{"id":7644,"date":"2026-03-31T11:07:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/?p=7644"},"modified":"2026-03-31T11:27:03","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:27:03","slug":"mdwp008-007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/","title":{"rendered":"Vexations"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>\n        .tsquotation strong {<br \/>\n            font-weight: bold;<br \/>\n        }<br \/>\n        .tsquotation em {<br \/>\n            font-style: italic !important;<br \/>\n        }<br \/>\n        .bibliography {<br \/>\n            margin-top: -1em !important;<br \/>\n            padding-left: 22px;<br \/>\n            text-indent: -22px;<br \/>\n        }<br \/>\n        figure {<br \/>\n            margin: 0;<br \/>\n        }<br \/>\n.fig-row{\n    display:flex;\n    gap: 20px;\n    align-items:flex-start;\n    justify-content:center;\n    flex-wrap:wrap; \n  }\n  .fig{\n    margin:0;\n    width:30%;          \n    min-width:240px;    \n  }\n  .fig-img{\n    width:100%;\n    height:auto;\n    display:block;\n  }\n  .fig .caption-text{\n    display:block;\n    margin-top:6px;\n    font-size:0.9em;\n    line-height:1.25;\n  }\n    <\/style>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"one_half\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span class='bdaia-btns bdaia-btn-medium' style=\"background:#b2b2b2 !important;color:#000000 !important;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-006\/\" style=\"color:#000000 !important;\">&#129028;<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"one_half last\">\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><span class='bdaia-btns bdaia-btn-medium' style=\"background:#b2b2b2 !important;color:#000000 !important;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-008\" style=\"color:#000000 !important;\">&#129030;<\/a><\/span><\/div><div class=\"clear-fix\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bdaia-toggle close\"><h4 class=\"bdaia-toggle-head toggle-head-open\"><span class=\"bdaia-sio bdaia-sio-angle-up\"><\/span><span class=\"txt\">How to cite<\/span><\/h4><h4 class=\"bdaia-toggle-head toggle-head-close\"><span class=\"bdaia-sio bdaia-sio-angle-down\"><\/span><span class=\"txt\">How to cite<\/span><\/h4><div class=\"toggle-content\"><p>\n<div id=\"zotpress-3471cda5583a9dd294451ebfd445540b\" class=\"zp-Zotpress zp-Zotpress-Bib wp-block-group\">\n\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_API_USER_ID ZP_ATTR\">4511395<\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_ITEM_KEY ZP_ATTR\">{4511395:75KZDHUJ}<\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_COLLECTION_ID ZP_ATTR\"><\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_TAG_ID ZP_ATTR\"><\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_AUTHOR ZP_ATTR\"><\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_YEAR ZP_ATTR\"><\/span>\n        <span class=\"ZP_ITEMTYPE ZP_ATTR\"><\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_INCLUSIVE ZP_ATTR\">1<\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_STYLE ZP_ATTR\">chicago-author-date<\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_LIMIT ZP_ATTR\">50<\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_SORTBY ZP_ATTR\">default<\/span>\n\t\t<span class=\"ZP_ORDER 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id=\"zp-ID-7644-4511395-75KZDHUJ\" data-zp-author-date='Annu\u00df-2025' data-zp-date-author='2025-Annu\u00df' data-zp-date='2025' data-zp-year='2025' data-zp-itemtype='book' class=\"zp-Entry zpSearchResultsItem\">\n<div class=\"csl-bib-body\" style=\"line-height: 1.35; padding-left: 1em; text-indent:-1em;\">\n  <div class=\"csl-entry\">Annu\u00df, Evelyn. 2025. <i>Dirty Dragging. Performative Transpositions<\/i>. mdwPress. <a class='zp-ItemURL' href='https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14361\/9783839474754'>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14361\/9783839474754<\/a>. <a title='Cite in RIS Format' class='zp-CiteRIS' data-zp-cite='api_user_id=4511395&item_key=75KZDHUJ' href='javascript:void(0);'>Cite<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><!-- .zp-Entry .zpSearchResultsItem -->\n\t\t\t<\/div><!-- .zp-zp-SEO-Content -->\n\t\t<\/div><!-- .zp-List -->\n\t<\/div><!--.zp-Zotpress-->\n\n\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<div class=\"bdaia-toggle close\"><h4 class=\"bdaia-toggle-head toggle-head-open\"><span class=\"bdaia-sio bdaia-sio-angle-up\"><\/span><span class=\"txt\">Outline<\/span><\/h4><h4 class=\"bdaia-toggle-head toggle-head-close\"><span class=\"bdaia-sio bdaia-sio-angle-down\"><\/span><span class=\"txt\">Outline<\/span><\/h4><div class=\"toggle-content\"><p>\n<a href=\"#1\">Terror (Ku Klux Klan)<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"#2\">Control (Comus)<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"#3\">Complicities (Tramps)<\/a><br \/>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<hr>\n<p><!-- \n\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">[btn btnlink=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/10.1515_9783839425015-001.pdf\" btnsize=\"medium\" bgcolor=\"#b2b2b2\" txtcolor=\"#000000\" btnnewt=\"1\" nofollow=\"1\"]CHAPTER PDF <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/download-1459070_1280.png\" style=\"vertical-align: middle\" alt=\"Download-Logo\" width=\"17\" height=\"17\">[\/btn]\n\n --><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows seemingly endless steel blocks hanging from the ceiling, with place names inscribed on their undersides.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"2100\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7412\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer-100x150.jpg 100w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/33_Lynching-Memorial-National-Memorial-for-Peace-and-Justice-Montgomery-2018.-Foto-Alan-Karchmer-850x1275.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 33<\/strong> Lynching Memorial, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, 2018. Photo: Alan Karchmer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In the spring of 2020, medical masks took over public life as the coronavirus pandemic set in. Suddenly, people began showing up in different masquerades in various locations to protest local mask mandates<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and to share their photos on social media for maximum attention.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn387\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref387\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>387<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Throwing together a chaotic repertoire of heavy signs (<em>signes lourdes<\/em>) in a kind of global contest over iconography, the carnivalesque became politically loaded in a particular way. The headline-&#173;grabbing figure of Q Shaman (staged by former actor, the now-pardoned Capitol rioter Jake Angeli) featured a face painted like the Star-Spangled Banner, a fur hat with buffalo horns evoking <em>Playing Indian <\/em>in Deloria\u2019s terms, and a tattoo of Thor\u2019s hammer across his torso<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>calling to mind the legacy of old Germanic warriors as imagined in trash action films.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn388\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref388\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>388<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Yellow stars and similar signs<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>meant to link mask mandates to Nazism and the Holocaust<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>were used in the German-speaking context at so-called hygiene demonstrations to frame protesters as victims of a health dictatorship.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn389\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref389\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>389<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> And in both San Diego, California, and Hillenburg, Thuringia, people eventually showed up wearing white hoods, posing for photos in supermarkets or photoshopping themselves accordingly to post their images online.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn390\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref390\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>390<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> While staging themselves as shopping in defiance of local mask rules, they were citing the visual language associated with the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n<p>These forms of making an appearance speak to a media attention economy driven by transgressive insults and operate like extrajudicial court spectacles.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn391\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref391\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>391<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The reality TV show <em>The Apprentice<\/em> had already staged a similar mode of address as early as 2004, in what ultimately became a carnivalesque courtroom<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a show that shaped Donald Trump\u2019s media persona for more than a decade.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn392\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref392\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>392<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> His recurring TV performances as a boss who loudly humiliates and fires others not only foreshadowed his presidency but also mirror today\u2019s social media appearances, celebrating a carnivalesque authoritarianism as rebellion against \u201cmainstream politics.\u201d Respectively, Trump performing the presidency like a carnival king, has made taboo breaking and putting down others part of a serial carnival routine. <\/p>\n<p>Within this context, the revival of Klan masks<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which recall the history of faceless racist terror<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>signals the persistent afterlife of violence in the play with referential slippery. Masks of this kind may not guard against COVID-19, but they shield their wearers like vigilantes from accountability. And such performances<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>whether in supermarkets or online<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>can be read both as carnivalesque commentary on mandated medical masks and as overt threats, aimed not only at pandemic policies but especially at those associated with the victims of the long history of white supremacy that the hoods cite. As masquerades, they are symptomatic of a kind of temporal drag from the political right: the performative transposition of signs from a political violence long thought to have been overcome. Such citations of Klan masks are clearly not a subversive move, but seem to be driven by terroristic, m\u00e4nnerb\u00fcndianfantasies,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn393\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref393\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>393<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> just as this carnivalesque play with historical references is embedded within a global right-wing backlash, where \u201cqueer wokeness\u201d has been cast in the role of the police. At the same time, the right-wing appropriation of transgression signals the current shift from neoliberal laisser-faire to illiberal regimes of liberalist economics and their disruptive claim of states of exception.<\/p>\n<div style=\"display:flex; gap:20px; justify-content:center; align-items:flex-start; flex-wrap:nowrap; margin-bottom:20px;\">\n<figure style=\"display:table; margin:0; flex:0 0 auto;\">\n    <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/34_Supermarkt-San-Diego-Kalifornien-Social-Media-Post-2020-Screenshot.jpg\"\n         alt=\"A color photo shows a person wearing a white Ku Klux Klan mask, leaning on a shopping cart in a supermarket.\"\n         style=\"height:420px; width:auto; display:block;\" \/><figcaption class=\"caption-text\" style=\"display:table-caption; caption-side:bottom; margin-top:6px;\">\n      <strong>Figure 34:<\/strong> Supermarket, San Diego, California, social media post, 2020 (screenshot).<br \/>\n    <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure style=\"display:table; margin:0; flex:0 0 auto;\">\n    <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/35_Supermarkt-Hillenburg-Suedthueringen-Social-Media-Post-2020-Screenshot.jpg\"\n         alt=\"A color photo shows two people in Ku Klux Klan-like masks standing with shopping carts in a supermarket. One is dressed entirely in white, the other entirely in black. Above it, in meme format, large letters read: \u201cShopping with a mask, they said \u2026\u201d.\"\n         style=\"height:420px; width:auto; display:block;\" \/><figcaption class=\"caption-text\" style=\"display:table-caption; caption-side:bottom; margin-top:6px;\">\n      <strong>Figure 35:<\/strong> Supermarket, Hillenburg, South Thuringia, social media post, 2020 (screenshot).<br \/>\n    <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>In its \u201cdragging\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>defying rules to contain the coronavirus while visually schlepping along racist terror<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the citations of the Klan reveals how performative cultural techniques can be mobilized to cater to the afterlife of white supremacy. People demonstrated how the medical mask mandate could be metapolitically \u201coverperformed.\u201d This right-wing state of exception in drag, then, did not aim for a universal \u201claughter of the entire people,\u201c<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn394\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref394\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>394<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> as Mikhail Bakhtin described the medieval European carnival<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that is to say, a temporary overturning of the social order. Instead, this Klan \u201cdragging\u201d in this case deliberately evoked memories of carnivalesque, masked, racist lynching spectacles carried out by faceless vigilantes, who were already subverting \u201cpolice\u201d control over cultural references in the nineteenth century.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn395\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref395\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>395<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>In the libertarian uprisings for an illiberal order<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>be it the storming of the Capitol in Washington or the Reichstag in Berlin<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>masks referencing racism or antisemitism have become iconic signs of today\u2019s regressive, postdemocratic politics. These political performances highlight both the hollowing out of state institutions and the continued legacy of historic violence: the way long-held resentments remain transposable to the present. So what, exactly, do these Klan masks call forth into the present? Following the Civil War in the United States and the fall of slavery, carnivalesque performances in the South quickly turned into terror against Black communities and abolitionists. Meanwhile, the Southern white elite celebrated itself in exclusive carnival balls and parade floats, citing imagery from courtly masquerade traditions. From early on, the right-wing \u201ccarnival\u201d took on the form of a vexing signifier, its masking practices swinging between terror and control. When viewed together, these forms of appearing in public reveal the brutal underside of minor mimesis<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>another kind of dirty dragging, whose legacy continues to endanger conviviality today.