{"id":7664,"date":"2026-03-31T11:06:48","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/?p=7664"},"modified":"2026-03-31T11:26:37","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:26:37","slug":"mdwp008-008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp008-008\/","title":{"rendered":"Second Lining"},"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\/mdwp008-007\/\" 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\/mdwp008-009\" 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 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ZP_ATTR\">%7B%22status%22%3A%22success%22%2C%22updateneeded%22%3Afalse%2C%22instance%22%3Afalse%2C%22meta%22%3A%7B%22request_last%22%3A0%2C%22request_next%22%3A0%2C%22used_cache%22%3Atrue%7D%2C%22data%22%3A%5B%7B%22key%22%3A%2275KZDHUJ%22%2C%22library%22%3A%7B%22id%22%3A4511395%7D%2C%22meta%22%3A%7B%22creatorSummary%22%3A%22Annu%5Cu00df%22%2C%22parsedDate%22%3A%222025%22%2C%22numChildren%22%3A0%7D%2C%22bib%22%3A%22%26lt%3Bdiv%20class%3D%26quot%3Bcsl-bib-body%26quot%3B%20style%3D%26quot%3Bline-height%3A%201.35%3B%20padding-left%3A%201em%3B%20text-indent%3A-1em%3B%26quot%3B%26gt%3B%5Cn%20%20%26lt%3Bdiv%20class%3D%26quot%3Bcsl-entry%26quot%3B%26gt%3BAnnu%26%23xDF%3B%2C%20Evelyn.%202025.%20%26lt%3Bi%26gt%3BDirty%20Dragging.%20Performative%20Transpositions%26lt%3B%5C%2Fi%26gt%3B.%20mdwPress.%20%26lt%3Ba%20class%3D%26%23039%3Bzp-ItemURL%26%23039%3B%20href%3D%26%23039%3Bhttps%3A%5C%2F%5C%2Fdoi.org%5C%2F10.14361%5C%2F9783839474754%26%23039%3B%26gt%3Bhttps%3A%5C%2F%5C%2Fdoi.org%5C%2F10.14361%5C%2F9783839474754%26lt%3B%5C%2Fa%26gt%3B.%20%26lt%3Ba%20title%3D%26%23039%3BCite%20in%20RIS%20Format%26%23039%3B%20class%3D%26%23039%3Bzp-CiteRIS%26%23039%3B%20data-zp-cite%3D%26%23039%3Bapi_user_id%3D4511395%26amp%3Bitem_key%3D75KZDHUJ%26%23039%3B%20href%3D%26%23039%3Bjavascript%3Avoid%280%29%3B%26%23039%3B%26gt%3BCite%26lt%3B%5C%2Fa%26gt%3B%20%26lt%3B%5C%2Fdiv%26gt%3B%5Cn%26lt%3B%5C%2Fdiv%26gt%3B%22%2C%22data%22%3A%7B%22itemType%22%3A%22book%22%2C%22title%22%3A%22Dirty%20Dragging.%20Performative%20Transpositions%22%2C%22creators%22%3A%5B%7B%22creatorType%22%3A%22author%22%2C%22firstName%22%3A%22Evelyn%22%2C%22lastName%22%3A%22Annu%5Cu00df%22%7D%5D%2C%22abstractNote%22%3A%22Dirty%20Dragging%20contributes%20to%20queer%20retheorizations%20and%20explores%20the%20ambivalence%20of%20transgressive%20performances%20under%20apartheid%2C%20Nazism%2C%20and%20Jim%20Crow%20through%20a%20transoceanic%20lens.%20The%20book%20takes%20up%20the%20ambivalence%20of%20%5Cu201cdirty%5Cu201d%20performance%20modes%5Cu2014spanning%20drag%20and%20carnival%20to%20propaganda%5Cu2014and%20extends%20readings%20of%20gender%20bending%20by%20incorporating%20perspectives%20on%20blackface%20and%20%5Cu201cracialized%20drag.%5Cu201d%20It%20%20explores%20violent%2C%20locally%20specific%20mobilizations%20of%20the%20transgressive%20along%20with%20the%20ways%20in%20which%20queer%20and%20creolized%20forms%20of%20performance%20intertwine%20to%20oppose%20identitarian%20boundaries.%20Given%20the%20current%20slide%20into%20right-wing%20authoritarianism%2C%20the%20book%20thereby%20gestures%20toward%20the%20potential%20joy%20of%20collectively%20making%20societal%20conditions%20dance%22%2C%22date%22%3A%222025%22%2C%22originalDate%22%3A%22%22%2C%22originalPublisher%22%3A%22%22%2C%22originalPlace%22%3A%22%22%2C%22format%22%3A%22%22%2C%22ISBN%22%3A%22978-3-8376-7475-0%22%2C%22DOI%22%3A%22%22%2C%22citationKey%22%3A%22%22%2C%22url%22%3A%22https%3A%5C%2F%5C%2Fdoi.org%5C%2F10.14361%5C%2F9783839474754%22%2C%22ISSN%22%3A%22%22%2C%22language%22%3A%22en%22%2C%22collections%22%3A%5B%22RJ2DWDIJ%22%5D%2C%22dateModified%22%3A%222026-03-11T09%3A28%3A12Z%22%7D%7D%5D%7D<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\t<div id=\"zp-ID-7664-4511395-75KZDHUJ\" 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\">Iconoclasms (Zulu)<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"#2\">Oddkinships II (Krewe du Jieux, Krewe of Julu)<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"#3\">\u201cOther\u201d Indigenizations (Black Indians)<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"#4\">Performing Otherwise (Baby Dolls)<\/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>In the back streets of New Orleans, the contemporary displays of power and authority \u201cin drag\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which variously referenced Perchten, court spectacles, and minstrel blackface<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>were, by the early twentieth century at the latest, undermined by appearances in public marked by shifting conflicts. Hardly photographed in the decades that followed, but visually ubiquitous today, this Mardi Gras, again shaped by roving mobs, opens up a particular understanding of the possibility of nomadic cross-referencing. These clubs, tribes or loose assemblies were not immune from being co-opted and made hypervisible amid changing social dynamics. Yet the traces of their Mardi Gras narrate the potential for a performing otherwise of prevailing conditions. The multifarious history of this long-overlooked Mardi Gras of the subalterns operating off the official carnival routes reads as a symptom of contested social shifts and testifies to the capacity of people to relate to another against all odds<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that is, to resist segregation.