern is an old one— “[European] city centres were inhabited by the well-to-do, while the outer districts were the areas for the poorer segments of the population”—and it carried over to New World cities. Encircling this empowered nucleus were middle- and working-class faubourgs, while farther out in the upper and lower banlieues and along wharves, canals, and the backswamp, were muddy, village-like developments of humble abodes to which gravitated lower-class and indigent families.

Overlaying these class patterns in antebellum (1803–1861) New Orleans was a broader ethnic geography. On the downtown side lived a predominantly French-speaking and Catholic demographic known as “the Creoles,” a pan-racial ethnicity unified by local nativity (having been born here), despite a three-tier division of castes, comprising free white, gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and enslaved black.

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On the upper side of the city were found mostly English-speaking people of Anglo-American ethnicity, generally Protestant in faith and recently arrived from points north. They were known as “the Americans,” and while their uptown neighborhoods had fewer numbers of people of African ancestry, a higher percentage of them were enslaved compared to downtown.

Creoles and Americans competed economically and politically, and struggled to assimilate culturally. Immigrants to this complex multilingual society were caught amidst this rivalry, and formed uneasy alliances with either side depending on where they settled. During the 1820s to 1850s, laborer families mostly from Ireland and Germany arrived by the thousands and settled throughout the upper banlieue along the river (today’s Irish Channel), around the turning basins of the New Basin and Old Basin canals, and in the lower faubourgs of the Third District (“Little Saxony”). At the same time, immigrants from the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Atlantic realms (including French, Spanish, Italians, Haitians, Cubans, Mexicans, and Brazilians) usually settled among the Creoles, finding commonalities in their faith and generally Latin culture.

Those in bondage mostly worked as domestics or clerks, else were “leased out” on urban projects. At night they dwelled in proximity to their masters, in attached quarters or adjacent lodges. Ironically, this so-called “back-alley pattern” created a more heterogeneous racial geography in New Orleans than we see today.

A particularly brutal aspect of life in the antebellum city entailed the temporary yet constant flow of victims of the domestic slave trade, which from 1808 to 1861 sent hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of the upper South and onto lower-South cotton and sugar cane plantations. Archival sources show that over a thousand people on average were sold annually in New Orleans in this era, with 4,435 purchases in 1830 alone (both figures are likely undercounts). Here too there was legislated geography: the City Council in 1829 passed an ordinance prohibiting the exposition and lodging of to-be-sold slaves in the urban core, while permitting it in adjacent faubourgs, for reasons of public image and health.

By the late 1850s, over 35 slave depots, yards, pens, booths, or auction sites operated in New Orleans, which many historians readily identify as the nation’s premier slave marketplace.

Those people of color who were free, meanwhile, tended to settle in the lower Creole neighborhoods, particularly in rear precincts alongside working-class whites and immigrants. Here, elevation was lower, land cheaper, amenities fewer, nuisances more common, and environmental risks greater.

This would become a recurring theme in New Orleans geography: whereas empowered families predominated the higher, opportunity-rich “front” of town, others were often literally marginalized to the “back” of town, near the swamp. Yet it is important to point out these spatial generalities abounded in exceptions, and it was not uncommon to find working-class families, white or of color, living adjacently to prosperous families, or for commerce and light industry to occur within steps of gardened mansions.

Four historical moments would radically transform settlement geographies in subsequent generations. One was mechanized transportation, starting with urban railways in the 1830s, which by the 1890s had grown into an expansive electrified streetcar system. These new methods of transport enabled wealthier people to move outwardly into the former banlieues, starting with the Garden District in the mid-1800s and continuing farther Uptown and along Esplanade Avenue to Bayou St. John by century’s end.

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Concurrently, after the Civil War, emancipated African Americans emigrated to the city by the thousands, only to find mounting segregationist fervor and de-facto relegation to back-of-town spaces like today’s Central City. For decades to come, white-supremacist forces would exert ever-greater pressure on African American populations to live in certain areas and not in others. Rarely were the resulting black settlements without urban nuisances or environment risks.

Thirdly, the post-war and turn-of-the-century era witnessed changes in the geography of immigration. Irish and German arrivals declined, while those from Southern and Eastern Europe increased, including Sicilians, Croatians, Greeks, and Orthodox Jewish Poles and Russians.

Small numbers of people of Asian and other origins also arrived, and as a whole, these cohorts would settle in a more clustered belt immediately surrounding the now-gritty urban core. This was the era, well into the 1900s, when New Orleans developed discernable ethnic enclaves with nicknames like “Little Palermo” (lower French Quarter), “Chinatown” (1100 Tulane Avenue), “the Jewish neighborhood” on Dryades Street (now Oretha Castle Haley), and “the Greek neighborhood” on North Dorgenois, not to mention the older “Irish Channel,” “Little Saxony,” the “Creole Seventh Ward,” and of course, “the French quarters.”

Finally, it was in this same turn-of-the-century era that the technology became available to drain the backswamp. Designed in the 1890s and fully functioning by the 1910s, the municipal drainage system lowered the water table, dried out lakeside lands, and enabled urbanization in Gentilly and Lakeview. White middle-class populations eagerly moved into these new auto-friendly subdivisions, as authorities sidestepped judicial rulings against explicitly discriminatory zoning ordinances by allowing the private real estate sector to create segregated neighborhoods through tactics such as racist deed covenants and redlining. The late 1930s also saw the first federal housing programs, which reduced the formerly heterogeneous racial geography of the city by segregating working-class occupants into white-only and black-only super-block “projects.”

White-only subdivisions in Lakeview and Gentilly imparted a twist to the old front-of-town/back-of-town pattern, which tended to position poorer black populations on lower ground. Now, white populations increasingly occupied the lowest and fastest-sinking soils, having been drained of their ground water. But confidence in levees and drainage technology seemingly neutralized these topographic concerns in the minds of most people, even as flood risk mounted—on account of urban sprawl, sinking soils, canal excavation in the east and West Bank, oil and gas extraction region-wide, and the deprivation of freshwater and new sediment by the levees along the Mississippi. Lower Louisiana starting in the 1930s would begin to lose upwards of 2,000 square miles of coastal wetlands, putting New Orleans at ever-greater geophysical risk.

The decline of de jure segregation during the 1950s–1960s may have brought the races closer together in the workplace and public facilities, but it occasioned the opposite in residential settlement patterns. White flight, followed by a broader middle-class exodus, made formerly diverse working-class neighborhoods mostly poor and black by the late 1900s.

Fleeing families resettled westward and across the river in Jefferson Parish, eastward to St. Bernard Parish, and, after the construction of hurricane-protection levees, to the “suburb within the city” known today as New Orleans East. That area underwent a dramatic racial changeover during the 1980s, such that by the 2000s, the New Orleans metropolis

comprised a predominately African American eastern half; a more white western half; a previously divested but now gentrifying urban core; and an increasing suburbanization of working-class and impoverished households (along with what were once euphemistically described as “inner-city problems”). It was in this era that greater New Orleans began spawning exurbs in places like Mandeville, Covington, and Slidell, complete with their own office parks and white-collar economic sectors.

The Hurricane Katrina deluge of 2005 and subsequent recovery

efforts jostled and shifted regional human geographies, but did not fundamentally change them. Most socio-spatial patterns and controversies today, on the occasion of New Orleans’ 300th anniversary, derive from decisions, opportunities, relegations, and exclusions that were centuries in the making.

This essay was originally published in The Data Center’s “The New Orleans Prosperity Index: Tricentennial Collection,” in April 2018. For more information, including the original version of the essay with footnotes, visit datacenterresearch.org.

EXPLORING THE GEOGRAPHY OF NEW ORLEANS

The School of Liberal Arts offers a wide variety of courses that explore the geography of New Orleans. Varying in format, discipline, and structure, these courses look at the physical nature of the clay in the region, histories of migrations and forced migrations to the South, languages spoken in the region, and ways in which we can engage with and record our environment more intricately, helping us understand New Orleans and the Gulf South in greater depth.

URBAN GEOGRAPHY: NEW ORLEANS CASE STUDY Department: Architecture/Urban Studies Professor: Richard Campanella URBAN GEOGRAPHY: NEW ORLEANS CASE STUDY explores how to analyze cities spatially, using New Orleans as a detailed case study. This topic is covered through lectures, discussion, field trips, film, research, and presentations.

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ART AND SCIENCE OF DELTA CLAY Department: Studio Art Professor: Jeremy Jernegan ART AND SCIENCE OF DELTA CLAY examines the nature of the layers of clay New Orleans is built on, from the perspective of geologic sedimentation, an urban living environment, and as a material for ceramic art. Working individually and in small groups, students develop new artworks made from clay sourced from digs at various sites in the city, exploring issues of identity, land, and water in the New Orleans region.