<\/p>\n<p>The first section of this chapter focuses on various kinds of masked facelessness and their histories, entangling the exploration of creolization (Chapter&#160;1) and decreolization (Chapter&#160;2). The spotlight shifts here to the South since the Civil War<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>specifically, the push for new, modern forms of segregation institutionalized as Jim Crow<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a term that is historically misleading, that is to say, in its reference to T. D. Rice\u2019s blackface performances of the 1830s. The first groups of Ku Klux Klan, which emerged in the 1860s, offered, I will argue, a blueprint for today\u2019s right-wing carnivalization of politics. That said, their media strategy drew not on visual imagery, but on striking rhetorical fictions, to \u201ccontagiously\u201d draw attention to anonymously roaming, carnivalesque mobs and to foment terror. To this end, the Klan drew from Old World European traditions of rural shaming rituals<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>precisely those \u201carsenals of masks\u201d outlined in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, to reiterate the point made above: the fraternal Klan marks only one<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>vigilante<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>side of contemporary right-wing carnival styles; the other is the elite Southern carnival, with its courtly forms of performing that developed in the later second half of the nineteenth century in places like New Orleans. In this context, Mardi Gras developed as a patriarchal tool of governmentality by a faceless high society that<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in staunch opposition to creolized social relations<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>invented its own lineage, while also foreshadowing the mafia-like dynamics of today\u2019s illiberal politics.<\/p>\n<p>At Mardi Gras, however, these Old World European traditions of masquerade are continually challenged by subaltern gangs who bring different forms of mimetic dragging into play. While their unruly appearances in the back streets have been repeatedly co-opted and folded into city branding campaigns, their repertoire, especially in contrast to the right-wing carnival, still gestures toward the possibility of <em>other<\/em> ways of relating. That is why the later part of this chapter will engage with \u201csecond lining\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the dancing along and behind of Zulu, of the Indians, or the Baby Dolls, that is, of the stock figures of New Orleans\u2019s creolized Mardi Gras.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn396\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref396\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>396<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In the context of the highly charged visual coding of white and black masks within the United States, I will trace the shift from in&#173;visi&#173;bilization to image proliferation for those subalterns who were never meant to mask themselves under Jim Crow by taking up the question raised at the start regarding Kewpie\u2019s drag scene: what forms of a danced performing otherwise may challenge politics of divide and control? In calling to mind the affective potential of collectively moving bodies, I will return again to context-specific, though related forms of a queer \u201ctouching across.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn397\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref397\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>397<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Facing today\u2019s identitarian, neoauthoritarian governmentality and ever-increasing surveillance, it is politically vital not to forget the often-overlooked joy of gathering irregularly, relating unpredictably, forging new kinships, making room for another, and moving together in public. Yet nomadic roving has a violent flipside, too.<\/p>\n<h4 id=\"1\">Terror (Ku Klux Klan)<\/h4>\n<p>In 1867, a series of short, puzzling notes appeared in the <em>Pulaski Citizen, <\/em>a small weekly paper in rural southern Tennessee. \u201cWhat does it mean?,\u201d or \u201cKuklux Klan,\u201d they announced<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a mysterious series establishing a name without a face. This<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as Elaine S. Frantz shows in <em>Ku-klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>is how the Klan began: \u201cas a name.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn398\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref398\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>398<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In her book, Frantz explores how the first generation of these Tennessee-based vigilantes emerged, how they used performance and media, and eventually became a nationwide, yet decentralized terrorist movement after the U.S. Civil War. To avoid being placed under a military government by the North, Tennessee became the only former Confederate state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before Reconstruction, which granted previously enslaved men the right to vote.<\/p>\n<p>In Pulaski<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a remote town of about three thousand residents, cut off from new trade and transportation networks, where the South\u2019s failure to modernize was apparent<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a self-styled Klan captured new kinds of media attention amid the turbulence of Reconstruction. There, strange newspaper pieces called up carnivalesque parades in a kind of rhetorical masquerade.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn399\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref399\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>399<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> On June&#160;7, 1867, the <em>Pulaski Citizen<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>apparently issued by Klan kin<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>ran an article titled \u201cKuKlux Klan: Grand Demonstration Wednesday Night.\u201d The piece already spins a tale of something that retrospectively could be read as right-wing carnival:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">About 10 o\u2019clock we discovered the head of the column as it came over the hill west of the square. The crowd waited impatiently for their approach. A closer view discovered their banners and transparences, with all manner of mottoes and devices, speers, sabres, &amp;c. The column was led by what we supposed to be the Grand Cyclops, who had on a flowing white robe, a white hat about eighteen inches high. He had a very venerable and benevolent looking face, and long silvery locks. He had an escort on each side of him, bearing brilliant transparencies. The master of the ceremonies was gorgiously caparisoned, and his \u201ctoot, toot, toot,\u201d on a very graveyard-ish sounding instrument, seemed to be perfectly understood by every ku kluxer. Next to the G.&#160;C. there followed two of the tallest men out of jail. One of them had on a robe of many colors, with a hideous mask, and a transparent hat, in which he carried a brilliant gas lamp, a box of matches and several other articles. It is said that he was discovered taking a bottle from a shelf in his hat, and that he and his companion took several social drinks together. The other one had on a blood red hat which was so tall that he never did see the top of it. They conversed in dutch, hebrew, or some other language which we couldn\u2019t comprehend. No two of them were dressed alike, all having on masks and some sort of fanciful costume.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn400\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref400\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>400<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The article about an outlandish procession led by a figure dressed in a &#173;billowing robe, with long silver curls and a hat nearly two feet tall, reads like a sketch of a Perchtenzug, a pagan pageant of Old World European figures. This also applies to the grotesquely masked companions in multicolored costumes: one with a transparent cap bearing a gas lamp, matches, and a bottle; another sporting a towering headdress. Through descriptions of their nonsense speech<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>supposedly including \u201cHebrew,\u201d that is, signifying incomprehensibility<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and a nod to the \u201cgraveyard-ish sounding instrument\u201d wielded by the Master of Ceremonies,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn401\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref401\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>401<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> the dance-of-death-like gang was depicted as playing with ambiguous signifiers. Instead of <em>one <\/em>single face, the <em>Pulaski Citizen<\/em> gave \u201cKuklux\u201d a vivid arsenal of imaginary masks<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>masks whose unruly variety stood apart from the later iconography of the Invisible Empire in white robes and hinted at diverse masking practices from elsewhere.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn402\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref402\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>402<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The spectacle thus not only blurred the traces of the participants: in the context of mid-nineteenth-century print culture<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>before its visual turn<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>it was precisely this mask play that first brought attention to the idea of a mysterious secret society. Although that initial public rhetorical appearance under the label of Ku Klux carried no overt political message, it unmistakably took place in the context of the South\u2019s 1865 defeat in the Civil War.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn403\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref403\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>403<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Klan\u2019s media appearance may have been a symptom of political weakness; but its imagined form proved to be an effective weapon. It seemed to downplay the vigilante violence that would soon follow. The article foreshadowed an uprising of a gang of political losers who sought to impose a racially reconfigured order. And indeed, the rhetorical trickery<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>possibly enacted through real masked demonstrations<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>spilled over into actual violence.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn404\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref404\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>404<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Its afterlife gestures toward the terror potential embedded in carnivalesque forms of making a scene in public.<\/p>\n<p>After 1865, the South saw the rise of numerous vigilante groups that refused to recognize new governance. In the postwar chaos<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which often left those who had been enslaved without money, education, or work<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>violence escalated rapidly. This history is powerfully recalled today by the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, opened in 2018 as part of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn405\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref405\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>405<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> It draws on the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg and Berlin\u2019s Holocaust Memorial. Seemingly endless arrays of steel columns, suspended from the ceiling and marked with the names of sites of terror, evoke the scale of violence unleashed during that era<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>violence that would later reappear in lynching postcards and live on in carnival.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn406\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref406\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>406<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>What the <em>Pulaski Citizen<\/em> had described as a performance that seemed both comical and harmless mutated within months into a murderous movement. This \u201ccarnival\u201d was never just a form of appearing in the form of play acting: it deliberately folded the death of \u201cthe Others,\u201d the unmasked, into its grotesque masquerade. After the Confederacy\u2019s defeat, the collapse of the plantation system with its \u201cbelligerent accumulation,\u201d and the fall of Southern white masculine subjecthood, the Klan began surfacing unpredictably across the South as a faceless terrorist force.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn407\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref407\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>407<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> As the name drew wider attention, it became a label for locally driven lynchings. By the latter half of 1867, \u201cKlan\u201d was already regionally linked to terror acts in various parts of the South. It did not signify continuous or centrally organized violence; instead, terror under the Klan\u2019s name kept flaring up in different places, carrying forward the rhetorical game of deniability along with public executions.<\/p>\n<p>In Pulaski, the Klan did not consist of established plantation owners, but of young veterans. Frantz refers to an image of the presumed founding members<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>faces unmasked, hats crooked on their heads, looking coolly into the camera with guitars.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn408\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref408\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>408<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> She argues that this imagery linked the Klan to the visual repertoire of the minstrel genre. Possessing no resources except access to a local newspaper, the Klan succeeded in establishing its media presence over the next few years through this borrowed, Northern-coined repertoire<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014&#173;<\/span>celebrating unaccountability. By planting playful \u201calt facts\u201d in the press, it reshaped how the Northern urban public saw the South. The conspiracies fed by signs and revelations found on today\u2019s social media platforms<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>pushed by QAnon and others<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>were in a sense prefigured by these \u201cKlandrops.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn409\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref409\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>409<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Shaped by the logic of emerging mass media, the 1860s Klan was, in this light, a distinctly modern phenomenon.