<\/p>\n<h4 id=\"1\">Iconoclasms (Zulu)<\/h4>\n<p>\u201cThere Never Was and Never Will Be a King Like Me\u201d was a sketch performed around the turn of the twentieth century in a vaudeville show at the Pythian Temple on the edge of Black Storyville\u2019s red-light district. Apparently, around 1909, a gang of guys from another social context than that of the Tramps captured in the photo above used this sketch to take to the streets in blackface. They also called themselves Tramps, thereby referencing <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow <\/span>in their own way.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn456\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref456\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>456<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/43_Bert-Williams-undatiert.-Harvard-Theatre-Collection-on-Blackface-Minstrelsy-1833\u20131906-Houghton-Library.jpg\" alt=\"A black-and-white newspaper advertisement promotes Broadway Brevities of 1920 with Bert Williams, shown in blackface portraying various labeled emotions: \u201cProspects,\u201d \u201cHooch,\u201d \u201cJoy,\u201d \u201cDespair,\u201d \u201cHappiness,\u201d and \u201cContentment.\u201d\" width=\"1400\" height=\"602\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7417\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/43_Bert-Williams-undatiert.-Harvard-Theatre-Collection-on-Blackface-Minstrelsy-1833\u20131906-Houghton-Library.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/43_Bert-Williams-undatiert.-Harvard-Theatre-Collection-on-Blackface-Minstrelsy-1833\u20131906-Houghton-Library-300x129.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/43_Bert-Williams-undatiert.-Harvard-Theatre-Collection-on-Blackface-Minstrelsy-1833\u20131906-Houghton-Library-1024x440.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/43_Bert-Williams-undatiert.-Harvard-Theatre-Collection-on-Blackface-Minstrelsy-1833\u20131906-Houghton-Library-150x65.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/43_Bert-Williams-undatiert.-Harvard-Theatre-Collection-on-Blackface-Minstrelsy-1833\u20131906-Houghton-Library-768x330.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/43_Bert-Williams-undatiert.-Harvard-Theatre-Collection-on-Blackface-Minstrelsy-1833\u20131906-Houghton-Library-850x366.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 43:<\/strong> Bert Williams, undated. Harvard Theatre Collection on Blackface Minstrelsy, 1833<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>1906 (Houghton Library).<\/span><\/p>\n<p>However, this gang does not appear to have been visually documented<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>other than their kin decades later. They drew on the tradition of Black carnival kings and the genre of blackface-on-Black minstrelsy. As the \u201cRoyal Coon,\u201d the Black dandy became part of contemporary music history and<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>within the context of the widely received Anglo Zulu Wars (1879<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>1896)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>also came to be associated with southern Africa.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn457\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref457\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>457<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The comic blackface persona, the <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span> tramp, emerged as an established character type, linked to the image of rebellious Africans. \u201c\u2018Zulu\u2019 \u2026 became synonymous with artifice and disguise,\u201d writes Louis Chude-Sokei in <em>The Last \u201cDarky,\u201d<\/em> a study of the Caribbean, New York-based comedian Bert Williams; pseudo-Zulus thus emerged \u201cas a stock character type that eventually entered the standard vocabulary of ethnic imagery.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn458\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref458\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>458<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Williams had first appeared as an \u201cExhibition Zulu\u201d in P. T. Barnum\u2019s circus<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>essentially a human zoo<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and later gained fame on Broadway performing in blackface. With songs like \u201cEvah Darkey Is a King,\u201d he helped shape creolized versions of the comic figure around 1900 and began to blur the color line on stage and screen. His remaining images and films bear witness to a different version of blackface<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as a creolized comic figure<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that would later be echoed in Baker\u2019s performances.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn459\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref459\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>459<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>In New Orleans, \u201cZulu\u201d was used as a slur for the darker-skinned and the underclass<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>shorthand for the precarious.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn460\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref460\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>460<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Renaming themselves the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, in 1909 the Tramps from the Pythian Temple founded a counterpart to the high society\u2019s Gentlemen\u2019s Club: a carnival club and mutual aid organization<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a benevolent society for those excluded from public welfare under Jim Crow.