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THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE Department: History Professor: Laura Rosanne Adderley THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE explores the cultural, economic, and social history of the African slave trade into the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The course particularly emphasizes the nature of this forced migration as a unique process of cultural interaction and cultural change.

› LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT Department: English Professor: Michelle Kohler LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT considers how texts—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film—can disrupt dominant ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and the natural world, and accumulates tools for analyzing representations of natural environments and for assessing their ethical/ecological implications. Topics include climate-change fiction and other science fiction, sustainability, posthumanism, animal studies, environmental racism and justice, and environmental precarity in southern Louisiana.

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HAITIAN CREOLE Department: French and Italian Professor: Myrlene Bruno In HAITIAN CREOLE, students develop skills to participate in conversations about real events about Haiti. Communicative contexts and grammatical guides are introduced in class through a variety of activities.

Linguistic and cultural competencies acquired in the course can ultimately lead to service learning in the Haitian community of New Orleans, the Caribbean, and beyond.

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PRESE

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SERVING

MUSIC AND MEMORY BYÂ ME LIS S A A. W E BE R CURATOR, H OG AN JA Z Z A RC HIV E TULAN E UN IVE R S IT Y S PECIAL COLLECTION S

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MAHALIA JACKSON SINGING ACCOMPANIED BY THOMAS DORSEY ON PIANO LGPH0155, LAURRAINE GOREAU COLLECTION, HJA-059, TULANE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HOWARDTILTON MEMORIAL LIBRARY, TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS, LA.

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OPENING PAGE: MAHALIA JACKSON HOLDING SHEET MUSIC AND SINGING INTO STUDIO MICROPHONE WITH EYES CLOSED LGPH0210, LAURRAINE GOREAU COLLECTION, HJA-059, TULANE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HOWARD-TILTON MEMORIAL LIBRARY, TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS, LA.

n a 1958 interview for DownBeat Magazine, New Orleans’ Mahalia Jackson told writer Studs Terkel, “We shouldn’t forget our roots, our history.”

Jackson, one of the most significant artists in twentieth-century American culture and music, couldn’t have been more accurate. It is the history of New Orleans, which involves cultural, intellectual, architectural, and sociological innovations, that has influenced both the historical narrative and current developments of life in the U.S. And the Hogan Jazz Archive, housed within Tulane University’s Special Collections, helps to tell these important stories to students, community members, and researchers around the world. The Hogan is a leading resource in the study of New Orleans music, its musicians, practitioners, and participants, and has been since its founding in 1958 as the Archive of New Orleans Jazz. Through the stories contained within its collections, users gain a greater understanding of New Orleans’ contributions and its global implications.

Archives maintain and make accessible rare, non-circulating items, including correspondence, photographs, sound, moving image materials, business papers, and more. These records are important because the objects and information contained within preserve and share histories of people, places, and events.

Most recently, as curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive, I’ve been thrilled to serve as a project manager for two major grant awards that Tulane University Special Collections recently received from the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). These awards will support the digitizing and accessibility efforts of collections that will interest scholars of U.S. political science, women’s studies, African American history and cultural studies, media and communications, musicology,

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and New Orleans history, among other disciplines.

Through generous support from the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program, Tulane University Special Collections is preserving and digitizing 25 recordings from the collection of New Orleans broadcast pioneer Vernon Winslow, popularly known as Dr. Daddy-O. Winslow, credited as the first Black radio disc jockey to host his own full-length radio show in New Orleans, began his on-air career in 1949 when Jax Brewery embraced his style and scripts for the “Jivin’ with Jax” show. The 78 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm acetates selected for digitization include material used in broadcasts aired between 1949 and 1958, including live remotes; personalized promo announcements for New Orleans bars, music clubs, and the renowned J&M Recording Studio; and interviews with legendary artists such as Roy Brown, Duke Ellington, Avery “Kid” Howard, and Little Esther Phillips. Once digitized, the recordings will be accessible to the public online through Tulane’s Digital Library.

In addition to the GRAMMY Museum grant, CLIR awarded Tulane University Special Collections a Recordings at Risk Grant to support “Tell the Real Story of Me: Mahalia Jackson and Black Gospel Quartets in the South” in 2019. The project will preserve and give access to original recorded interviews with Jackson, not only heralded internationally as “The Queen of Gospel,” but also recognized as a Civil Rights Movement activist and an influential figure in Black American culture. Interviews conducted from 1967-1974 by Jackson’s biographer Laurraine Goreau also include primary accounts of Jackson by entertainers Ella Fitzgerald, John Hammond, Della Reese, and Dinah Shore; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) co-founder Reverend Ralph Abernathy; television host Ed Sullivan; gospel stars J. Robert Bradley, Thomas A.

RIGHT: WONDER RECORDING FROM THE VERNON WINSLOW A.K.A. DR. DADDY-O COLLECTION, HJA-055, TULANE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HOWARD-TILTON MEMORIAL LIBRARY, TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS, LA.

PHOTOS ON THIS PAGE BY PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO

BELOW: CASSETTE TAPES FROM THE LAURRAINE GOREAU COLLECTION, TULANE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HOWARD-TILTON MEMORIAL LIBRARY, TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS, LA.

Dorsey, Sallie Martin, and Albertina Walker; and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Turkel, among other influential figures.

The CLIR grant award will also help to preserve and provide access to interviews with Black gospel quartet singers and practitioners, serving as an oral history of the regional Black gospel quartet music scene that both predated and assisted Jackson’s international success. In interviews conducted from 1981-1986 by scholar and Tulane University Special Collections library associate Lynn Abbott, gospel performers like Mary Thames Coleman, Reverend Paul Exkano, and Bessie Griffin; local blues and rhythm & blues heroes such as Chuck Carbo and Snooks Eaglin; and other obscure and familiar

artists explain the development of Black gospel quartets in New Orleans.

These two oral history digitization projects, in addition to all future Tulane University Special Collections initiatives, will continue the mission to not only document and tell stories about our history via archives but also to make collections accessible to all. Through these collections, researchers can discover alternative perspectives, overlooked stories, and new multidisciplinary approaches to reviewing and learning the people, places, and culture of New Orleans and the surrounding region.

And, as a result, never forgetting our history.

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THE SILICON VALLEY OF SCHOOL REFORM

BY D OU GL AS N. HARRI S P ROF E S S OR AND DEPART M ENT CH AIR OF ECON OMICS S C HL I E D E R FO U NDAT I O N C HAI R IN PUBLIC E DUCATION D IR ECTOR O F T HE ED U C AT I O N RE S E ARCH ALLIAN CE FOR N E W ORLE AN S

T

ulane University is fortunate to be located in its unique home of New Orleans. Really, it is difficult to imagine the university being anywhere else. The city shapes the university, and the university shapes the city.

Nowhere is that relationship closer than with New Orleans public schools. Before Hurricane Katrina, the public school system was like just about every other system across the country: a locally-elected board governed the schools, teachers were unionized and had tenure, and students mostly went to schools in their own neighborhoods.

After the storm, that old way disappeared. The state took over governance of almost all schools and turned them into charter schools, run by private non-profits. New Orleans Public Schools regained local control in 2019, but this was not a return to the past. Rather, New Orleans is now the only all-charter school district in the country.

Tulane was involved in these reforms from the beginning. After the storm, then-Tulane president Scott Cowen led the mayor-appointed committee that solicited community input and made recommendations, and he continues to lead the Cowen Institute at Tulane in monitoring and analyzing progress and developing innovative programs. Expanding on these efforts, the university recruited me to come to Tulane to found the Education Research Alliance (ERA) for New Orleans. In 2014, we started by forming our advisory board, which is comprised of local education leaders with widely varying views about the reforms—from teacher unions to the state department of education.

However, these groups all agree on one thing: the school reform debate 16 | TUL A NE SCHOO L O F LIBER A L A RTS M AG A ZIN E

should be informed by objective, rigorous, and useful evidence.

What have we found in our studies? Schools are complicated places with multifaceted goals. But there have been some productive outcomes in the 14 years since the reforms started:

• The New Orleans school reforms significantly increased commonly-measured student outcomes: the average student in New Orleans moved from the 22nd percentile nationally to the 37th percentile, while high school graduation rates, college entry, and college graduation increased by 10-30 percent each.

• The reforms reduced almost every type of achievement gap by race, income, and special education status.

• Most parents of children attending the new schools, as well as voters, generally believe the reforms improved schools.

However, not all developments have been so positive: • While student performance has improved compared with the pre-reform era, it is hard to celebrate being at the 37th percentile nationally.

• Our surveys of students suggest that the quality of teaching in New Orleans schools is also below the national average. This may be related to the relatively low levels of teacher experience and certification and high turnover.

• The reforms shifted funds out of the classroom to cover increased costs of administration and transportation.