<\/p>\n<p>On that Wednesday night described above, if we follow the rhetoric of the accounts mentioned, the vexing signifiers spilled over into something like a staged parade: \u201cAll wondered,\u201d the article begins, \u201cand many expressed the belief that it was all a hoax, and that there was no such thing as a kuklux klan.\u201d According to the <em>Pulaski Citizen, <\/em>flyers of unknown origin had advertised the procession as a celebration of the Klan\u2019s first anniversary. Coded notes containing orders from a Grand Cyclops had allegedly surfaced repeatedly <span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>either left at the paper by another shadowy figure, the Grand Turk, or, as they claimed, mysteriously fluttering in from nowhere:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">We are warned not to make an effort to find out the objects of the \u201cmystic klan,\u201d and to allow the Grand Cyclops to issue his orders without molestation. Well, old Cyclops, just issue as many orders as you please, but if we catch your Grand Turk \u201ccyphering\u201d round our door late at night, we\u2019ll upset him with a \u201cshooting-stick.\u201d Look out, old Turk, we are some Cyclops ourself on our own premises.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn410\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref410\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>410<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>A veritable series of brief notices, buried deep in the back pages, introduced these unknown figures as sudden, elusive appearances, as if fact and fiction blurred entirely. Questions about their origins or intentions seemed ultimately unanswerable. The texts advertised the Klan as a haunting specter: uncertain, unplaceable, and impossible to pin down. It remained unclear who, if anyone, was actually speaking in its name:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Will any one venture to tell us what it means, if it means anything at all? What is a \u201cKuKlux Klan,\u201d and who is this \u201cGrand Cyclops\u201d that issues his mysterious imperatives and orders? Can any one give us a little light on that subject? Here is the order: \u201cTAKE NOTICE. <span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span> The Kuklux Klan will assemble at their usual place of rendezvous \u2026 exactly at the hour of midnight, in costume and bearing the arms of the Klan. <br \/>By or of the Grand Cyclops.<br \/>The G. T.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn411\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref411\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>411<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Reporting and the <em>mystic klan<\/em>\u2019s roving, untraceable apparitions fed off one another. Even its alliterative name scattered clues in every direction. That syncretic name, open to fictional genealogies of all kinds, leaned hard into displaced, nomadic referentiality<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>unlike the \u201cme as Al Jolson\u201d captioned by Eva Braun (Chapter 2), whose rhetorics remained tightly contained. Richard Wolfram\u2019s research on the afterlife of ritual performances of old Germanic secret brotherhoods, as discussed above, would later lend intellectual cover to the Nazi cult of ancestry and help legitimize state terror as a permanent state of exception. The Klan, by contrast<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>emerging from the ruins of political defeat<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>refused any neat origin story or official politics. Its nomadic appearance anticipated how the hoods that would later become its signature reemerged during COVID-era protests and claimed a carnivalesque calendar of ever-possible states of exception along with shifting tales of origin.<\/p>\n<p>Subsequently, even the Klan\u2019s founding date was changed<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>backdated, seemingly for effect, to Christmas Day 1865. That clearly invoked masked winter rituals among adolescent men, akin to the ones Wolfram later appropriated for the Nazis. The Southern summer parade of the Klan described above can thus also be read in consideration of intimidating rituals and masked masculine processions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as explored in the previous chapter with regard to <em>Schwerttanz und M\u00e4nnerbund<\/em>. The depiction of the Grand Cyclops<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>with his silver curls, white robe, and entourage<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>closely resembles Alpine Saint Nicholas figures, who move from house to house, accompanied by roaring devilish Krampus companions in fur and distorted dark masks, and are part of the broader Perchten tradition.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn412\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref412\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>412<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Performing rudimentary \u201cThingspiele\u201d in village parlors, they enacted their own rustic form of justice. A mask now housed in the Chicago History Museum, dated to the 1870s, makes this especially clear. It strongly recalls those Christmastime Saint Nicholas plays in Europe, long reserved for costumed men<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>indicating the fraternal gendering of this other dirtiness of political violence the Klan unleashed.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/36_-Ku-Klux-Klan-Maske-von-Joseph-Boyce-Stewart-1870er-Lincoln-County-Tennessee.-Chicago-History-Museum.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows a dark Ku Klux Klan robe with hood and a face-like veil, reminiscent of a St. Nicholas costume.\" width=\"765\" height=\"1000\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7409\" style=\"width:65%; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/36_-Ku-Klux-Klan-Maske-von-Joseph-Boyce-Stewart-1870er-Lincoln-County-Tennessee.-Chicago-History-Museum.jpg 765w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/36_-Ku-Klux-Klan-Maske-von-Joseph-Boyce-Stewart-1870er-Lincoln-County-Tennessee.-Chicago-History-Museum-230x300.jpg 230w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/36_-Ku-Klux-Klan-Maske-von-Joseph-Boyce-Stewart-1870er-Lincoln-County-Tennessee.-Chicago-History-Museum-115x150.jpg 115w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 765px) 100vw, 765px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 36<\/strong> Ku Klux Klan mask once belonging to Joseph Boyce Stewart, 1870s, Lincoln County, Tennessee. Chicago History Museum (ICHI-062420).<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In looking at the masking repertoire used by the early Klan, a distant kinship emerges with ritualized rural-fraternal retributive court spectacles in Old World Europe. One cannot say for sure how such a masquerade<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>reminiscent of Haberer, Gl\u00f6ckler, Krampusse, or Perchten<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>made its way into the <em>Pulaski Citizen<\/em>, appeared on the streets of the South, and entered the homes of its victims. It may have arrived via the German New Year\u2019s carnival in Philadelphia, that is, in the North,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn413\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref413\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>413<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> through the Mardi Gras traditions of Memphis or New Orleans, or by means of some other unspecified processions. However, the mention of towering hats evokes the headwear and costumes known also from the Alpine regions. From a comparative perspective, the description of that alleged first Klan parade conjures images of young men dancing through streets and from house to house: white-robed Gl\u00f6ckler with illuminated headwear or Krampusse with dark masks. The garb described in the <em>Pulaski Citizen<\/em> thus hints at nomadic performative transpositions.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn414\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref414\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>414<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Citing carnivalesque parades aimed less at \u201cself-indigenization\u201d in claiming an unbroken return of a Germanic Wild Hunt as Wolfram had. Rather, the Klan is foremost a New World phenomenon. The image of bodies lashing out in sudden terror was picked up, but without being contained in a single backstory. Instead, the Klan leaned into an open play with slippery references<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>translating the Wild Hunt, for instance, into the vigilantes\u2019 claim that they were Confederate soldiers who had returned from the dead. The Klan thus tapped into a motif that Nazis such as Euringer and Wolfram would later project back onto the medieval tradition of the dance of death in claiming its Germanic roots. For the Klan, however, it was rather spectacle than such genealogies that mattered; their performance was all about drawing attention. In that sense, the Klan reflects a kind of modernity that makes it particularly meme-ready for contemporary media. The afterlife of rural European masquerade<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which perhaps arrived in Pulaski via its adaptation into the minstrel genre<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>was thus recast in a locally specific and deliberate way, shaped by the political climate of the time. These young ex-Confederates, having experienced cultural defeat in the Civil War, were carving out a new role for themselves, one that reshaped their militarized masculinity through carnivalesque terror. As Frantz notes, the Klan was not simply about restoring the old plantation order, but about the invention of a fundamentally changed hegemonic white Southern masculinity and the modern fight for attention: \u201cKu-Klux drew from popular culture to reconstruct their destabilized gender identities and reaffirm the racial dominance at its core.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn415\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref415\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>415<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This carnivalesque, terrorist masculinity in minstrel blackface and other disguises aimed to impose the new racist order that would later be known as Jim Crow.<\/p>\n<p>In citing rural European masquerade, however, the early Klan first and foremost brought into play two kinds of masking that were not yet mentioned in the <em>Pulaski Citizen <\/em>article quoted above but are highlighted by Frantz: cross-dressing and face-blackening.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn416\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref416\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>416<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Blackface can certainly be seen as a minstrel citation, but the blackened face also functions as a marker of combative masculinity. It taps into performative techniques tied to the heroization of death, the rough justice of militant male bands, and punitive rituals such as tarring and feathering, reframed in the context of the Civil War. This specific blend of spectacle and terror breaks through the boundaries separating gender bending from carnivalesque comedy, lines that would later become sharply drawn, for instance, in SS Volkskunde. As the hoaxes circulated by the Klan demonstrate, the contemporary power of their performance lies in enforcing the carnivalesque play with ambiguity rather than trying to suppress it. In this sense, the Klan\u2019s early appearances are quite literally readable as in drag. And it is precisely this form of public spectacle that now, in the wake of the current right-wing backlash, seems newly appealing to some.<\/p>\n<p>In his book <em>On the Postcolony<\/em>, Achille Mbembe reads the carnivalesque as the \u201cbanality of power,\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn417\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref417\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>417<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> where the obscene and the grotesque serve as intrinsic moments of domination, channeled through noninstitutionalized forms of public performance. But the history of the Klan<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>emerging on the cusp of Jim Crow and the rise of a modern racist order codified into law after the collapse of the plantation-based slavery regime in the South<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>makes clear that the relationship between terror and carnival needs to be situated more precisely. It also provokes a deeper look at how specific regimes of domination change over time. The first Klan dissolved in the early 1870s. Its acts of terror faded from view after systematic racism was consolidated through formal state policy. When the Southern states began installing new segregation laws<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>effectively a form of apartheid aimed to perpetuate the hyperexploitation of Black labor<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>night-time terror began to die down.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn418\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref418\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>418<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Klan vanished just as the paramilitary battle over a racial color line under contemporary capitalism seemed won. In New Orleans<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>some 750 kilometers south of Pulaski, situated on the Mississippi and a key destination of steamboat tourism<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>this shift coincided with carnival\u2019s transformation into a mass spectacle. Yet through the carnival masquerade, the Klan\u2019s faceless terror gained an afterlife in a new, governmental form of faceless crowd control in the context of Southern white supremacism.<\/p>\n<h4 id=\"2\">Control (Comus)<\/h4>\n<p>What Errol Laborde and others now call \u201cclassic American Carnival\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn419\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref419\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>419<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> may be seen as one of the templates for the early masquerades of the Klan. Yet carnival also absorbed the Klan\u2019s spectacles just as the brief post-Civil War era of democratization and abolition came to a close. Terror thus began to give way to what would become known as Jim Crow. As the white supremacist vigilante movement started to fade, new economic elites rose and found ways to put carnival to governmental use.<\/p>\n<p>The history of New Orleans Mardi Gras<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>arguably the most creolized and spectacular carnival in the United States<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>reflects the shift from rural, fraternal vigilantism to urban, paternalistic modes of crowd control. Unlike Pulaski, New Orleans<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a major port city where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>has been crucial for North-South commerce since the invention of the steamboat. In the nineteenth century, as carnival and the rise of a new upper class became entangled, Mardi Gras was turned into a tool for governmentality focused on mass tourism, city branding, and the commodification of entertainment. This coincided with the displacement of a fluid caste system. The distinction between the enslaved and <em>gens de couleur libre<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>some of whom participating in the exploitation of bare labor<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>was now transformed to conform to a rigid color line.