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn461\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref461\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>461<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Quoting the blackface routine noted above, they changed their name from Tramps to Zulu, highlighting transatlantic lines of flight. In reply to Rex and his Tramp entourage, they staged King Zulu and his retinue in blackface and Africanized costumes, reversing dominant local and colonial stereotypes. Dressed in improvised costumes, bent tin-bucket hats, and grotesquely exaggerated makeup, they paraded through the streets. This was not some Afrocentric imagined elsewhere. As their early spectacular appearances made clear, this blackface was, in the context of segregation-era politics, \u201cakin to the \u2018category crisis\u2019 \u2026 in the politics of drag,\u201d as Chude-Sokei calls it.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn462\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref462\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>462<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Zulu affirmatively overperformed racist caricatures. The white New Yorker T.&#160;D. Rice had translated the comic figure of European folk theater into <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow<\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a figure swaying between subaltern smartness and rural &#173;simple-mindedness. Transposing his stock character into the plantation context in the 1830s, Rice had linked the traditionally dark mask of <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Arlecchino<\/span> from sixteenth-century European itinerant theater to the \u201csecond skin\u201d of a tramp-like fugitive slave. The New Orleanian Zulu Club, caught between port-city creolization and segregation, responded to this in the context of Black performers entering early mass culture and defying Jim Crow politics. Zulu blackface translated the grotesque figure<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>tamed by the post-Rice minstrel genre but since reimagined by Bert Williams, later also by Josephine Baker, and others<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>into something \u201cfaux-African.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Here, the inherent ambivalence of blackface<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>its complicity in Othering versus its potential to subvert hegemonic culture<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>was transposed into carnival in a new way, one that resonated within the Southern Atlantic. While blackface in Cape Town\u2019s carnival from around the same time signaled a transoceanic mass culture and could be read as a creolized nod to \u201cpostcolonial\u201d US entertainment, the Zulu Club projected distorted racialized drag back onto the African continent. This blackface also served as a way to externalize racist stereotypes, by performing them within an imagined colonial scenario. Yet Zulu dragging also disrupted the frame of the official Mardi Gras. Emerging in the early twentieth century, it exemplifies those grassroots carnival mobs long ignored by official histories, gangs that challenged the established segregationist order and how it had been affirmed by hegemonic popular culture. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/44_-Zulu-King-Baley-Robertson-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1925.-The-William-Russel-Collection-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection.jpg\" alt=\"A black-and-white street carnival photo shows costumed people in blackface \u2014 among them someone wearing a crown and cape.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1108\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7418\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/44_-Zulu-King-Baley-Robertson-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1925.-The-William-Russel-Collection-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/44_-Zulu-King-Baley-Robertson-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1925.-The-William-Russel-Collection-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-300x237.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/44_-Zulu-King-Baley-Robertson-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1925.-The-William-Russel-Collection-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-1024x810.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/44_-Zulu-King-Baley-Robertson-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1925.-The-William-Russel-Collection-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-150x119.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/44_-Zulu-King-Baley-Robertson-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1925.-The-William-Russel-Collection-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-768x608.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/44_-Zulu-King-Baley-Robertson-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-1925.-The-William-Russel-Collection-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-850x673.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 44:<\/strong> Zulu King Baley Robertson, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, 1925. The William Russel Collection, The Historical New Orleans Collection (THNOC 92-48-L.77; MSS 520.3223).