And perhaps most importantly, the process of creating the reforms left out New Orleans’ local, mostly African American community. The

process disenfranchised African Americans, creating a deep, lasting wound that the reformers have struggled to heal. This exclusion from the process may have also had educational consequences: though achievement gaps declined, our student surveys find that African American students have a less positive experience than white students in school.

While the reforms remain controversial, such rapid success on key academic metrics has put New Orleans educators in high demand for leadership positions and consulting jobs elsewhere. Some of the new non-profits and for-profits have spread their wings to other cities. In these respects, the Tulane-New Orleans relationship parallels what Stanford did with the technology sector in the San Francisco area. New Orleans is now akin to the Silicon Valley of school reform.

Our role at ERA-New Orleans has been to ask the tough questions and communicate our answers—positive and negative—to the community. We have influenced schooling decisions by shaping our understanding of schools and student experiences. References to our reports can be seen not only in the media, but also in school professional development sessions, school board meetings, and community

discussions about education. Our reports have also received attention around the world—in addition to more than 100 references in national and international media, we have discussed our work with education ministers and parliamentary delegations from four continents.

ERA-New Orleans is continuing to evolve and find new ways for our research to make a difference for New Orleans children. We are working to transform our organization into a true research-practice partnership, where members of our advisory board, which includes the city’s public school district, can vote on research questions and quickly receive analyses that will help inform policy decisions.

As in Silicon Valley, the relationship between universities and their cities can be transformative. For ERA-New Orleans, my hope is to continue giving back to the city’s schools and students for decades to come. We must learn from what transpired in our past so that we, as a community, can make informed decisions about the character of the schools we want for our children.

LEARNING FROM THE ERA-NEW ORLEANS My work at ERA-New Orleans as an undergraduate intern, and now research analyst, has propelled me into the world of education research. While at ERA-New Orleans, I’ve worked on a variety of policy-relevant research projects, attended meetings with New Orleans school and community leaders, and met prominent education researchers throughout the country. I am proud of the research we do at ERA-New Orleans not only because it is rigorous, but also because it is designed to be useful for the community by providing quantitative evidence on the effects of education policy changes.

CATHY BALFE (SLA ’18)

Research Analyst Education Research Alliance for New Orleans Tulane University

I really found a passion for education research through my work at ERA. After I graduated from Tulane University, I took a job with the Indiana State Legislative Services Agency as a fiscal analyst for education policy. In that role I got to help legislators understand the impacts of different policies they wanted to implement. I am currently an Instructor of Economics at Butler University, and I continue to work on education research as a contractor with the state of Indiana.

Of course research is important for the sake of creating knowledge, but I think the work at ERA is unique in its ability to bring

together a wide variety of perspectives—practitioners, researchers, parents, and other stakeholders. This leads to better quality research and a more receptive audience once the research is articulated.

WHITNEY BROSS ( PhD ’16)

Instructor of Economics Lacy School of Business Butler University

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D. LAMMIE-HANSON, SILVERPOINT DRAWING ON BLACK SURFACE, 2018.

Writing New Orleans

into the American Revolution

BYÂ EMILY CLARK, CLEMENT CHAMBERS BENENSON PROFESSOR IN AMERICAN COLONIAL HISTORY

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M

ost Americans don’t know that Louisiana fought in the American Revolution on the side of the thirteen British mainland colonies.

Only a handful know that one of the soldiers from Spanish colonial Louisiana who helped win America’s freedom was a man named Noel Carrière, the commander of the New Orleans free black militia.

The absence of Louisiana and Carrière from most versions of America’s founding story highlights one the great paradoxes embodied by New Orleans. In the popular imagination, the city is unique, unlike any other in the U.S.—an exotic, exceptional place that sits outside the parameters of what is typically American, past and present.

This is the city that is promoted to tourists and, if truth be told, to prospective Tulane students. The New Orleans waiting to be discovered in the city’s archives, however, is quintessentially American, right down to the role it played in the nation’s birth. If you don’t know that this story and its heroes are there to be found, though, you’re unlikely to go looking for them. Even if you’re a historian. And even if you are a historian and intrigued by that prospect, in order to find them you have to be able to read the French and Spanish documents that reveal the city’s history.

The majority of American Revolution historians have not found themselves on this path. And although I can and do read French and Spanish, I have to confess that I did not go looking for Carrière. I stumbled over him. In the course of a quarter of a century in New Orleans archives spent chasing down the histories of colonial nuns and free people of color, I kept coming across his name. He flitted in and out of the archives like a moth, indistinct and elusive, but persistent. About ten years ago, I realized that I had enough archival fragments to trace him from his birth in slavery in the 1740s to his death in 1804. It’s rare to be able to do that, since the records that fill America’s archives were produced by Europeans and their descendants who were eager to tell their stories but mentioned Africans and African-descended people only in passing, if at all. That was especially true of those born into slavery, like Carrière.

Yet there he was in the archives, again and again. The priests of St. Louis Cathedral recorded him as the godfather and namesake of many enslaved and free infants and adults who shared his African ancestry. Those same priests wrote him into the historical record as an honored witness at the marriages of men who served under him in Louisiana’s free black militia. New Orleans notaries included

him in the inventories of those who claimed him as a slave, recorded his sale to new owners and, finally, inscribed his name on the document that verified his purchase of himself, an act that made him legally free. Another priest documented his marriage, and yet another his burial. A census revealed that he was a barrel maker, and an act of sale revealed that he owned a home and a workshop in New Orleans. Other acts of sale chronicle his purchase of other human beings to labor for him, a sobering, confusing discovery. Spanish governors listed him on the rolls of the free black militia and twice nominated him for medals and monetary rewards for his valor in battles of the American Revolution.

As the bits and pieces from the archives piled up and I worked to make sense of them, I realized that Carrière epitomized many of the things that made America, America. He pulled himself up from nothing.

He was a devoted husband and father who worked hard so that he could leave enough to his children to provide them with the security his own father, captured in Africa and enslaved in Louisiana, could not give to him.

He fought bravely in the war that granted America independence and promised its people freedom. And, like so many economically successful American men of his time, he bought the bodies of others to serve him. One of the great ironies embodied by America’s founders was their invocation of liberty even as they held others in bondage. In this, sadly, Carrière was no different from Thomas Jefferson.

In other ways, Carrière could not have been more different. His father came to New Orleans in the hold of a slave ship as a small, terrified child taken captive in the chaos that followed the fall of the African kingdom of Ouidah. The African-born commander of the Louisiana free black militia who taught Noel the arts of war initiated him into the great military tradition of the ceddo warriors of Senegambia. The most important people in Noel Carrière’s life, the people who taught him how to be a man, a husband, a father and a soldier, were Africans. He was an American Revolutionary War hero, but he joined that fight as much as a son of Africa as a son of America.

Noel Carrière was a global American founder, a figure who embodies the intersection of New Orleans with the U.S. and the wider world. He was worth looking for.

Clark’s book, Noel Carrière’s Liberty: From Slave to Soldier in Colonial New Orleans, is expected to be in print in early 2021.

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A Temple in

PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO

LITTLE WOODS

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OPPOSITE PAGE: SISTER THANH TRANG AT THE BUDDHIST CENTER IN THE LITTLE WOODS NEIGHBORHOOD OF NEW ORLEANS.

BY ALLISON TRUITT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY New Orleans’ Little Woods neighborhood stretches out along the southern shoreline of Lake Ponchartrain. Once called “poor man’s Miami Beach,” the area was famous for its fishing camps perched on stilts and piers jutting into the water. In the 1920s, these camps housed restaurants and a few music clubs, but later, only those in Little Woods withstood the onslaught of development planning, including the ambitious East Lakefront Development program proposed by the Orleans Levee Board in 1963. This was the case at least until 1998, when even those camps were reduced to pilings by Hurricane Georges, and in its aftermath when the mayor refused to grant rebuilding permits, citing public health concerns. Today, Little Woods is best known as home to the New Orleans Lakefront Airport.

I had never visited the neighborhood until September 2019 when I learned that Sister Thanh Trang, a Buddhist monk, had returned to New Orleans and established a new temple. After Hurricane Katrina, she resided in a nearby Buddhist center but left the city after a year or so. A few Vietnamese families continued to rely on her to carry out funeral rituals and to provide spiritual guidance and many urged her to return and settle down in New Orleans.

New Orleans is said to be an exceptional city. After the hurricane, the city embraced Vietnamese Americans within this narrative, particularly the New Orleans East neighborhood, centered around Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. But if exceptionalism highlights some stories, it casts shadows on others, overlooking those places and peoples that do not conform to the city’s exuberant storylines. As a cultural anthropologist, I have focused on Buddhist institutions along the Gulf Coast, and how these institutions challenge our understandings of the city and its place in the world. Presently, New Orleans has numerous Buddhist centers, including five Vietnamese temples in the greater metropolitan area, a Thai temple, and other meditation groups. Yet these spiritual communities are seen not of the city, only in the city, reinscribing the persistent trope of Asian Americans as strangers from a distant shore.