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn420\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref420\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>420<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Before the Civil War, a rising coalition of mostly Northern white newcomers<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>benefiting from the Deep South\u2019s connection to the industrial North and the transport revolution<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>had speculated in goods traded through the plantation economy. They became now tied to shifting market dynamics brought on by the era\u2019s mobility boom. <\/p>\n<p>And even before 1861, when the war broke out, questions of modern urban development were playing a role for those who sought to gain from the transformation of the existing economy.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn421\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref421\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>421<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> As Reconstruction took hold and profit systems collapsed along with the end of slavery, New Orleans required a new commercial model. Until then, it had been the leading hub for the American slave trade and, after the Haitian Revolution around the turn of the century, the central node of sugar commerce across the Black Atlantic. Like Cape Town, New Orleans was plugged into transatlantic trade and had long been a creolized port city with a Romance-style carnival tradition.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn422\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref422\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>422<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In line with Louisiana\u2019s French and Spanish colonial history, Mardi Gras blended street processions and ball culture, anchored in the Catholic calendar. But even before abolition, shifting internal migration patterns signaled the rise of new social formations, which would also reconfigure carnival.<\/p>\n<p>Standard histories date the start of Mardi Gras in New Orleans to the winter of 1856<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>1857, when the Mistick Krewe of Comus was founded<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the same year Dred Scott failed in his bid for freedom before the U.S. Supreme Court, and eighty years after independence.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn423\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref423\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>423<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> During carnival, Comus staged a kind of roving theater parade<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>at first with only two floats<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and hosted a spectacular, invitation-only ball featuring tableaux vivants.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn424\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref424\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>424<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The masked secret society was made up of affluent anglophone newcomers, some of whom profited from the sugar trade. With them, a new parade culture emerged after the war<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>what city marketers would later brand the \u201cgreatest free show on earth.\u201d Exclusive balls, meanwhile, served to knit together the new elite. These tableaux-vivants events, and the officially sponsored \u201celevated carnival\u201d for the masses<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014&#173;<\/span>especially for the rising tide of tourists<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>went hand in hand. With them, the newcomers positioned themselves against the longstanding, francophone moneyed elite and their masquerade ball culture.<\/p>\n<p>A drawing of the 1867 Comus Parade, published in an illustrated magazine<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span><em>Frank Lesley\u2019s Illustrated Newspaper<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>highlights the recently established divide between the parade and its spectators. This new parade form juxtaposed an unruly, street-level carnival and its moving bodies with public spectacle. Here, masks became signs of faceless authority. Comus thereby invoked an allegorical court masquerade by the London poet John Milton, titled <em>A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: On Michaelmasse night, before the Right Honorable, John Earle of Bridgewater, Viscount Brackly, Lord President of Wales, and one of His Majesties most honorable privie counsell.<\/em> The Milton citation clearly functioned as a marker of bourgeois, anglophone, Protestant distinction<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as a display of cultural capital.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn425\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref425\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>425<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> It underscored the ambition to create an alternative high society, separating itself from the creolized, Romance carnival traditions both in the streets and in the long-standing dance halls. In time, its aesthetic would prove especially well suited to the emerging era of mass image distribution. Paradoxically, the citation of a courtly spectacle also helped to establish a \u201cpostcolonial,\u201d supposedly genuine American carnival form<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>though deliberately stripped of its creolized character.<\/p>\n<p>This masquerade spectacle negotiated contemporary claims to power through specific stagings of gender. Comus appeared in an ambiguously masculinist form.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC.jpg\" alt=\"A drawn black-and-white newspaper image shows a nighttime parade of costumed people, separated from the spectators.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"922\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7410\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC-300x198.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC-1024x674.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC-150x99.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC-768x506.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC-850x560.jpg 850w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/37_Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Mardi-Gras-Parade-New-Orleans-1867.-Library-of-Congress-Washington-DC-742x490.jpg 742w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 37:<\/strong> Mistick Krewe of Comus, Mardi Gras Parade, New Orleans, 1867. Frank Lesley\u2018s Illustrated Newspaper, April 6, 1867: 41. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (99614058).<\/p>\n<p>From the outset, Milton depicts the figure who gives the secret society its name as Janus-faced. Its seemingly harmless shepherd\u2019s disguise turns out to be the deceptive flipside of sexualized violence. In Milton\u2019s puritan allegorical play of chastity<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a genre pastiche of courtly theatrical forms<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the sorcerer <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Comus<\/span>, a masked seducer, abducts his counterpart, called the <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Lady<\/span>, who stands for spirit and virtue. Dragging her to his castle, he tries to rob her of her innocence. Right in his first entrance, <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Comus<\/span> leads a band of wild, beast-faced, noise-wielding monsters, whose appearance first evokes baroque creatures of hell and their colonial-racist transfigurations within the context of British expansion:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\"><span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Comus<\/span> <em>enters, with a charming-rod in one hand, his glass in the other; with him a rout of monsters, headed like sundry sorts of wilde beasts, but otherwise like men and women, their apparel glistring; they come in making a riotous and unruly noise<\/em>,<em> with torches in their hands.<\/em><span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn426\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref426\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>426<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Even in Milton\u2019s play, the female figure of virtue serves as a trigger for the display of spectacular unruliness, as the first entry of <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Comus <\/span>and his \u201cbestial\u201d retinue shows. Transposed into Mardi Gras, figurations of femininity and \u201cbestiality\u201d enabled krewe members to adopt cross-dressing and blackface, bringing into play the image of white femininity as something to be protected<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>along with the dark threat it supposedly faces.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn427\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref427\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>427<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Against the backdrop of enslavement and the plantation, these figurations took on a distinct political signification. Milton\u2019s <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Comus<\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>oscillating between sovereign masquerade and unleashed violence<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>became the king of the Mardi Gras krewe. After the Civil War, Milton\u2019s rape fantasy<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>cited to reconfigure carnival<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>could also be read as a threat of violent transgression onto those cast as a racialized, bestial menace. And it is precisely through this twisting and intertwining of allusions to violence that the history of the Comus Krewe, for their part, resonates in a particular way with the contemporary governmental right-wing carnival<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>while differing from the Klan\u2019s vexations.<\/p>\n<p>In the end of the play, Milton has virtue and order prevail. And the Comus Krewe, in its own way, nods to a Puritan view of carnival already shaped by Ash Wednesday. Read with Umberto Eco, the Milton citation envisages a temporary form of transgression that serves to amplify an existent regime of domination.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn428\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref428\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>428<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Unlike the Klan<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>carnivalizing its calendar and staging a permanent state of emergency<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>excess is presented here as fleeting and clearly bounded, yet recalling the transformation of militant violence into societal structures potentially reactivated when needed by the new elites.<\/p>\n<p>While Comus\u2019s zoomorphic Mardi Gras personae<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>often white and female or Black and male figures, all of them played by white men<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>appeared only briefly every year in what we might call drag, they have a lasting counterpart: a gentlemen\u2019s club founded alongside the krewe, which to this day excludes those who are categorized as Jewish, Black, or women.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn429\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref429\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>429<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Serving the interests of an elite faction, the carnival of what are now called the Old Liner krewes has increasingly evolved into a vehicle for city branding. After the South\u2019s military defeat, the quoted courtly theatrics was repurposed into a large-scale carnival spectacle<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>now aligned with modern commercial capitalism and new modes of entertainment. At the same time, Mardi Gras became a tool of contemporary social control.<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans<\/em>, James Gill charts the entanglement of ex-Confederate vigilante groups such as the paramilitary, unmasked White League and the Comus Krewe, despite its Northern background.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn430\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref430\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>430<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Their \u201celevated carnival\u201d spectacle of street glamour, Gill argues, lured the bourgeoisie into the streets, making the old, unruly hooliganism<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>with its flour fights and, most likely, urine bombs<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>easier to control.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn431\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref431\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>431<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This new form of Mardi Gras went hand in hand with a retroactive, yet deeply enduring mythologizing of Southernness: \u201cThe krewes have played a big part in perpetuating the myth that the South sustained a great civilization until it was destroyed by Yankee vandals.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn432\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref432\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>432<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>In the guise of Proteus or Momus, by the 1870s<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>just as the first Klan was winding down<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>several elite krewes were springing up, modeled on Comus and helping to regulate street carnival with rolling tableaux vivants and living statues.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn433\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref433\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>433<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The modern version of carnival then finally received a respectable face in Rex, the supposedly universal, white, male Mardi Gras king<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>ruler of all the krewes.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn434\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref434\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>434<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Invented in 1872 as a deliberate attempt to jumpstart tourism, Rex became the figurehead of the modernized, \u201cAmerican\u201d carnival. His face is bare, while Comus still hides behind a stiff white mask, punctured with holes. To this day, the Comus Krewe refuses to reveal who appears each year on its behalf, broadcast on television alongside King Rex and exclusively photographed in an ever-same way during the now-traditional Meeting of the Courts on Fat Tuesday. In embroidered royal capes with long trains, Comus and Rex perform their alliance as \u201cErsatz,\u201d as surrogate, royalty.