<\/span><\/p>\n<p>While the face mask has remained largely unchanged, Zulu\u2019s status within New Orleans Mardi Gras has shifted alongside evolving local \u201crace\u201d politics. In its early years, the Club turned up on unpredictable routes, coming off as a fraternal band of nomadic rowdies. By 1914, Zulu began showing up at the Rex Parade, eventually taking the lead. From 1923 onward<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>wearing raffia skirts<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>they challenged the \u201celevated carnival\u201d with a wild mix of blackface and African stereotypes atop eccentric floats, as a 1925 photograph from The Historical New Orleans Collection indicates. Zulu introduced a whole cast of stock characters to accompany the Zulu King, from the Witch Doctor to Big Shot Africa. In 1933 already, however, the club rebranded itself in a patriarchal mold, copying the white krewes who had done away with cross-dressing.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn463\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref463\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>463<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Like the carnival kings of high society, the Zulu King was now flanked by a female queen. Unlike in the context of the self-styled Old Liners, however, she was not obliged to appear as a virginal debutante.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn464\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref464\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>464<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Still, the regendering of the club\u2019s appearances was more a sign that the organizers were slowly aligning themselves with the prevailing carnival economy than a demonstration of advancing gender equality. Zulu thus became a marker of the shifting terrain of segregation. Today, the club is involved in municipal politics and commercially networked with the Old Liner krewes. The story of the Zulu Club<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>whose floats have included white members in blackface since carnival organizations desegregated in 1991<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>has become a lens for viewing social transformation. It raises questions about the changing role of a largely unchanged mask worn by members of a carnival club that emerged from the underclass of segregation and gradually came to bridge high society and the increasingly gentrified back streets.<\/p>\n<p>Zulu\u2019s reception thus serves as a kind of seismograph for political shifts as reflected in carnival. In 1996, theater historian Joseph Roach described Zulu\u2019s performance style, in his widely cited study <em>Cities of the Dead<\/em>, as deconstructive. By staging an obviously fictional African tradition through a blackface citation, Roach argues, the carnival of the elites itself becomes legible as a form of whiteface minstrelsy.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn465\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref465\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>465<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The white makeup beneath Zulu\u2019s black mask, he continued, points to a kind of self-reflexiveness: a subversive laughter that, by parodying a particular image of Africa, turns Eurocentric stereotypes around. Roach celebrated the visual citation of carnivalesque mass culture<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>blackface and raffia skirt<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as a satirical reversal of racist projections. He saw Zulu\u2019s performances as an iconoclastic strike against the white Old Liner krewes:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Since 1909 members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club have \u2026 staged an annual float parade, featuring strereotypes of \u201cAfricans.\u201d In addition to \u201cKing Zulu,\u201d high officials in the organization take on such personas as \u201cThe Big Shot of Africa,\u201d \u201cThe Witch Doctor,\u201d \u201cGovernor,\u201d \u201cProvince Prince,\u201d and \u201cAmbassador\u201d \u2026 Originally known as \u201cThe Tramps,\u201d the working-class African Americans who founded Zulu took their inspiration from a staged minstrel number \u2026 They parade on Mardi Gras morning, using the same route along St. Charles Avenue that Rex follows an hour or so later. They wear grass skirts and blackface laid on thick over an underlying layer of clown white circling the eyes and mouth. In addition to plastic beads, Zulu members throw decorated coconuts, for many parade goers the most highly prized \u201cthrow\u201d of Mardi Gras.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn466\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref466\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>466<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Referencing Henry Louis Gates Jr.\u2019s <em>Signifying Monkey<\/em>, Roach suggested in the 1990s that the deconstructive spirit of the West African trickster Esu lived on in Zulu\u2019s parade, though it seemed to be shaped by its adversarial relationship to Rex: \u201cZulu might very well have taken his present form without Esu per se, but he certainly could not exist in the same way today without Rex, nor, it must be emphasized, could Rex in the same way exist without Zulu.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn467\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref467\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>467<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Esu, in this reading, was not an \u201cAfrican retention\u201d but rather \u201ca circum-Atlantic reinvention.