How can we instead see Asian Americans as full participants in the process of rewriting New Orleans, inscribing new meanings into the city’s landscape? The large structure that houses Sister Thanh Trang’s Buddhist Center on Edgelake Court today was once the residence of a Baptist pastor. Neighbors claimed he never returned after Katrina and that the building had lay vacant for almost 15 years.

Last year Sister Thanh Trang saw a posting for the property just days before it was to be auctioned by a bank. She drove by and walked through an open gate. There she saw a large yard with its towering live oaks. The neighbors welcomed her, and now Sister Thanh Trang and her fellow monk, Sister Thiên . Trang, support their vocation by caring for a dozen or so children after school.

I visited Sister Thanh Trang again in the early afternoon in December. She was dressed in grey robes topped off with a brown down vest, her smile warm and open. While we drank tea, we lingered over stories of her childhood—how she had fled Vietnam in 1981 at the age of eight; how she learned to shop and cook for her father and three younger sisters in Hong Kong; how her mother arrived three years later; how her family was later transferred to the Philippines, a former U.S. colony, to learn American culture. She giggled as she recounted her attempt to reconcile her attraction to Buddhism with her adolescence in America, and how her master refused to believe her when she told him she wanted to become a monk. She later resided in monasteries in California, Indiana, France, and Taiwan. Now she was ready to plant herself, and her practice, in New Orleans.

As our conversation wound down, she led me down the narrow hall, past the newly completed worship hall, through the classroom filled with art supplies, to the backyard. She showed me where she had removed dozens of trees so the children would have room to run, but she left the large oak tree in the front yard standing. Its thick trunk and outstretched limbs may have been standing long before the neighborhood was known for its fishing camps and public beaches. Now rooted firmly in the ground, the tree would shelter the temple in Little Woods.

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LET NEW ORLEANS PLAY ITSELF

BY A N G ELA T U C KER VI S IT I NG AS SI STANT P RO FE S S OR D IG ITAL M EDI A P RACT I C ES

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PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO

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I

TOP LEFT: ALL SKINFOLK AIN'T KINFOLK. THE UNPRECEDENTED STORY OF A HISTORICAL MAYORAL RUNOFF TOLD THROUGH THE EYES OF BLACK WOMEN LIVING IN NEW ORLEANS. DIRECTED BY ANGELA TUCKER. BOTTOM RIGHT: CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY ANGELA TUCKER, THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES "AFROPOP" DELIVERS ENGAGING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING STORIES ABOUT MODERN LIFE IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA.

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t was the end of 2014, and I needed to do a real intake of my life. I was living in my hometown, New York City, and I had hit a wall. I was steadily working on an enviable amount of film freelance jobs, a difficult feat to pull off in this competitive industry, but was beyond exhausted. At that time, I knew I wanted to teach more, to take fewer soul-sucking money jobs, to continue my life’s work of creating media about underrepresented communities, and to live in a place where people valued and appreciated the importance of joy, rest, and self-care. So, with my production company, TuckerGurl Inc., I took the plunge and moved to New Orleans.

When I told film industry people that I was moving to New Orleans, they would often say, “Oh, there’s so much film happening there now.” I would reply with excitement but honestly, I did not know how this perceived boom in film work in Louisiana would affect me directly. My company’s biggest client was Black Public Media, an arm of public television, where I am the Co-Executive Producer for their documentary series “AfroPoP.” That project could be done from anywhere but it was not enough income to hold me for the year. Part of my rationale for moving was a desire to make more fiction projects, especially feature length films. I knew that large studio films like Jurassic Park 3 or series like NCIS: New Orleans filmed in the city but they weren’t exactly posting job listings for independent film directors. I had to dig deeper to understand what these film incentives meant for me.

Louisiana’s film tax credit program has been around since 2002. In layman’s terms, having this program means that productions at a certain price point can get benefits, also called incentives, for filming in Louisiana. States have become production hubs entirely because of incentives, with Georgia and Louisiana at the top of the list creating a new regional hub called “Hollywood South.”

In Louisiana, these incentives include filmmakers getting back 30% of what they spend in the state. For larger projects, this can add up to a return of millions of dollars. Obviously, this money has to come from somewhere—in 2019, the state of Louisiana shelled out $150 million toward film tax incentives alone—and for a state as poor as ours, having incentives this extensive, does not come cheap.

However, the influx of crewmembers and actors brings increased revenue to local businesses throughout the city.

I quickly learned that these incentives would benefit me in ways I wouldn’t have imagined working in New York City. Even though I was not working on these larger features, my peers were.

This steady work allowed me to easily find crew and collaborators

who had outlets to earn regular income. The arrival of studio films and television shows has created what Governor John Bel Edwards called in a recent industry event a “creative class:” a group of people that can remain in Louisiana making a living while pursuing their own passion projects. I’ve been able to meet other independent filmmakers quickly because of New Orleans’ size and culture, and groups like Film Fatales and organizations like the New Orleans Film Society and the New Orleans Video Access Center have allowed me to create a community with invaluable friendships. Most filmmakers get jobs because of referrals and so the more people you know, the better.

What a bigger investment in the Southern film industry and an increased interest in Southern stories have made clear is that the film industry has a growing interest in regionalism. Documentary funders have started the charge by creating new programs like Tribeca Film Institute’s If/Then Short Documentary Program, which specifically funds filmmakers based in underserved regions like the South or the Midwest so they’re able to make short documentaries that are distributed on major platforms like The New York Times’ website or PBS. These funders see the importance of having work made by people living in these regions. Independent feature film-

making is slowly following suit but there is still a tendency to use places like New Orleans as a studio space instead of making stories that are specific to the region. Vicki Mayer, a professor in the School of Liberal Arts Department of Communication, attests to this in her book Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy, observing that the influx of film-making in New Orleans has “created a para-industry predicated on the city’s malleability as a canvas.”

But many of us are trying to change that. Now armed with an incredible community of filmmaking collaborators, I too am working to create local New Orleans stories in partnership with makers who are indigenous to this community. I have found a new quality of life that allows for more rest and focus. I have been able to make a feature length film, “All Styles,” currently available on Amazon, and also make three short films, one of which, All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk, premiered on PBS’ Reel South in April, while beginning to teach in Tulane’s Digital Media Practices Program. I know this doesn’t sound restful but trust me, it is!

After six years in New Orleans, I have seen more and more filmmakers and small studios bring their film projects to the city and increasingly hire local crew and talent in more decision-making positions. I have a deeper understanding of the complicated and beautiful history of my new city and, therefore, am able to tell richer and complex stories about it. However, until the larger film industry directly funds and distributes more work by born-and-raised Louisiana makers, we still have a long way to go in creating an industry that benefits everyone equally.

UPDATE: I wrote this piece before COVID-19 was in our midst. As the world struggles with how to handle reopening, the film community is doing the same. This summer I was supposed to direct a feature length fiction film that has been postponed. As of now, there are no answers, but every filmmaker knows that people are hungry for content. I remain optimistic that regional stories that have a strong point of view and are grounded will still be desirable to the filmgoing public. I know the New Orleans film community will weather this, but I also know that none of us will be the same.

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What Happened to Walt Whitman in New Orleans?

S

omething happened to Walt Whitman during his short stay in New Orleans. The details are sparse—it probably happened in March or April of 1848, maybe May, and probably not far from the foot of Canal Street. What happened could only have happened here, and it changed him forever.

A breakthrough, an awakening, an epiphany, whatever it was, it laid the groundwork for the most innovative and influential body of work in all of U.S. literature.

Whitman was twenty-nine years old when he arrived in New Orleans, having just been fired from a Brooklyn newspaper for his anti-slavery views. Why he would have travelled such a distance to take a similar job in the city that was the hub of the slave trade is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he knew he wouldn’t last long and was using the job merely as an excuse for a jaunt. He had never been out of Brooklyn and its environs; he was wholly unprepared for the dazzling wide-open landscapes he encountered and that would figure so prominently in his poetry. But even more exciting to him was the sheer social complexity he found in New Orleans. As New Orleans journalist Lafcadio Hearn wrote a generation later, “Every race that the world boasts is here, and a good many races that are nowhere else.”