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn435\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref435\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>435<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Positioned within the social order of the South, the pairing of white mask and white face comes to expose the link between violence and wealth.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/38_Meeting-of-the-Courts-Comus-Rex-Mardi-Gras-1941-New-Orleans.-Foto-John-N.-Teunisson.jpg\" alt=\"A black-and-white photo shows many people in a large hall. In the center, two figures in opulent royal costumes with meter-long trains meet; the figure on the right is accompanied by four others.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1025\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7411\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/38_Meeting-of-the-Courts-Comus-Rex-Mardi-Gras-1941-New-Orleans.-Foto-John-N.-Teunisson.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/38_Meeting-of-the-Courts-Comus-Rex-Mardi-Gras-1941-New-Orleans.-Foto-John-N.-Teunisson-300x220.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/38_Meeting-of-the-Courts-Comus-Rex-Mardi-Gras-1941-New-Orleans.-Foto-John-N.-Teunisson-1024x750.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/38_Meeting-of-the-Courts-Comus-Rex-Mardi-Gras-1941-New-Orleans.-Foto-John-N.-Teunisson-150x110.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/38_Meeting-of-the-Courts-Comus-Rex-Mardi-Gras-1941-New-Orleans.-Foto-John-N.-Teunisson-768x562.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/38_Meeting-of-the-Courts-Comus-Rex-Mardi-Gras-1941-New-Orleans.-Foto-John-N.-Teunisson-850x622.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Abbildung 38<\/strong> \u00bbMeeting of the Courts\u00ab, Comus, Rex, Mardi Gras 1941, New Orleans. Photo: John N. Teunisson. The Historical New Orleans Collection (THNOC 1985.233.1).<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Historical sources already bear witness to this carnival\u2019s deep ties to the Southern myth and to courtly spectacle. A 1941 photograph, taken from a bird\u2019s-eye view by John N. Teunisson, shows the two royal couples with their spectacular trains and entourages approaching one another<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>surrounded by their exclusive audience. In contrast to today\u2019s tightly controlled close-ups from the Meeting of the Courts, Comus\u2019s perforated white mask, though, is hardly visible in the image. Referring to the courtly appearance of Comus, the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> remarked on February&#160;25, 1903, with a clear nod to the Civil War:<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn436\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref436\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>436<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Comus had gone by, with his train of mystic pageantry stretching far behind in glowing colors of many hues, and lit with the gleam of a thousand torches \u2026 and from the throne room beyond the mystic curtain whisperings of the court drifted out to the waiting multitude.<br \/>The ball, with its memories of many other Carnival balls, and with its associations of bravery and skill and of men who have gone forth to die for their country, was decked in the colors of the Carnival.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn437\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref437\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>437<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As this quote indicates, the emerging form of Mardi Gras in New Orleans gained its political charge through its tight fusion of ballroom culture and militarism in service of the Southern myth. As early as 1873, the Comus parade featured not only overt displays of glamour but also white supremacist satire. Its tool was racist caricature, as shown in Charles Briton\u2019s elaborate watercolors of figures and floats, painted on empty backgrounds, which are now housed in Tulane University\u2019s Carnival Collection.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn438\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref438\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>438<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> While the makeshift street carnival inflected by the creolized ragtag of the Atlantic has left few traces, the New Orleans archives overflow with exclusive artifacts from the so-called Old Liners: drawings, invitations, party favors, d\u00e9cor, and costumes from elite krewes. Among them are the remains of the 1873 Comus parade. Titled <em>The Missing Link to Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species<\/em>, these artifacts reimagined Milton\u2019s \u201croughly-headed monsters\u201d as oversized-headed animals meant to parody new political leaders: the president, the governor, the chief of police, and so on.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn439\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref439\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>439<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> By turning politicians into animalized figures, the parade staged a supposed Africanization of governance. Comus drew here on minstrel imagery, as shown in Briton\u2019s depiction of a gorilla playing a banjo, wearing a crooked hat and peacock feather, said to reference a sitting lieutenant governor. As minor, supporting characters, delicate, feminized creatures resembling butterflies appear in Briton\u2019s drawings, often with a stinger, such as the Demoiselle Fly. The krewe members likely performed these roles in blackface and cross-dressed as white women. In portraying such \u201cOthers,\u201d the use of masks became a gesture of domination. Black torchbearers and the krewe members\u2019 female relatives, by contrast, were not entitled to wear facial disguises.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn440\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref440\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>440<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The krewe masks thus worked to legitimize the emerging color line by appealing to the biology of the day, and they ultimately called for a reversal of Reconstruction government.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn441\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref441\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>441<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This carnival, in other words, played an overtly political role.<\/p>\n<div style=\"display:flex; gap:20px; justify-content:center; align-items:flex-start; flex-wrap:nowrap; margin-bottom:20px;\">\n<figure style=\"display:table; margin:0; flex:0 0 auto;\">\n    <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/39_Gorilla-or-The-Missing-Link-Wasserzeichnung-fuer-die-Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Parade-1873-New-Orleans-Charles-Briton.jpg\"\n         alt=\"A colored watercolor shows a gorilla playing a banjo, wearing a feathered hat and a ruff.\"\n         style=\"height:420px; width:auto; display:block;\" \/><figcaption class=\"caption-text\" style=\"display:table-caption; caption-side:bottom; margin-top:6px;\">\n      <strong>Figure 39:<\/strong> \u201cGorilla or The Missing Link,\u201d watercolor drawing for the Mistick Krewe of Comus Parade 1873, New Orleans, Charles Briton. Tulane University, Carnival Collection.<br \/>\n    <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure style=\"display:table; margin:0; flex:0 0 auto;\">\n    <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/40_-Demoiselle-Fly-Wasserzeichnung-fuer-die-Mistick-Krewe-of-Comus-Parade-1873-New-Orleans.jpg\"\n         alt=\"A colored watercolor shows a feminized figure with flowers in her hair, a fan in her hand, insect-like wings, and a stinger.\"\n         style=\"height:420px; width:auto; display:block;\" \/><figcaption class=\"caption-text\" style=\"display:table-caption; caption-side:bottom; margin-top:6px;\">\n      <strong>Figure 40:<\/strong> \u201cDemoiselle Fly,\u201d watercolor drawing for the Mistick Krewe of Comus Parade 1873, New Orleans, Charles Briton. Tulane University, Carnival Collection.<br \/>\n    <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>More than a century later, in the early 1990s, those notorious depictions reemerged<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>this time to give an afterlife to Jim Crow-style segregation. Before Comus, Momus, and Proteus shifted their efforts solely to private, invitation-only balls and canceled their parades in protest over a new city ordinance<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>requiring the overdue desegregation of all Mardi Gras parade groups<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the figures from 1873 were reinvoked in one last public spectacle.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn442\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref442\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>442<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Once again, the right to remain unseen was tied to a grotesque, hypervisibilization of those othered.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, these Mardi Gras secret societies have limited themselves to a parallel world of ball culture. Overt racist provocations, such as the gorilla imagery of the early 1990s parades, vanished from the public eye. Meanwhile, krewes like Comus have continued to cultivate quasi-oligarchic business networks through their ball circuits, networks that have entrenched local racialized class structures and have contributed to keep broader social change at bay. Unlike the fraternal terror tactics of the antebellum period, this exclusive ball culture was shaped by patriarchal logic. The daughters of otherwise faceless businessmen in \u201cdrag\u201d were presented as debutantes of high society: \u201cespecially the daughters of the krewe members become living effigies, the overdressed icons of social continuity,\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn443\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref443\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>443<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> as Joseph Roach writes. In her study on gender and Mardi Gras, Karen Trahan Leathem also stresses the role of women related to the krewes, who remained unmasked: \u201cAs men disguised their identities, unmasked women representing their families defined elite boundaries.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn444\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref444\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>444<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>Today, the complicit appearance of these young women, affiliated to the krewes within the quasi-feudal marriage market of elite ball culture can be read as the flipside of police terror aimed at Black men<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>racialized as public threats<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>whose mass incarceration and hyperexploitation under the US prison system has come to be labeled the New Jim Crow.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"> <span><a href=\"#fn445\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref445\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>445<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This marriage-market, moreover, also shows that the krewes do not operate as fraternities but as patriarchal elite formations. Having long since secured their position, they no longer need to flaunt their wealth and resentment in public. Instead, the very facelessness of their power, its transformation into structural conditions, becomes legible in their withdrawal from the streets. The elite krewes can be read as invisible \u201cwar machines\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that is, de- and reterritorializing engines of local governing. \u201cThat is why bands in general,\u201d as Deleuze and Guattari write in <em>A Thousand Plateaus<\/em>, \u201ceven those engaged in banditry or high-society life are metamorphoses of a war machine formally distinct from all State apparatuses or their equivalents, which are instead what structure centralized societies.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn446\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref446\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>446<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Reading the Klan and the krewes with Deleuze and Guattari as complementary war machines, the kinship between the faceless rule of high society through patriarchal networks and fraternal gangs of terror comes into view.<\/p>\n<p>So what exactly is the relationship between krewe and Klan? A decade after Comus was founded, the Mistick Krewe\u2019s carnivalization of naming was subtly picked up by the <em>Pulaski Citizen<\/em> calling the local vigilantes a \u201cmystic klan.\u201d And despite the differences between the so-called Old Liner krewes and the early Klan, the carnivalesque functioned as a tool of power for both the hidden elite and the vigilante mob. For the Old Liner krewes, however, this came<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>even in the 1870s<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>from a position of local dominance, a dominance that had nonetheless relied on the terror tactics of vigilantes. Accordingly, the Klan\u2019s unruly, mask-blending spectacles in the 1870s folded into what Laborde calls the \u201cclassic carnival.\u201d Frantz points to a lynching float in the 1872 Memphis Mardi Gras<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>featuring Klan supporters restaging their assaults, appearing in blackface and, apparently, playing the roles of their own victims. In <em>Midnight Rangers<\/em>, she shows how carnivalesque terror shifted, as Reconstruction faltered, to a performative \u201cas if\u201d mode of Mardi Gras spectacle, increasingly interwoven with a rising new high society:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Once southern elites could gather huge crowds to witness large, splashy Mardi Gras celebrations teaming with representations of race, gender, violence, and antinorthern sentiment and could describe them in detail and without fear of reprisal in their increasingly viable newspapers, the actual Klan was of much less use to them. The Klan would dissolve easily back into the cultural realm, where it would have and continues to have an uncanny and undeniable resonance.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn447\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref447\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>447<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Southern Mardi Gras thus evokes the kind of potential terror that can be reawakened and transposed whenever racial hierarchies are challenged<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and which, as seen in the storming of the Capitol or the use of Klan masks in supermarkets, has continually been remade into new forms of right-wing carnival untethered from any calendar. In the context of Trumpism<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>with its grotesque recasting of the president as the white Carnival King, serving an illiberal identitarian politics of majoritarian resentment and furthering upward redistribution, fueled by a popularity born of reality TV<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>reading Klan and krewe in tandem opens onto broader questions: how street terror intersects with mafialike \u201cmicrofascisms,\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn448\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref448\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>448<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> and how carnivalesque terror can be translated into structural, into governmental, violence.