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn468\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref468\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>468<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Roach framed this as surrogation: as an act through which the \u201cNew World\u201d was not discovered by Europe, but invented on site.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn469\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref469\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>469<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Such creolized performative transpositions, he argued, carry with them the memory of substitutions that would otherwise be forgotten, revealing the creativity and modernity of improvisational responses to cultural entanglements within the liminal space of a colonial contact zone. <\/p>\n<p>While Roach highlighted Zulu\u2019s deconstructive potential and anchored it in a (West) Afrocentric framework via Esu, the Zulu Club came under fire as early as the beginning of the Civil Rights era.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn470\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref470\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>470<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This criticism stemmed not just from a breach of respectability politics but also from the club\u2019s political cooptation.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn471\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref471\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>471<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In the early 1960s, Zulu was the only Black organization to break with the Mardi Gras boycott organized by the Civil Rights movement in protest against racist segregation. In doing so, Zulu accepted, for instance, the use of dogs by the police for crowd control during its parade.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn472\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref472\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>472<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Later, the club made a temporary effort to rebrand itself with African themes and to drop blackface. But this shift was accompanied by the distribution of tokens and souvenirs made in apartheid-era South Africa, as if to suggest an inherited tradition from the \u201cmother continent.\u201d Meanwhile, Zulu\u2019s Mardi Gras ball permitted only formal Euro-American eveningwear.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn473\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref473\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>473<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Even during the global antiapartheid boycotts and amid widespread criticism of Mangosuthu Buthelezi for collaborating with the apartheid regime as the official Zulu leader, New Orleans entertained the idea of inviting South African Zulu delegations to march in the parade.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn474\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref474\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>474<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>At first glance, this move may seem to support newer interpretations framing Zulu as part of a transcontinental tradition. Kevin McQueeney, for example, points to increased Atlantic shipping between New Orleans and Cape Town, especially around 1900 during the Second Boer War, to buttress a claim of transoceanic relations:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Steam freighters regularly sailed between the Port of New Orleans and Cape Town in the early twentieth century, especially during the Second Boer War (1899<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>1902). During the conflict, the British military established their own port section in the city and sent tens of thousands of horses, mules, and other livestock to South Africa, as well as guns and additional supplies, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. The British purchased the goods and animals in the US, as well as actively recruited for soldiers to fight in South Africa, and then shipped the cargo, along with white and black porters and muleteers from New Orleans to Cape Town.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn475\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref475\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>475<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Starting from port connections, McQueeney traces trade routes in an effort to confirm a link between the Zulu Club and the South African Zulus: in 1905, following the end of the Second Boer War, a British army parade reportedly took place in New Orleans, featuring \u201cethnic Zulus who fought on their side.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn476\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref476\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>476<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Anglo Zulu War of 1879 had also received broad press coverage. Still, even the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club does not claim such a direct lineage from its South African namesakes. As Felipe Smith observes: \u201cGiven the many overlapping affiliations that social aid and pleasure club members maintain, throughout its history there is a disturbing consistency in the Zulu Club\u2019s willingness to advance its own organizational interests at the expense of black community solidarity.