Though usually thought of as a quintessentially New York City poet, chanting his way through his long catalogues of different social types, that kind of language only emerged in his notebooks in the immediate aftermath of his three-month stay in New Orleans, a place considerably more diverse than the Brooklyn of his upbringing. A handful of years later, this vision of urban democracy would be the cornerstone of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

BY T.R. JOHNSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND WEISS PRESIDENTIAL FELLOW

Of all that he encountered in this “cosmic soup,” nothing focused his attention more than the themes of slavery and freedom. In the New York that he knew, people of African descent constituted less than three percent of the population, but in New Orleans in that period, they accounted for 30 percent, and, were it not for the influx of Irish and German immigrants into the city in that decade, the figure would have been well over 50 percent. What this meant for the culture of the city is easy to see, and its impact on Whitman is impossible to overstate. He kept an advertisement for a slave auction, presumably plucked off a wall of a French Quarter building, close to hand for the next forty years. He used it to serve, he said, as “a reminder” and “a warning”—a foil against which all of his writing, forever afterward, would push.

Countless literary artists have followed in Whitman’s footsteps, coming to New Orleans for a few weeks, a few months, or a few years, and culling from their experiences of this place visions and meanings that would spark and shape their entire life’s work.

Johnson is the editor of New Orleans: A Literary History (Cambridge 2019), the fourth chapter of which—written by Ed Folsom— forms the basis of this piece.

THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION, ACC. NO. 1995.19

LEFT: CAMP ALGIERS WAS A WORLD WAR II INTERNMENT CAMP LOCATED IN NEW ORLEANS.

Lessons for the Present FROM THE LATIN AMERICAN ALIEN ENEMY PROGRAM

BY MARILYN MILLER ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE AND SIZELER PROFESSOR IN JEWISH STUDIES

Displacement, family separation, indefinite detention, and uncertainty regarding the present and the future—these are the conditions faced by contemporary asylum seekers and other migrants hoping to enter the U.S. They also characterize the experiences of some 30,0000 men, women, and children of European and Japanese descent who were interned in U.S.-operated detention facilities between 1941-1946 under the Latin American Enemy Alien Control Program. As a primary port of entry for named alien enemies deported to the U.S., and the site of an internment facility in the Algiers neighborhood, New Orleans played an important role in this little-known aspect of WWII history.

While more than 100,000 persons of Japanese descent in the U.S., two thirds of whom were American citizens, were detained during WWII domestically, another internment effort reached into fifteen neighboring republics in efforts to bolster hemispheric security during wartime. With the help of the FBI, Latin American officials named, apprehended, and detained noncitizens who had arrived in Central and South America throughout the early 20th century from areas that by 1941 had come under Nazi or fascist control. Though only about one in ten detainees were active Nazis or pro-Fascists, the “dangerous alien enemies” were deported to camps in the U.S. Many of these individuals arrived in the Port of New Orleans aboard military vessels en route to camps in other states. A small percentage, including an unlikely contingent of sixty Jewish refugees, were held at Camp Algiers, an immigrant quarantine station on New Orleans’ West Bank, about three miles from the French Quarter.

What lessons regarding U.S.-Latin American relations and immigration debates does this slice of New Orleans history offer us today? The episode illustrates Latin America’s own importance as a historical haven for a wide variety of immigrants and refugees, and warns us of the dangers of blanket categorizations of any group of persons on the basis of country of origin, religion, or race. As the Crescent City takes stock of its first three hundred years and looks ahead to the next century, understanding its role in receiving detained enemy aliens from Latin America during WWII can equip its citizens to better address the contemporary challenge of providing a “gateway” to the Americas for other seekers of refuge and opportunity.

Miller’s book Port of No Return. Enemy Alien Internment in WWII New Orleans is forthcoming from LSU Press.

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Strangers in a Strange Land No More

BY KENNETH HOFFMAN (A&S ’88, G ’93) DIRECTOR, MUSEUM OF THE SOUTHERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE

D

id you know that as a seven-year-old boy, Louis Armstrong was taken in by the Karnofskys, a New Orleans family of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania?

They helped him purchase his first cornet, and for the rest of his life, Armstrong wore a necklace with a Jewish Star on it as a reminder of their kindness. This story, while not typical of the Southern Jewish experience, opens the door to new ways of thinking about Southern history. Once opened, you may be surprised by what you find.

The history of the South is rich in culture, contribution, conflict, and cooperation that comes with exploring the often-overlooked history of various immigrant groups who came South—strangers in a strange land, if you will.

In an effort to tell a more comprehensive story of New Orleans, the Gulf South, and the U.S., the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experi-

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ence will open in New Orleans in early 2021.

Located just blocks away from the National WWII Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center, the museum is poised to become an important educational facility, a heartfelt testament to the legacy of Judaism in the South, and a vibrant center for cultural exploration and understanding.

The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience will be the only museum in the country to explore the history and culture of Jews across the South, from Virginia to Texas, Arkansas to Florida, in big cities and small towns. It’s a history that goes back in places to Colonial times, but one that is both dynamic and enduring, mirroring—and bumping up against—the history of regional, national, and world events. During the Revolutionary War, Mordecai Sheftall, an Orthodox Jew of Savannah, Georgia, became the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Colonial forces. He helped defend the city from British invasion, lent a considerable sum to the American cause, and served time as a British prisoner of war. By 1900, Jewish communities thrived throughout the South, with more than 125,000 Jews living in hundreds of cities and towns. As merchants, they helped the South recover from the Civil War. As civic leaders, they served as mayors, aldermen, and judges. All the time, they made choices about how to fit in as Southerners and when to stand out as Jews. It is those choices that give these stories their universal appeal and offer us lasting lessons.

The museum’s board of directors chose New Orleans as our home based on the city’s vibrant tourism economy, its rich Jewish history, and the presence of Tulane University, with its sizeable Jewish student population and impressive Department of Jewish Studies. Partnering

Center for the American Jewish Experience at Tulane University

PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO

I

with Tulane’s Center for Public Service, the museum has so far worked with nine student interns cataloging artifacts, researching documents, and preparing for the museum’s opening. Once open, the museum will continue to offer Tulane students real-world experience in the museum field. And together with the School of Liberal Arts Department of Jewish Studies, the museum also hopes to implement student research projects on Jewish history across the South.

Beyond focusing a light on part of the South’s lesser-known history, the museum aims to expand visitors’ understanding of what it means to be Southern, what it means to be a Jew, and ultimately, what it means to be an American. The lessons of tolerance, strength in diversity, and community that shine through the Southern Jewish story are universal lessons—not lessons to be forced onto people, but lessons to be experienced and shared in engaging and approachable ways.

The museum’s unique collection of artifacts—from Judaica brought by immigrants to Ardmore, Oklahoma, to dry goods store ledgers from Shaw, Mississippi, and a wedding dress worn at a Jewish wedding in New Orleans in the 1880s—provide the building blocks of three galleries of interactive exhibits. Non-Jewish visitors will learn the basics of Judaism in a special exhibit designed to explore Jewish beliefs, life cycle events, and

holidays. Children will get to choose what they would pack if they were moving to another country and if they only had one suitcase.

All visitors can explore Jewish history state-bystate on a wall-sized interactive touch screen.

Visitors to the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, will leave not only understanding something about Southern Jews and Judaism but may also gain more understanding about themselves and their own experiences as strangers in a strange land.

So, as we say at MSJE, “Shalom. Make yourself at home.”

MSJE Executive Director Kenneth Hoffman is a 1988 graduate of Tulane’s College of Arts & Sciences and earned an M.A. in history from Tulane in 1993. He wrote his thesis on the Jews of Port Gibson, Mississippi. For more information on MSJE, visit www.msje.org.

OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: SLOGAN OF THE MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN EXPERIENCE. OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM: A PRAYER BOOK FROM 1843 WAS DONATED BY JOHN GREEN III OF LAFAYETTE, LA, AND BELONGED TO HIS UNCLE, JACOB “JAC” HIRSH. JAC’S MOTHER’S SIDE OF THE FAMILY IMMIGRATED FROM ALSACE, FRANCE, TO DONALDSONVILLE, LA, IN THE MID-1800S. JAC’S FATHER’S SIDE OF THE FAMILY EMIGRATED FROM FRANKFURT, GERMANY, TO DONALDSONVILLE. THE PRAYER BOOK (IN FRENCH AND HEBREW) CONTAINS FAMILY RECORDS FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE FAMILY. TOP: KENNETH HOFFMAN, DIRECTOR, MUSEUM OF THE SOUTHERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE.

n Summer 2019, a gift from Stuart and Suzanne Grant founded Tulane University’s new Center for the American Jewish Experience. Through their generosity, the Grants’ gift is supporting more research faculty in the Department of Jewish Studies and operating support for the new Center.

Building on this momentum, the department just received an anonymous gift to support an endowed chair in contemporary American Jewry. This new professor will serve as a bridge linking Jewish history to its contemporary application in the twenty-first century.