<\/p>\n<h4 id=\"3\">Complicities (Tramps)<\/h4>\n<p>Around 1900, as media technologies evolved, the first visual records of a new kind of street carnival began to appear in New Orleans: images that could be read both as signs of revolt against modern crowd control in the wake of an elevated Uptown Mardi Gras, that is, from the American Quarter, and as manifestations of carnivalized complicity with the ruling order. In the same historical moment that images began to proliferate, these early Mardi Gras photographs captured the ambivalence of the carnivalesque. I want to highlight one photo indicative of this ambivalence. It shows a rowdy carnival crew in New Orleans, which takes over the full width of the street like in a protest march. It seems to stage a kind of street-claiming act of revolt, yet probably marks the rear flank of the mobile power architecture of elite carnival and gestures to questions of co-optation. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/41_-Tramps-Band-Local-23-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1907.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection.jpg\" alt=\"\"A black-and-white photo shows a group spanning the entire width of the street, wearing torn suits and with differently painted or masked faces.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1141\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7415\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/41_-Tramps-Band-Local-23-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1907.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/41_-Tramps-Band-Local-23-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1907.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-300x245.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/41_-Tramps-Band-Local-23-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1907.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-1024x835.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/41_-Tramps-Band-Local-23-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1907.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-150x122.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/41_-Tramps-Band-Local-23-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1907.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-768x626.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/41_-Tramps-Band-Local-23-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1907.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-850x693.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 41:<\/strong> Tramps, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, 1907. The Historical New Orleans Collection (THNOC 1981.261.58, 12.2.1907).<\/span><\/p>\n<p>On Mardi Gras Day 1907<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>February&#160;12<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the Tramps Band Local&#160;23 grinned into a camera, wearing torn suits, off-kilter hats (some far too small), and faces variously painted or masked. As they made their way through the streets of New Orleans, they likely played rough music for the onlookers who appear at the edge of the photograph. This ragged, lumpen-looking yet neatly lined-up crew also denotes just how embedded highly gendered forms of blackface were in Mardi Gras around 1900. The street scene features all kinds of minstrel-like and related face-masking: fake beards, blackened eyes, painted faces, veils, and soot smears. In the context of US segregation, it shows how blackface functioned as the comic mask of the precarious<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>linked, in Achille Mbembe\u2019s terms, to the modern Black conditionof bare labor, the condition of being made into a nonperson.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn449\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref449\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>449<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> A cardboard sign warning not to provoke the monkey links blackface to zoomorphic tropes and taps into the racialized visual regime of the time. The cockeyed hats, torn suits, and metal buckets used as makeshift instruments<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>hallmarks of this band<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>also signal connections to minstrel shows. <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>long associated with the plantation system and the figure of the runaway slave<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>appears to be collectively recast as a masculinist gang persona allegorizing the segregationist regime now bearing his name.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn450\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref450\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>450<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/42_T.-D.-Rice-als-Jim-Crow-mit-Publikum-auf-der-Buehne-des-American-Theatre-Bowery-New-York-1833.jpg\" alt=\"A black-and-white newspaper illustration titled \u201cAmerican Theatre Bowery New York\u201d shows a stage scene with a central figure in blackface dancing, surrounded by the audience on stage.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1025\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7416\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/42_T.-D.-Rice-als-Jim-Crow-mit-Publikum-auf-der-Buehne-des-American-Theatre-Bowery-New-York-1833.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/42_T.-D.-Rice-als-Jim-Crow-mit-Publikum-auf-der-Buehne-des-American-Theatre-Bowery-New-York-1833-300x220.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/42_T.-D.-Rice-als-Jim-Crow-mit-Publikum-auf-der-Buehne-des-American-Theatre-Bowery-New-York-1833-1024x750.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/42_T.-D.-Rice-als-Jim-Crow-mit-Publikum-auf-der-Buehne-des-American-Theatre-Bowery-New-York-1833-150x110.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/42_T.-D.-Rice-als-Jim-Crow-mit-Publikum-auf-der-Buehne-des-American-Theatre-Bowery-New-York-1833-768x562.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/42_T.-D.-Rice-als-Jim-Crow-mit-Publikum-auf-der-Buehne-des-American-Theatre-Bowery-New-York-1833-850x622.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Abbildung 42:<\/strong> T. D. Rice as <span class=\"Kapitaelchen\">Jim Crow<\/span>, with spectators present on the stage of the American Theatre, Bowery, New York, 1833. Harvard Theatre Collection on Blackface Minstrelsy, 1833<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>1906 (Houghton Library).<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In the 1830s, decades before slavery was abolished, T. D. Rice had introduced <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span> as a new figure in popular theater. His black-painted persona of a drifting tramp had served as both a trickster figure and a projection screen for a predominantly white audience that was first largely industrial working-class, then increasingly bourgeois<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>mainly in the urban North, along the border, and eventually overseas. This figure had stood in for an imagined elsewhere<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>one that invoked the terror of enslavement, but reframed it in carnivalesque terms and infused the supposedly preindustrial setting with nostalgia. Rice\u2019s burnt cork makeup had not yet been grotesquely exaggerated, however, unlike what would later characterize the post-Reconstruction minstrel shows of an era that inherited his character\u2019s name.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn451\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref451\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>451<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In the Tramps photo, the rowdy, in-between characteristics of this syncopated singer-dancer gained a <em>survie<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>appearing as \u201ctoo slippery \u2026 to police,\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn452\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref452\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>452<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> to quote Walter Lhamon. The Tramps somehow pulled back the choral, uncontainable, aesthetics of the comic figure, echoing an 1833 image of <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span> in the American Theatre on New York\u2019s Bowery, where Rice dances in the middle of a throng onstage. But the 1907 photo of the Tramps gave <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span> a collective afterlife in the streets at a time when his name had already come to signify a new form of racist structural violence. This image no longer presented an imagined elsewhere<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>however problematic<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>of rural rebellion staged in the city; it marshaled a lineup of carnival revelers in blackface, already loaded with racist stereotypes, situated within a precise historical and geographic context, as the photo\u2019s provenance shows. <\/p>\n<p>Filed under \u201cTramps Band Local&#160;23,\u201d it entered The Historical New Orleans Collection with no added context. But indirectly, it signals complicity. On the fourth page of the <em>Daily Picayune<\/em> from February&#160;13, 1907<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Ash Wednesday<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a photo by C.&#160;C. Cook appears at the bottom right.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn453\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref453\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>453<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Taken from another angle, it again shows the Tramps Band Local&#160;23 walking in the Rex Parade. Respectively, this rowdy, street-claiming gang turns out to be an entourage for the dominant carnival. Like Milton\u2019s \u201croughly-headed monsters,\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn454\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref454\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>454<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> the Tramps can be read as escorts to the white Carnival King. However bizarre their outfits, they still marched in step along the official routes of a segregated Mardi Gras:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">When the sun rose and shone red and then bright he saw various queer-costumed people, little people and big people moving about, dancing and making merry, even as the day began, and as the day advanced their number increased until the whole city seemed turned into a clown\u2019s show, and everywhere there was grotesque figures, groups of figures and queer bands and single musical preparations, making the music that is typical of the Carnival when it is at its height on Mardi Gras.<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>\u2026 St. Charles Avenue, above Calliope, where the parade appeared at 11&#160;o\u2019clock, was thronged with people, including all classes, old and young, men and women and children, maids with babies, fathers and mothers carrying and wheeling their little ones. Every race and nationality of the homogeneous population of the city, mingled with the queer masked figures whose race and nationality, sex and visages all were concealed, and only the general jollity denoted that they also belonged to the happy family of Rex.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn455\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref455\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>455<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That Mardi Gras, the <em>Daily Picayune<\/em>\u2019s front page commented on the \u201cqueer-&#173;costumed people\u201d mingling with \u201cthe homogeneous population of the city\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>likely with irony, since the ostensibly happy family of Rex and the \u201chomogeneous population of the city\u201d officially excluded the people of the back streets, except in the form of grotesque effigies during the Jim Crow era. The choral, plebeian underside of the Rex Parade captured in the Tramps photo may thus point to a specific function of blackface at the time: negotiating a new idea of white male supremacy. Popular and everyday culture<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>carnival included<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>helped stabilize a cross-class pigmentocracy whose ideological veneer, the claim of a homo&#173;geneous population, was in fact a racist fantasy.<\/p>\n<p>It was precisely after abolition that blackface took on a distinctly political role. By citing the tramp persona reminiscent of T. D. Rice\u2019s <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span>, at a time when that figure in New Orleans had become shorthand for segregation, the masks worn by this male crew had become markers of possible complicity with the modernized racist order of their day. Whoever these men were, the photo gives a glimpse into how the name of a comic carnival figure came, under modern conditions, to stand in for an age of political backlash. Reading the image accordingly offers a path toward historicizing \u201cJim Crow\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a way to question the kinds of linear projections that treat racialized drag as fixed, as timeless across differing contexts. Hence I would suggest attending to the specific ways modes of drag are cited and the performative transpositions this entails. The Tramps in racialized drag of 1903, viewed in context of the afterlife of terror in segregationist violence, thus already allegorize a kind of <em>new <\/em><span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span>.<\/p>\n<h4>Endnotes<\/h4>\n<hr>\n<ol start=\"387\">\n<li id=\"fn387\">\n<p>On the changed media culture of self-publication and the transformation of mimesis, see Balke, <em>Mimesis<\/em>, 2018: 228<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>229. On the role of blackface citations, see also K\u00f6ppert, \u201cDigital Blackface,\u201d 2025.<a href=\"#fnref387\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn388\">\n<p>On Jake Angeli, see <a href=\"https:\/\/people.com\/politics\/justice-dept-walks-back-claim-capitol-rioters-sought-to-capture-assassinate-politicians\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/people.com\/politics\/justice-dept-walks-back-claim-capitol-rioters-sought-to-capture-assassinate-politicians\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024. <a href=\"#fnref388\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn389\">\n<p>Costumes in the German-speaking context also include Perchten masks. See &#173;preliminary considerations on the protests against government policies to &#173;contain COVID-19 in <em>Affekt und Gefolgschaft<\/em>, 2023; <em>Populismus und Kritik<\/em>, 2024. See also Nachtwey et al., <em>Corona-Proteste<\/em>, 2020; Amlinger and Nachtwey, <em>Gekr\u00e4nkte &#173;Freiheit<\/em>, 2022: 247<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>297 (with reference to Adorno\u2019s studies on the authoritarian &#173;character, written in the 1940s and published in English in 1950, German version: 1995); &#173;Reichardt, <em>Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft<\/em>, 2021.<a href=\"#fnref389\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn390\">\n<p>See David Hernandez, \u201cMan Wears KKK Hood While Grocery Shopping,\u201d <em>Los Angeles Times<\/em>, May&#160;4, 2020, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/california\/story\/2020-05-04\/man-kkk-hood-in-santee-san-diego-sparks-outrage\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/california\/story\/2020-05-04\/man-kkk-hood-in-santee-san-diego-sparks-outrage<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2020\/05\/05\/USAT\/c35db4ec-989e-44da-b9b9-0214718c2f8b-Screen_Shot_2020-05-05_at_5.38.20_AM.png?crop=2205,1240,x0,y0&amp;width=2205&amp;height=1240&amp;format=pjpg&amp;auto=webp\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2020\/05\/05\/USAT\/c35db4ec-989e-44da-b9b9-0214718c2f8b-Screen_Shot_2020-05-05_at_5.38.20_AM.png?crop=2205,1240,x0,y0&amp;width=2205&amp;height=1240&amp;format=pjpg&amp;auto=webp<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;22, 2022; Sebastian Haak, \u201cHassbotschaft unter Mundschutz. Rassistischer Vorfall in einem Supermarkt in S\u00fcdth\u00fcringen,\u201d <em>Neues Deutschland<\/em>, May&#160;5, 2020: 5.<a href=\"#fnref390\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn391\">\n<p>On resentful forms of mimesis and their connection to today\u2019s media structure, see Vogl, <em>Capital and Ressentiment<\/em>, 2022; regarding gender politics, Nagle, <em>Kill All Normies<\/em>, 2017. On corresponding performances of masculinity and their social causes, see for the US<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>from a prepandemic perspective<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Hochschild, <em>Strangers in Their Own Land<\/em>, 2016 and Kimmel, <em>Angry White Men<\/em>, 2013.<a href=\"#fnref391\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn392\">\n<p>On Trumpism, see Koch et al., <em>Great Disruptor, <\/em>2020.<a href=\"#fnref392\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn393\">\n<p>For the corresponding reformulation of temporal drag see Lott, \u201cBlackface from Time to Time,\u201d 2025.<a href=\"#fnref393\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn394\">\n<p>Bakhtin, <em>Rabelais<\/em>, 1984, 111. Bakhtin\u2019s view perhaps overly romanticized carnival also in reaction to Stalinism. See, by contrast, Mbembe: \u201cBakhtin\u2019s error was to attribute these practices to the dominated. But the production of the burlesque is not specific to this group.\u201d Mbembe, <em>Postcolony<\/em>, 2001, 133. For a critique of Mbembe\u2019s critique see again Crichlow and Northover, <em>Globalization<\/em>, 2009, 109.<a href=\"#fnref394\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn395\">\n<p>For a critique of vigilantism and its gendering, see Dorlin, <em>Self-Defense<\/em>, 2022, 82<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>110.<a href=\"#fnref395\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn396\">\n<p>On the differing and shifting use of <em>creole<\/em> as a designation for a population group in New Orleans, see the second chapter of Lief, <em>Staging New Orleans<\/em>, 2011, 14<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>32; see also Regis, <em>Local<\/em>, 2019. I refer here instead to Glissant\u2019s understanding of creolization processes, that is, the interweaving of cultural techniques (<em>Introduction<\/em>, 1996; <em>Po\u00e9tique de la relation<\/em>, 1990\/<em>Poetics of Relation<\/em>, 1997). On second lining see Regis, \u201cBlackness,\u201d 2001; \u201cSecond Lines,\u201d 1999.<a href=\"#fnref396\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn397\">\n<p>This is Dinshaw\u2019s formulation in Dinshaw et al., \u201cTheorizing Queer Temporalities,\u201d 2007, 178; see also Dinshaw, <em>Getting Medieval<\/em>, 1999, 3.<a href=\"#fnref397\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn398\">\n<p>Frantz, <em>Ku-Klux<\/em>, 2015, 27. On the retrospective self-mythologization of the \u201cweird potency\u201d of this previously meaningless designation and the transformation of a loose group in search of entertainment into a \u201cband of Regulators,\u201d see the Klan members Lester and Wilson, <em>Ku Klux Klan<\/em>, 1905: 56, 73.<a href=\"#fnref398\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn399\">\n<p>On the rhetorical \u201cface of speech,\u201d see Menke, <em>Prosopoiia<\/em>, 2000.<a href=\"#fnref399\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn400\">\n<p>The <em>Pulaski Citizen<\/em>, June&#160;7, 1867: 3; <a href=\"https:\/\/chroniclingamerica.loc.gov\/lccn\/sn85033964\/1867-06-07\/ed-1\/seq-3\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/chroniclingamerica.loc.gov\/lccn\/sn85033964\/1867-06-07\/ed-1\/seq-3\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024 (all spelling as in the original); see Frantz, <em>Ku-Klux<\/em>, 2015: 51.<a href=\"#fnref400\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn401\">\n<p>On the significance of whistles, see, from a Klan perspective, Lester and Wilson, <em>Ku Klux Klan<\/em>, 1905: 59. On the modernity of such sounds, see Lhamon, <em>Raising Cain<\/em>, 1998: 110.<a href=\"#fnref401\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn402\">\n<p>\u201c<em>Kuklux\u201d<\/em> is the designation in Lester and Wilson, <em>Ku Klux Klan<\/em>, 1905: 47. For the history of Klan masks see Frantz, \u201c<em>Midnight Rangers<\/em>,\u201d 2005; <em>Ku-Klux<\/em>, 2015; Kinney, <em>Hood<\/em>, 2016; \u201cHow the Klan Got Its Hoods,\u201d 2016, <a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/127242\/klan-got-hood\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/127242\/klan-got-hood<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024. On the proximity of Klan hoods and carnivalesque appearances in the context of Mardi Gras see Godet, \u201cMultiple Representations,\u201d 2017: 237. That said, Klan hoods<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which in the United States paradigmatically signify WASP cultural attributes<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>recall Catholic penitential robes from southern Europe and thus also testify to the fact that the Klan itself is a creolized phenomenon. <a href=\"#fnref402\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn403\">\n<p>For the history of the Civil War in the United States and its aftereffects see Masur, <em>U.S. Civil War<\/em>, 2020; Guelzo, <em>Fateful Lightning<\/em>, 2012.<a href=\"#fnref403\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn404\">\n<p>On the double character of the German \u201c<em>vexieren\u201d<\/em> as a term meaning both \u201cplaying hide-and-seek\u201d and \u201cvexing,\u201d see <em>Etymologisches W\u00f6rterbuch des Deutschen<\/em>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref404\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn405\">\n<p>On the Civil Rights Trail and the privately funded lynching memorial in Montgomery see <a href=\"https:\/\/museumandmemorial.eji.org\/memorial\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/museumandmemorial.eji.org\/memorial<\/span><\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/04\/25\/us\/lynching-memorial-alabama.html\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/&#173;2018\/&#173;<\/span><span class=\"Hyperlink\">04\/25\/us\/lynching-memorial-alabama.html<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024. Canetti describes the relationship between mob and lynching terror: \u201cIn addition there remains to this day one unashamedly primitive pack<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the pack which operates under the name of <em>lynch law<\/em>. The word is as shameless as the thing, for what actually happens is a negation of law. The victim is not thought worthy of it; he perishes like an animal, with none of the forms usual amongst men.\u201d See <em>Crowds and Power<\/em>, 1973, 117. In German: \u201cEine unversch\u00e4mte Art von Meute hat man noch heute in jedem Akt von Lynch-Justiz vor sich. Das Wort ist so unversch\u00e4mt wie die Sache, denn es geht um eine Aufhebung der Justiz. Der Beschuldigte wird ihrer nicht f\u00fcr wert gehalten. Er soll ohne alle Formen, die f\u00fcr Menschen \u00fcblich sind, umkommen wie ein Tier.\u201d <em>Masse und Macht<\/em>, 1980: 130. <a href=\"#fnref405\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn406\">\n<p>On the visual politics of lynchings, whose victims are 99&#160;percent men, see Allen and Littlefield, <em>Without Sanctuary<\/em>, 2000: <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/without_xxx_2000_00_7106\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/without_xxx_2000_00_7106<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;12, 2024; Apel, <em>Imagery of Lynching<\/em>, 2004; Young, \u201c<em>The Black Body<\/em>,\u201d 2005; on the visual history of violence and the photographs marked by modes of respectability responding to it see also D\u00e4rmann, <em>Undienlichkeit<\/em>, 2020: 182<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>205.<a href=\"#fnref406\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn407\">\n<p>For a respective reformulation of Marx\u2019s notion of <em>primitive accumulation <\/em>in the context of colonial critique, see the research project of Katja Diefenbach, Ruth Sonderegger, and Pablo Valdivia de Orozco, who organized an international conference on Belligerent Accumulation at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder, in May 2024: <a href=\"https:\/\/accumulation-race-aesthetics.org\/belligerent-accumulation\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/accumulation-race-aesthetics.org\/belligerent-accumulation\/<\/span><\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/accumulation-race-aesthetics.org\/research-statement\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/accumulation-race-aesthetics.org\/research-statement\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed August&#160;13, 2025.<a href=\"#fnref407\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn408\">\n<p>See Frantz, <em>Ku-Klux<\/em>, 2015: 33; \u201cMidnight Rangers,\u201d 2005: 812; <a href=\"https:\/\/external-content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.XdwGTN8TaTGeQy_wCpaUawHaEn%26pid%3DApi&amp;f=1&amp;ipt=28b716b0acf7139d9b6dfa7269910355fc65c0fbaebb251fb0a9a2fca6817171&amp;ipo=images\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/external-&#173;content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.XdwGTN8TaTGeQy_wCpaUawHaEn%26pid%3DApi&amp;f=1&amp;ipt=28b716b0acf7139d9b6dfa7269910355fc65c0fbaebb251fb0a9a2fca6817171&amp;ipo=images<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024. <a href=\"#fnref408\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn409\">\n<p>On the topicality of the postfactual, see Gess, <em>Halbwahrheiten<\/em>, 2021. Tavia Nyong\u2019o incisively notes: \u201cIn times like these, fabulationality is itself due for a certain degree of redress.\u201d See <em>Afro-Fabulations<\/em>, 2018: 21. On self-reflexive constellations of Afro-fabulations, see Heidenreich, \u201cWhose Portrait?\u201d 2025.<a href=\"#fnref409\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn410\">\n<p>Quoted from an article under the heading \u201cKuKlux Klan\u201d in <em>The Pulaski Citizen<\/em>, April&#160;5, 1867. <a href=\"#fnref410\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn411\">\n<p><em>The Pulaski Citizen<\/em>, March&#160;29, 1867: 3.<a href=\"#fnref411\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn412\">\n<p>On the relationship between Perchten and St. Nicholas plays, see Kammerhofer-&#173;Aggermann, \u201cSankt Nikolaus,\u201d 2002.<a href=\"#fnref412\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn413\">\n<p>Davis, \u201cParades and Power,\u201d 1988; on the intertwining of blackface and gender bending in the history of the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, see DuComb, \u201cThe Wenches,\u201d 2018.<a href=\"#fnref413\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn414\">\n<p>For the \u201ccontinued existence of ancient European folk theatricals well into nineteenth-century America,\u201d and the close connection of Klan, minstrelsy, and mumming plays, see Cockrell, <em>Demons<\/em>, 1997: xiii<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>xiv; 33, 46, 56.<a href=\"#fnref414\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn415\">\n<p>Frantz, <em>Ku-Klux<\/em>, 2015: 78.<a href=\"#fnref415\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn416\">\n<p>On the differentiated spectrum of meanings of blackened faces with regard to the Klan in the context of Reconstruction, see Frantz, \u201cReading the Blackened Faces,\u201d in <em>Facing Drag<\/em>, 2025. See also Cockrell on \u201cnonracial folk blackface masking\u201d in <em>Demons<\/em>, 1997: 52; on \u201cBlack Gothic,\u201d see Smith-Rosenberg, <em>Violent Empire<\/em>, 2010: 413. The play with references is also a hallmark of early blackface acts and is adopted by the Klan; on T.&#160;D. Rice\u2019s reply signed with Jim Crow to a newspaper review, see Annu\u00df, \u201cBlackface,\u201d 2014.<a href=\"#fnref416\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn417\">\n<p>Mbembe, <em>On the Postcolony,<\/em> 2001: 102.<a href=\"#fnref417\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn418\">\n<p>On the Jim Crow era and segregation laws, see A. Reed, <em>The South<\/em>, 2022; on the corresponding \u201cburdened subject no longer enslaved, but not yet free,\u201d see Hartman, <em>Scenes of Subjection<\/em>, 1997: 206. On the concept of petty apartheid, see Lalu, <em>Undoing Apartheid<\/em>, 2022. <a href=\"#fnref418\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn419\">\n<p>As Errol Laborde, contemporary chronicler of the New Orleanian Mardi Gras in the tradition of Perry Young (1969), writes in <em>Mardi Gras<\/em>, 2013: 81, \u201cWith lineage that traces back to Mobile and farther back to the Mummers in Philadelphia, what evolved in New Orleans is the classic American Carnival, which, like many things American, has a touch of European afterlife.\u201d On the colonial prehistory of Mardi Gras beginning around 1700, cf., however, Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 27<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>44; Godet, <em>From Anger to Joy<\/em>, 2024; <em>Playing with Race<\/em>, 2016: 258<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>260; Sublette, <em>The World<\/em>, 2008.<a href=\"#fnref419\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn420\">\n<p>On the political history of the color line in New Orleans and its caste system before segregation, see Powell, <em>The Accidental City<\/em>, 2012; on the three classifications up to the mid-nineteenth century<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>comparable to Cape Town<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>see Brook, <em>The Accident of Color<\/em>, 2019. See also Vidal, <em>Louisiana<\/em>, 2014; <em>Caribbean New Orleans<\/em>, 2019. On the exemplary role of New Orleans as a port city in the formation of diasporic communities and the specific function of carnival, see Abrahams, \u201cConflict Displays,\u201d 2017. With regard to demographic developments and Mardi Gras, see also Gotham, \u201cAuthentic New Orleans,\u201d 2007: 22<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>44; on gender history, the segregation of marriages (1894), and public life (1896), as well as prostitution, see Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 18<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>19; Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 224<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>233. To again quote Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 143, \u201cThe few remaining pockets of interracial association disappeared from New Orleans in the 1880s.