The Center for the American Jewish Experience will promote cross-disciplinary learning—a principal ideal of the School of Liberal Arts—in a way that emphasizes the global orientation of the American Jewish experience. The Center will also partner with various departments and programs across the University to facilitate this learning, such as the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, to redefine the fields of Latin American and Caribbean Jewish Studies, to organizations off campus such as the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience.

This world-class facility will host the one in four students that enroll in a Jewish Studies course while at Tulane, and will provide exciting opportunities for a holistic study of American Jewry building on the department’s interdisciplinary approach to learning about the evolution of Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish nationalism from biblical times to the present.

Jewish Studies continues its transformation into a world-class department by raising funds for an endowed chair in American Jewish history, as well as increased operating support for its dynamic slate of action-oriented public programs, innovative student engagement activities, and cutting-edge research opportunities.

For more information, liberalarts.tulane.edu/departments/ jewish-studies.

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OPINION

STUDENT REVOLUTIONARIES

BY SARAH JONES (SLA ’20)

D

uring the spring semester of my first year at Tulane University, I took a comparative politics course that focused on revolutions in the context of Western societies. This course offered insight into the characteristics and mechanisms that constructed a revolution, and it opened my eyes to how my studies could impact my world view. From the start of this course, I began to imagine what would coming revolutions look like? Who would lead them?

Years later, I took a leap in my academic career. After taking courses with Elisabeth McMahon and Z’etoile Imma, professors in the Departments of History and English, respectively, I decided to study abroad at the University of Cape Town (UCT) due to the rich anti-apartheid resistance present in the country before and after 1994. When I arrived on UCT’s campus in January 2019, I could feel a similar atmosphere as when I arrived at Tulane in Fall 2016. In the spring of 2015, students from UCT started nationwide movements to decolonize education with #RhodesMustFall, which organized a collective of students to demand the removal of a statue memorializing British imperialist Cecil Rhodes on their campus. The movement soon spread to the University of Witwatersrand (UWC), which led to the emergence of #FeesMustFall. This movement demanded an end to increasing student fees and pushed for more financial assistance for students. Together, these movements sparked the mobilization of university students across institutions, the streets of the Western and Eastern Cape, and on social media. Students collectively organized to spread awareness of the oppression they faced from colonial and apartheid legacies and assert that education was not a commodity. #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall contributed to defining an era of digital activism, which made organizing and advocating accessible to a larger audience and created an international awareness of these issues.

Across the ocean, students at Tulane had ignited their own movement. At the Call for Unity action in 2015, students from organizations such as Tulane’s Black Student Union (tBSU), Generating Excellence Now and Tomorrow in Education (GENTE), Students Organizing Against Racism (SOAR), and the Muslim Student Association (MSA) stood in solidarity with students at the University of Missouri to demand a list of changes to make Tulane a safe and equitable place for marginalized students. Echoing the 1968 requests from African American Congress of Tulane, the tBSU’s list of demands included changes to academic and financial departments and admissions in an effort to increase accessibility and representation. These demands reflected the concerns and realities for marginalized students that faced barriers of not only being admitted to Tulane, but navigating the campus and feeling supported while completing their academic careers. Knowing that they may not experience the benefits that could result from the list of demands, the student organizations were intentional in creating a legacy to alleviate stress for future students. The mission of Tulane and UCT student organizers resembled the reality of organizing, which is obtaining the liberation of all impacted by legacies of oppression.

When I studied abroad at UCT, this became even more clear to me.

At UCT, I befriended students who reminded me of my friends and mentors at Tulane. Students who wanted to learn in an environment free of

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economic and social oppression and marginalization. Students who attended school to break barriers for their families. Students who knew that they could not treat 2015 as a single event, and who knew that change started with them.

While at UCT I took an African Political Economy course, which awakened me and my classmates to protest scholarship and challenged us to “ask the right kinds of questions.” The lecturers, tutor, and guest speakers encouraged us to not accept any text or theory as just a body of work; rather, we were empowered to see ourselves as

normal” of living through a pandemic, student activists across the nation faced another traumatic moment. On May 25, George Floyd lost his life to police brutality, which was documented in an 8-minute and 46-second video. As Black communities attempted to grieve the deaths of Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others, Floyd’s death symbolized an accumulation of frustration and exhaustion.

The Black Lives Matter Movement, Movement for Black Lives, and BYP100 brought people out of isolation to advocate and demand justice for Black people whose lives have been disregarded due to the productions of racism, capitalism, violence, and exploitation. Joining and leading these movements were student revolutionaries who were equipped with knowledge of care, liberation, and justice that they wanted for their communities. Across the nation, students united to organize around policing presence and practices on their campuses, financial insecurity, and how to free themselves from colonial histories.

For many students, this will be a summer that will change their entire lives. It will be a summer

during which they have to challenge themselves to reimagine what accountability will look like from institutions to the state. They will have to imagine outside of the confines in which they have been told to exist. They will have to imagine who they want to be and the communities they want to create. In the years to come we must continue to ask ourselves, what does a decolonized education reflect at Tulane? But this responsibility is not just on students. Administrators, faculty, and staff must also ask themselves, how will I respond when I am held accountable?

How will I respond when I am asked to reimagine the conditions within the academy?

BELOW LEFT: #FEESMUSTFALL PROTESTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN BELOW RIGHT: SARAH JONES

DISCOTT / CC BY-SA

producers of knowledge. In this course, the students and I became comrades working together to imagine and cultivate a revolution needed to decolonize the academic space and allow those who have operated on the margins to have their voices heard.

Since coming back to Tulane in August, I am aware that the next revolution will not fully reflect what I learned as a freshman. Now, I understand that students have the tools, knowledge, and understanding to resist the perpetuation of colonial legacies in academic spaces and to challenge those legacies. As students, we can imagine what it would look like to have a space of learning separate of economic, social, and political oppression.

From climate activists to immigration advocates and student action groups like Les Griots Violets, Tulane is entering a new era of students holding their peers, professors, and administrators accountable for the learning environment we cultivate and encourage and the legacy we produce.

After spending much of this spring advocating for financial and housing support from universities as they transitioned into their “new

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OPERATION RESTORATION

BY EMILY WILKERSON

ACCORDING

TO THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION (ACLU), WOMEN ARE THE FASTEST GROWING POPULATION

IN

THE

CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, THEIR NUMBERS INCREASING AT A RATE ALMOST DOUBLE THAT OF MEN SINCE 1985. IN ADDITION, THE ACLU REPORTS THAT TWO THIRDS OF WOMEN IN STATE PRISONS HAVE CHILDREN THAT ARE MINORS, AND MORE THAN 1.5 MILLION CHILDREN IN THE U.S. HAVE A PARENT IN PRISON.

In 2015, Annie Phoenix began her doctoral studies in the City, Culture, and Community (CCC) Program, a collaborative doctoral program of Tulane’s Schools of Liberal Arts, Social Work, and Architecture, to address these statistics. Before enrolling in the CCC Program, Phoenix was teaching in public schools in Louisiana. “I felt like I wasn’t making the impact I wanted to make,” expressed Phoenix.

She applied to the Ph.D. program “as a way to transition my life to be more about the issues that I wanted to address—I wanted to explore incarceration more in depth and had always been interested in gender and women specifi-

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“Providing

resources is necessary; but you can’t put band-aids on gaping wounds.

That increases your chances of becoming complicit in the issue, when we really need to be changing laws.”

ANNIE PHOENIX

women who have been through the same experience and can help them walk through their journeys.” Steib was sentenced to prison for 120 months at the age of 19. Since her release she has championed the strength of women and their families, working to address humanitarian inadequacies both in criminal justice systems and beyond. “It’s not enough to be a resource provider, the most effective thing is to walk with somebody and say ‘I’ve done this walk before, and I know what this feels like.’”

Operation Restoration employs thirteen individuals that all identify as women, a majority of whom have been incarcerated. Approximately one third of Operation Restoration’s programs are rooted in education, from their Women FIRST Program, to the College-in-Prison program they offer in partnership with Tulane University’s School of Professional Advancement and Newcomb Institute, and a vocation program for incarcerated women that helps equip them with tools for

job placement upon release from their sentencing. The organization also offers social services such as The Closet, which provides clothing and hygiene products to women at no cost; Hope House, a safe, transitional housing program for women returning home after incarceration; and the Rapid Response program, which supports clients with rent, utilities, court costs, transportation costs, and other expenses that women incur when establishing stable housing and employment, among others. This year, the growing organization also began expanding their services to women experiencing immigration detention, which is escalating at a high rate in Louisiana.

“I think the reason why Operation Restoration is effective in policy work is because we do service work and we know the issues very intimately,” explains Phoenix. “The fact that we do policy work helps us connect folks that are going through issues with services. Providing resources is necessary; but you can’t put band-aids on gaping wounds. That increases your chances of becoming complicit in the issue, when we really need to be changing laws.” Through her role as a doctoral candidate in Tulane’s CCC program, Phoenix is able to not only research and enact policy changes, but also reflect on and write about her findings, the policies, and their effects for her dissertation. Furthermore, the types of classes she has been able to enroll in through the program—from public health to sociology—has allowed her to research at a higher level, ethically engage in research, and bring a multifaceted approach to issues she cares about deeply.

PHOTO PROVIDED BY ANNIE PHOENIX

cally. But I was thinking about it from the perspective of my students and the families I had been working with as a teacher, and how incarceration was affecting youth.”

Shortly after beginning the CCC program, Phoenix attended a multitude of community events about incarceration and met Syrita Steib. Together, Phoenix and Steib co-founded the New Orleans-based organization Operation Restoration with a vision to focus on educational initiatives, policy changes, and social services for women and children affected by incarceration.

She began her work in the community teaching ten women in the inaugural iteration of the Women FIRST Clinic, a GED program for women who have been incarcerated facilitated by Operation Restoration in collaboration with New Orleans nonprofit Women with a Vision, which receives funding from Tulane’s Newcomb Institute and Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking.

Today, the Women FIRST Clinic is thriving and has served more than 140 women, and Operation Restoration has grown to serve individuals across the country through their programs and policy work. As the organization’s Policy Director, Phoenix works with Steib and lawmakers to enact laws that help women and children survive in existing systems, and more importantly, change those systems. Over the course of four years, Operation Restoration has facilitated bills such as LA HSR 2, a Bill of Rights for Children with Incarcerated Parents; LA Act 392, the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act; and LA HCR 27, the Louisiana Task Force on Women’s Incarceration, among others.

Currently, their bill to ban the box on public college and university applications asking if you have been incarcerated has been enacted in Louisiana and four other states, and over the next two years, 15 states will introduce bills to remove this criminal history question. These bills not only fight for human rights, such as helping supply women in prison with basic needs like sanitary products and soap, but also strive to increase access to education so formerly incarcerated women can attend college and secure meaningful work and safe housing to support themselves and their families.

In a recent interview with Yale Law School, Steib explained, “Women coming out of prison need everything. It goes from basic things like underwear and a toothbrush to connections to systems of higher education, opportunities to heal from trauma and resources to reconnect with family. And more importantly, they need other

ANNIE PHOENIX AND SYRITA STEIB OF OPERATION RESTORATION LOOK ON AS LOUISIANA GOVERNOR JOHN BEL EDWARDS SIGNS LA ACT 26 INTO LAW TO "BAN THE BOX" IN HIGHER EDUCATION.

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A CENTER FOR BRAZILIAN SCHOLARSHIP

BY ANNIE McNEILL GIBSON (PhD ’10) ADMINISTRATIVE ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR DIRECTOR OF STUDY ABROAD

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N

ew Orleans is often referred to as the northernmost city of the Caribbean. As such, researching and teaching at Tulane offers many moments to draw connections between our city and Latin America. We often think about these connections first in relationship to Spanish-speaking Latin America given that Spain had sovereign control over New Orleans in the 18th century. Tourists visiting the French Quarter see the Cabildo, the municipal hall that dates to this period of Spanish colonial rule and various plaques and monuments throughout the city commemorate more recent relationships with Latin America, most notably the statues of Simon Bolívar, Benito Juárez, and Francisco Morazán Quesada along Basin Street. Other landscape elements such as the Spanish-language signage along Williams Boulevard in North Kenner, an area just a few miles beyond New Orleans, manifest the dynamic Latino communities that are a part of the city’s more contemporary history and character.

The 2010 census revealed that the Latino population as a whole has more than doubled in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. However, an important and often overlooked enclave within this Latino community in New Orleans is the Brazilians. By the nineteenth century, the networks that linked New Orleans to ports around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean also extended south of the equator to Brazil. From this point until Hurricane Katrina, a special commercial connection led to the establishment of a small Brazilian community. Brazil was a major supplier to the New Orleans coffee industry, with Louisiana Coffee and Spice Mills marketing the guarantee on its packaging that its Lunch Bell brand contained “pure Rio,” referenc-

ing the allure and seductiveness of Rio de Janiero in its coffee beans. Currently, about a quarter of all coffee imported to the U.S. still comes from Brazil—the supplier to nearly a third of the world’s coffee—and enters the country through the Crescent City.

It was not until the extensive flood damage of Hurricane Katrina, however, that New Orleans became a crucially important part of the story of the “New Latino South,” a term used to describe booming contemporary Latino migration to the Southern U.S. in the early 2000s. Researchers have sometimes referred to Brazilians as an “invisible minority” in the U.S. due to restrictive census definitions of the term Latino along with language and cultural differences. Exact statistics of the number of Brazilians who arrived in the aftermath of Katrina are difficult to confirm, though calculations from Brazilian churches, the itinerant consulate, and social media tracking seem to indicate that between 7,000-9,000 Brazilians arrived to rebuild the city after the storm. Today, the number of Brazilians is close to 4,000 in the greater New Orleans area.

I was recently reminded of the interconnectedness of research on Brazil at Tulane and our local Brazilian community in 2019 when the Latin American Library hosted the Amazônia Ocupada exhibition, featuring the work of Brazilian photographer João Farkas. Farkas documented the mass migration of workers throughout Brazil who came to the Amazon basin in the 1980s and 1990s to try their luck in gold mining, logging, and cattle ranching. The international attention given to environmental degradation in the in the Amazon basin, the lack of productive markets for the pioneer settlers who resettled in Rondônia from Southern Brazil as part of the migration wave, and subsequent policies to save

Tulane has long been a prominent center for research and teaching on Brazil, having offered Portuguese language courses since 1947 and a Brazilian Studies degree program since 1999. the rainforest that put restrictions on their cattle farming, were all motivating factors in an undocumented immigration network that went from Colorado do Oeste, Rondônia, and actually led to New Orleans, Louisiana. While Farkas’ photographs concentrated on the Amazon Basin, I had heard stories of this migration from children of these workers who left the Amazon region for work in New Orleans post-Katrina. Immigrants from Colorado do Oeste, Rondônia began describing New Orleans as the next El Dorado in post-storm reconstruction, and today, New Orleans, and its suburb Chalmette in particular, is home to one of the main communities of Rondônians living in the U.S. These Brazilian storm chasers left the Amazon for the U.S. seeking more productive markets to support their families, and are now a part of

the hybridity that is New Orleans and the Gulf South’s cultural identity.

These connections between Brazil and New Orleans emerge in immigration patterns, music, and ethnic and racialized categories in our local city politics, making Tulane an exciting place to be a Brazilianist.

Tulane has long been a prominent center for research and teaching on Brazil, having offered Portuguese language courses since 1947 and a Brazilian Studies degree program since 1999. Next year the University will begin its prestigious five-year term as the secretariat of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). The Brazilian community in New Orleans offers opportunities for scholars at Tulane to explore how real people living in our communities participate in the creation of specific places and hemispheric networks that link New Orleans to Brazil.

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• ANALYZING THE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS OF •

Gun Violence IN AMERICA

BY GEOFF DANCY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR POLITICAL SCIENCE

Whether I’m in New York, Nairobi, or Norway, people light up when I mention my home city of New Orleans. They ask about the standard fare like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. But those with direct experience also pay tribute to the city’s resilience, admiring the way that locals churn disaster and setbacks into an appreciation for beauty. As the New York Times wrote in 2018, New Orleans is a place where centuries of trauma “have yielded something magical.”

While the city’s residents have endured the effects of devastations like plagues and floods, this is not a reason to accept suffering for the sake of it. As the flagship institution in the city, Tulane must lead the way in limiting traumas that persistently devastate its home of New Orleans.

One of those traumas is gun violence, and the numbers on gun violence in New Orleans are well known. According to the most recent FBI statistics from 2018, there were 147 homicides in the city, over 90% of which were committed with a firearm. This puts New Orleans’ per capita murder rate at 4th in the nation, and 50th in the world. Remarkably, journalists on local TV stations like WWL still celebrated the 2018 homicide figure because it was the lowest total in 47 years.

The recent decline in violence is cold comfort to many in New Orleans—especially children—who grow up with constant fear of getting caught in the crossfire. In the 551 shooting incidents in New Orleans that took so many lives in 2018, 353 additional people were injured, and countless children were witnesses.

New Orleanians know all of this, and they know it enough to constantly remind tourists and visitors to “stay safe.”

But many people are not aware of what measures, if any, are being taken to limit the toll of gun violence. People are often scared away from analyzing firearms policy in the U.S. because it is framed as an ideological battleground between gun rights and gun control. Two years ago, Mirya Holman, a professor in the Department of Political Science, and I set out with a group of Tulane students to collect evidence on state and local firearms legislation across the U.S. to answer some basic questions. Where and how might we expect reasonable gun violence prevention policies be proposed? And which policies, once enacted, reduce the number of gun-related homicides? Our research is ongoing, but so far, we have debunked some common myths.