\u201d On the historical geography of New Orleans, see Campanella, <em>Bienville\u2019s Dilemma<\/em>, 2008; <em>Cityscapes of New Orleans<\/em>, 2017.<a href=\"#fnref420\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn421\">\n<p>On the contemporary revolutionization of trade, industrialization, and mobility from a transregional perspective, see Smith-Rosenberg, <em>The Violent Empire<\/em>, 2010.<a href=\"#fnref421\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn422\">\n<p>On the family resemblance of the creolized port cities Cape Town and New &#173;Orleans, see Fredrickson, <em>White Supremacy<\/em>, 1981: 258; Saunders, \u201cCape Town and New &#173;Orleans,\u201d 2000. With regard to the second half of the nineteenth century in both &#173;cities, Bickford-Smith points out \u201csocial \u2018integration\u2019\u201d as a \u201clower-class &#173;phenomenon\u201d; &#173;<em>Ethnic Pride<\/em>, 1995: 37.<a href=\"#fnref422\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn423\">\n<p>On the Cowbellion de Rakin Society, a carnivalesque and secretive fraternity founded in the 1830s in Mobile, about 150&#160;miles east of New Orleans, with connections to the German carnival of Pennsylvania and from which Comus emerged, see Cockrell, <em>Demons<\/em>, 1997: 36<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>37; on Comus and its relation to the New Orleans vigilantes and the Klan, see also Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 48, 77<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>108.<a href=\"#fnref423\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn424\">\n<p>On the history of mobile platforms<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>wagons, floats, caravans, and the like<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>functioning as tribunes in Europe, see Heer, <em>Vom Mummenschanz<\/em>, 1986: 69.<a href=\"#fnref424\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn425\">\n<p>On the Milton quote as an attempt \u201cto accumulate cultural capital to complement their material success,\u201d see Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 258.<a href=\"#fnref425\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn426\">\n<p>Milton, <em>Comus, <\/em>1921: 10; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/comuswithintrodn00miltuoft\/page\/10\/mode\/2up?ref=ol\">https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/comuswithintrodn00miltuoft\/page\/10\/mode\/2up?ref=ol<\/a><a href=\"#fnref426\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn427\">\n<p>On the use of blackface by Comus and later also by Rex, see Felipe Smith, \u201cThings,\u201d 2013: 25<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>26; revised reprint in Adams and Sakakeeny, <em>Remaking New Orleans<\/em>, 2019.<a href=\"#fnref427\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn428\">\n<p>See Eco, \u201cFrames,\u201d 1984.<a href=\"#fnref428\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn429\">\n<p>See Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule, <\/em>1997: 7. <a href=\"#fnref429\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn430\">\n<p>On the White League, see Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 106<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>122; on the 1874 coup and the involvement of Comus members, see also Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 261; on the &#173;Battle of Liberty Place, the 1874 coup by the White League against Reconstruction, see Gotham, \u201cAuthentic New Orleans,\u201d 2007: 39.<a href=\"#fnref430\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn431\">\n<p>See Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 36; Young, <em>The Mistick Krewe<\/em>, 1969: 49<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>50. On corresponding medieval European carnival battles and their afterlife, see Mauldin\u2019s introduction to <em>\u00a1Carnival!<\/em>, 2004: 17. In the Alpine and Tyrolean regions, there are complementary forms of performance involving coal-dust cudgels and soot-smearers.<a href=\"#fnref431\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn432\">\n<p>Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule, <\/em>1997: 280.<a href=\"#fnref432\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn433\">\n<p>On the statuary aesthetics of \u201celevated carnival,\u201d see Young, <em>The Mistick Krewe<\/em>, 1969: 75.<a href=\"#fnref433\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn434\">\n<p>On the first King Rex, Lewis Salomon, a banker from a Jewish family who converted to Catholicism, see Laborde, <em>Mardi Gras<\/em>, 2013: 33<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>34.<a href=\"#fnref434\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn435\">\n<p>On the <em>Meeting of the Courts<\/em>, which is broadcast in full on local television every year, see Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 11, 13; on its history: 137. See, most recently, <span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=46RclbkevBU<\/span>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024. The white Comus mask also faintly recalls the modern signature hoods of the Ku Klux Klan with its eye holes; on the mask repertoire, see the introduction by Adams and Sakakeeny to <em>Remaking New Orleans<\/em>, 2019: 16. On the second Klan, founded in 1915, and its visual media politics, see Harcourt, <em>Ku Klux Kulture<\/em>, 2019.<a href=\"#fnref435\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn436\">\n<p>A photo of the 2022 Meeting of the Courts by David Erath, showing the unsettling masking of Comus, can be found in Nell Nolan\u2019s article \u201cPhotos: Rex and Comus Balls and Meeting of the Courts 2022\u201d; <span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.nola.com\/multimedia\/photos\/photos-rex-and-comus-balls-and-meeting-of-the-courts-2022\/collection_248d8fee-9b5f-11ec-8c0f-1771c2d8ad3d.html#16<\/span>; accessed September&#160;24, 2024. It was not possible to obtain current images for this book. A former standard photographer, for example, first wanted to check whether my text aligned with the interests of her \u201c&#173;clients.\u201d<a href=\"#fnref436\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn437\">\n<p><em>Times Democrat<\/em>, February&#160;25, 1903: 7. The newspaper merged about ten years later with the <em>Daily Picayune<\/em>, which still exists and maintained coverage during the Katrina disaster in 2005.<a href=\"#fnref437\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn438\">\n<p>See Leathem, <em>Gender and Mardi Gras<\/em>, 1994: 59.<a href=\"#fnref438\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn439\">\n<p>The phrase is spoken by the <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Lady<\/span> in Milton, <em>Comus<\/em>, 1921: 28.<a href=\"#fnref439\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn440\">\n<p>On the class-specific taboo against wearing masks that applied to white women in the nineteenth century, see Leathem, <em>Gender and Mardi Gras<\/em>, 1994: 52; see also Young on the nighttime mask ban after the Civil War and the preceding regulations targeting ball culture from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into the 1830s; <em>The Mistick Krewe<\/em>, 1969: 87, 17<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>26. On the racist history of mask bans, which began around 1730 under Spanish rule with the Code Noirin force at the time, see Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 81<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>82. See the local Code Noir at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.blackpast.org\/african-american-history\/louisianas-code-noir-1724\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.blackpast.org\/african-american-history\/louisianas-code-noir-1724\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024. On <br \/>the Code Noir, introduced in Louisiana in 1724 and in force until the territory was purchased by the United States in 1803<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which regulated the status of Blacks and free Blacks, banned intergroup marriage, prohibited enslaved gatherings, enforced Catholi&#173;cism, and ultimately also excluded Jews<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>see Palmer, <em>Through the Codes Darkly<\/em>, 2012. See also Midlo Hall, <em>Africans in Louisiana<\/em>, 1992. Linebaugh and Rediker point out that the Code Noir did not apply on pirate ships. The transatlantic \u201chydrarchy,\u201d as they call it, which mixed cultural practices from around the world, functioned more democratically than the dominant conditions on land; the mobile underclass thus became a threat to the slave trade; see <em>Hydra<\/em>, 2000: 162<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>167. On pirate cultures and their relation to queer lives, see also Halberstam, <em>Queer Art of Failure<\/em>, 2011: 18<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>23.<a href=\"#fnref440\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn441\">\n<p>On the Darwin quote, see Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 261<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>269; Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 101<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>105.<a href=\"#fnref441\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn442\">\n<p>On the persistence of patriarchal ball culture, see also Rebecca Snedeker\u2019s documentary film <em>By Invitation Only<\/em>, 2006.<a href=\"#fnref442\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn443\">\n<p>Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 267. By contrast, see Laborde: \u201cthe debutante tradition, which at its primal level is as innocent as a proud father honoring his daughter \u2026 such traditions involve old-family lineages and customs and are quite healthy for a community.\u201d <em>Mardi Gras<\/em>, 2013: 61. On the afterlife of killability, see Sharpe, <em>In the Wake<\/em>, 2016.<a href=\"#fnref443\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn444\">\n<p>Leathem, <em>Gender and Mardi Gras<\/em>, 1994: 107. On the affirmative function of drag in the context of the elite Mardi Gras, see Ryan, <em>Women in Public<\/em>, 1990: 29.<a href=\"#fnref444\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn445\">\n<p>See Alexander, <em>New Jim Crow, <\/em>2012. <a href=\"#fnref445\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn446\">\n<p>Deleuze and Guattari, <em>A Thousand Plateaus<\/em>, 1987: 358.<a href=\"#fnref446\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn447\">\n<p>Frantz, \u201cMidnight Rangers,\u201d 2005: 836.<a href=\"#fnref447\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn448\">\n<p>Deleuze and Guattari, <em>A Thousand Plateaus, <\/em>1987: 379.<a href=\"#fnref448\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn449\">\n<p>\u201cThe transnationalization of the Black condition was therefore a constitutive moment for modernity, with the Atlantic serving as its incubator\u201d; see Mbembe, &#173;<em>Critique of Black Reason<\/em>, 2017: 15. According to Mbembe, the invention of <em>le n\u00e8gre<\/em> (38), the &#173;personification of the <em>conditio nigra<\/em>, is not a prerequisite but a response to the commercialization of the triangular trade; the figure was only biologized in the nineteenth century and, in the context of today\u2019s genome-oriented thinking, is experiencing a comeback (39). For critiques of biological thinking and of notions of indi&#173;geneity, see also Erasmus, <em>Race Otherwise<\/em>, 2017; \u201cWho Was Here First?,\u201d 2020. <a href=\"#fnref449\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn450\">\n<p>On the connection between loose assemblages and comic figures, see Menke, <em>Der komische Chor<\/em>, 2023. See also Kirsch on the related nomadism of chorus and <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Harlekin<\/span>, <em>Chor-Denken<\/em>, 2020: 505.<a href=\"#fnref450\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn451\">\n<p>See Annu\u00df, \u201cBlackface,\u201d 2014.<a href=\"#fnref451\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn452\">\n<p>Lhamon, <em>Jump Jim Crow, <\/em>2003: 23.<a href=\"#fnref452\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn453\">\n<p>My thanks for this information to Heather Green from THNOC.<a href=\"#fnref453\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn454\">\n<p>Milton, <em>Comus, <\/em>1921: 28.<a href=\"#fnref454\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn455\">\n<p>\u201cRex Entertains the Nations with Pageant and Reception,\u201d front page of the <em>Daily &#173;Picayune<\/em>, Ash Wednesday, February&#160;13, 1907.<a href=\"#fnref455\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Figure 33 Lynching Memorial, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, 2018. Photo: Alan Karchmer. In the spring of 2020, medical masks took over public life as the coronavirus pandemic set in. Suddenly, people began showing up in different masquerades in various locations to protest local mask mandates\u2014and to share their photos on social &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annuss-dirty-dragging-en"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Vexations &#8211; mdwPress<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vexations &#8211; mdwPress\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp; Figure 33 Lynching Memorial, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, 2018. Photo: Alan Karchmer. In the spring of 2020, medical masks took over public life as the coronavirus pandemic set in. Suddenly, people began showing up in different masquerades in various locations to protest local mask mandates\u2014and to share their photos on social &hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"mdwPress\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-03-31T09:07:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-03-31T09:27:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/download-1459070_1280.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jana Diewald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Verfasst von\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Jana Diewald\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Gesch\u00e4tzte Lesezeit\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"37\u00a0Minuten\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Jana Diewald\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/en\/#\/schema\/person\/718d5159661e1c0dbf47804f556bf0ba\"},\"headline\":\"Vexations\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-03-31T09:07:06+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-03-31T09:27:03+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/\"},\"wordCount\":7383,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/en\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/download-1459070_1280.png\",\"articleSection\":[\"Annu\u00df: Dirty Dragging (en)\"],\"inLanguage\":\"de\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-007\/\",\"name\":\"Vexations &#8211; 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