1 2 3

First, many people think that legislatures are doing very little about gun violence. This is untrue. Between 2010 and 2015, state legislators proposed over 15,000 bills to regulate the purchase, use, and safety of firearms.

Only a small minority of these passed, but this represents a great deal of activity in “gun control” states like California and Pennsylvania, but also in southern states like South Carolina and Georgia.

Second, gun regulation is less ideological than people think. While many treat gun control as exclusively a “blue” issue and gun rights as exclusively a “red” issue, we find that legislators from both parties are more willing to consider gun regulations if they are from districts that face more violence. Gun rights legislation comes from places insulated from gun deaths.

Third and finally, for preventing gun violence, national regulations appear to be less important than those at the state and local level. Some cities, like New Orleans, witness reductions in death from basic interventions like installing crime cameras and deploying mediators to address gang rivalries.

We can draw these early conclusions only because, with the help of Tulane students, we have collected the most comprehensive data set to date of proposed firearms legislation in the country. But ours is only one project of many now underway. After years of avoiding the issue, scholars are increasingly interested in addressing the humanitarian scourge of gun violence that ravages communities nationwide. With continued study, we can isolate those policies that translate into significant reductions in violence over time, from New Orleans to New York.

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‘

New Orleans?

W H AT D O YO U W I S H P E O P L E K N E W A B O U T

‘‘

“New Orleans is as much a city as it is a conduit linking the past

“Ever since Bienville set up a French outpost among the Chiti-

all around the globe, some of whom come to see and leave and oth-

arrivals: Americans and Creoles of varying hues, enslaved indi-

and the present. It is also a passageway traversed by people from

ers who escape here well aware that in the spotlight that is New Orleans, one can still disappear.”

BERNICE L. McFADDEN Professor of Practice of Creative Writing Novelist, author of Praise Song for the Butterflies

macha Indians, New Orleans has been enriched by waves of new

viduals and gens de couleur libres, Spaniards and Hispanics, Irish

and Italians, Haitians and Vietnamese. This vibrant mix helped to create New Orleans’ unique music, food, architecture, and festi-

vals. Sometimes people pay lip service to the importance of diversity. I would love people to realize that New Orleans shows how profoundly true that is.”

WALTER ISAACSON Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values Author of The Innovators, Leonardo da Vinci, Franklin, Einstein, and Steve Jobs

“New Orleans is a city of Creoles and cultural creolizations over

time. Sometimes overlooked are the relationships of Sicilians, African Americans, and Afro Creoles. The late Creole tinsmith

and jazz trumpeter Lionel Ferbos’ family made cannoli molds for neighbor Angelo Brocato’s French Quarter sweetshop. Bandleader Louis Prima drew on jazz and R&B, and played the

“Chitlin’ Circuit.” Some jazz bands were ‘mixed,’ with Sicilians and Creoles passing in both directions. Leo Nocentelli is the

Afro-Sicilian funk guitar maestro of the Meters. On March 19,

Sicilian and black Catholics alike ritually present St. Joseph altars, and black Mardi Gras Indians parade that evening as a mid-Lenten festivity.”

NICK SPITZER Professor of Anthropology Gulf South folklorist, producer of public radio’s American Routes

“Take the bus! Believe it or not, there are other routes besides the streetcar that go to the Quarter. The version of New Orleans that

is sold to the tourists is valuable and true enough but it is just that, a limited, easy-to-consume version of a much more complex society. The bus is a movable sidewalk where you can hear strangers

talk and pass by the houses that do not appear in the postcards, even though they are equally beautiful. It is efficient; sometimes it’s messy, but if you don’t like messy go somewhere else.”

YURI HERRERA-GUTIÉRREZ Associate Professor of Spanish Novelist, author of A Silent Fury

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Welcome Home New 2019-2020 Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty MOISÉS ARCE Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and Professor, Department of Political Science Moisés Arce specializes in conflict processes, state-society relations, and the politics of social and economic development. He has joined Tulane as the Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of Political Science, and is also affiliated with the Stone Center of Latin American Studies. Arce is the author of Market Reform in Society (Penn State, 2005), Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru (Pittsburgh, 2014), Social Protest and Democracy (Calgary, 2019), and numerous book chapters and journal articles. He has served as a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2003), and as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo (2014). Arce received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico.

RUTH D. CARLITZ Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science Ruth Carlitz’s research looks at government responsiveness from the ‘top down’ (how governments distribute public goods) and the ‘bottom up’ (what citizens and non-governmental organizations can do to promote transparency and accountability).

She focuses primarily on East Africa, inspired by her experience living and working in Tanzania from 2006-2008.

In addition to her academic research, Carlitz has worked on evaluations commissioned by organizations including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Twaweza, the International Budget Partnership, the Institute of Development Studies, and the UK’s Department for International Development.

Carlitz received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

HONGWEI CHEN Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Hongwei Thorn Chen is a scholar of Chinese and east Asian film and media cultures. Chen received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and his research addresses how institutions attempt to govern with technological media, and how media, in turn, trigger crises of governmental reason. He is working on a book that examines how “education” and “tutelage” served as organizing rationalities of institutional film use in China during the early-twentieth century, a period when elites sought to shape new political subjects within the uneven landscape of global inter-imperial competition. This book unfolds Chen’s broader interests in colonial modernities and their legacies in east Asia and modern China, and transnational histories of film and visual culture.

AUGUSTINE DENTEH Assistant Professor, Department of Economics Augustine Denteh’s broad research interests are in applied econometrics and health economics, where he is interested in employing innovative econometric tools to study how public policies affect people’s health and wellbeing. In particular, he works on impact evaluation, measurement error models, the economics of obesity, and food and nutrition programs. Denteh received his Ph.D. from Georgia State University and also studies techniques for generalizability in health policy using statistical machine learning approaches for causal inference.

ERIN J. KAPPELER Assistant Professor, Department of English Erin Kappeler’s current book project, The Secret History of Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics 1880–1933, is the first historical account of free verse poetry as a

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race-based construction. Through readings of journals, literary magazines, and poetry anthologies from the modernist era, The Secret History of Free Verse identifies the fundamental but, until now, neglected connections between prosodic theories of free verse and constructions of American whiteness, and shows how these discourses shaped popular and academic understandings of African American and Native American poetry.

Kappeler received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and her research has been supported by the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.

ANDREW McDOWELL Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology Andrew McDowell’s research interests include cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, tuberculosis (TB), global health, and the anthropology of science with a focus on South and Central Asia. In work with TB-afflicted communities in rural Rajasthan, India, he traces the changes in TB care and its memory as well as its dialectical effects on rural forms of life.

Focusing on global health, kinship, and aspiration his work toggles between haunted pasts, futures, bacilli, and families. McDowell received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

JONATHAN MORTON Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian Jonathan Morton specializes in medieval literature with a particular interest in the interrelation between philosophy and art, and in literature’s mediation between knowledge, experience, and desire. Morton received his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford and comes to Tulane from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, where he was the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship.

DAVID O’BRIEN Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy David O’Brien’s academic interests include ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and metaethics. His recent publications include an article on the unit and currency of egalitarian concern in the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and “Inequality of opportunity: Some lessons from the case of highly selective universities” in Theory and Research in Education.

O’Brien received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

LEE SKINNER Dean of Newcomb-Tulane College and Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Lee Skinner, dean of Newcomb-Tulane College, is a leading scholar of Latin American literature. Skinner earned her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Spanish from Emory University. Skinner’s research and teaching focuses on the study of national identity in 19th-century Spanish America. She has authored two monographs, History Lessons: Refiguring the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in Spanish America (Newark, 2006) and Gender and the Rhetoric of Modernity in Spanish America, 1850-1910 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).

PATRICK A. TESTA Assistant Professor, Department of Economics Patrick Testa’s current research focuses on the political economy of development, and he employs a combination of microeconomic theory and empirical methods, as well as both contemporary and historical data, in his research.

Testa’s recent work seeks to understand the urban and regional effects of forced migration, as well as how institutions and culture interact with economic geography. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.

JENNIFER ZDON

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PAULA BURCH-CELENTANO

THIS VIEW FROM THE HOWARD-TILTON MEMORIAL LIBRARY SHOWS HOW TULANE AND NEW ORLEANS ARE INTRINSICALLY CONNECTED.

GRAFFITI ARTISTS IN THE FRENCH QUARTER RESPOND TO COVID-19 THROUGH ART.

CHERYL GERBER

TULANE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS 102 NEWCOMB HALL NEW ORLEANS, LA 70118