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn477\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref477\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>477<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Unlike McQueeney<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>who in 2018 cast the Zulu Club as a now-&#173;established cultural emissary with distinct ties to Africa<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Smith underscores the extent to which the club had been co-opted:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Thus the Zulu Club did not adopt and perpetuate blackface masking in a vacuum, nor did they challenge its meaning or change its ritual functions as scripted by white carnival elites. They adopted blackface while it was still a white carnival masking tradition that they, like Williams and Walker, believed they could perform in a style that would improve upon the white \u201cimitators,\u201d and in the process they partly made their way through cunning and determination into a festival performance genre that had been evolving for half a century. \u2026 The persistent description of the Zulu parade as a veiled critique of the Rex parade that follows it on Shrove Tuesday (an interpretation that Zulu strenuously denies) reflexively recognizes the two events as linked, but symbolically oppositional expressions of racially inflected cultural paradigms.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn478\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref478\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>478<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Smith argues that Zulu blackface was predisposed from the start to be absorbed into the official Mardi Gras. The Club has long functioned as a networking hub for New Orleans\u2019s Black political elite. And, for a time, it even ran as a franchising operation for \u201cdesegregated\u201d white blackface riders, who, starting in the 1990s, could pay handsomely to ride on the floats. This shift in Zulu\u2019s function caused increasing disputes regarding its mode of appearance, which may be read as emblematic for a specific contemporary discourse on recognition. <\/p>\n<p>In 2019, activists launched an attack on the club with the rallying cry, \u201cAll symbols of white supremacy must fall\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn479\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref479\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>479<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>driving a social media campaign against Zulu. Take \u2018Em Down NOLA, an activist collective emanating within the broader context of Black Lives Matter across the United States, demanded that the Zulu Club adopt new masks, challenging what Roach and others had described as a deconstructive usage of blackface.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn480\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref480\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>480<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Take \u2018Em Down NOLA featured alternative masks drawn by artist Journey Allen, latently referencing the then-new Marvel blockbuster <em>Black Panther<\/em>, conjuring a stylized, feudal-&#173;folkloric fantasy of Africa.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn481\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref481\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>481<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> These masks bear no relation to South African Zulu masks, nor to the ornamental glitter masks that succeeded carnival blackface after apartheid\u2019s end in Cape Town. Instead, they seem to stand in for a longing to fabricate a seemingly \u201cauthentic\u201d transatlantic tradition and invent an imagined past purified from colonial domination.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBlack makeup is NOT \u2018Blackface\u2019\u201d was the Zulu Club\u2019s official response to Take \u2018Em Down NOLA\u2019s tribal-style face paint designs.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn482\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref482\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>482<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This statement attempted to fight Take \u2018Em Down NOLA on their own terrain, framing blackface as an Afrocentric symbol, a representation of African tradition. The club insisted it was not invoking \u201csymbols of white supremacy,\u201d but paying homage to African Zulu tribal culture. While its use of blackface is nevertheless clearly legible as a grotesque minstrel pastiche, the club responded to the ensuing scandal by reinterpreting its official historiography. In effect, the Zulu Club, pretending to cite South African Zulu traditions for its grass skirts and exaggerated makeup, was leveraging the activists\u2019 own understanding of symbolic representation. <\/p>\n<p>This representational take was echoed in another initiative by activists related to Take \u2018Em Down NOLA, staged after the protests against the Zulu Club: a reenactment of the long-suppressed Slave Rebellion of 1811. In the revolt of 1811, enslaved people had risen up against their disenfranchisement and brutal hyperexploitation a full fifty years before emancipation in the United States.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn483\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref483\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>483<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Staged with historical weapons and costumes, the reenactment was to evoke the <em>longue dur\u00e9e<\/em> of Black Lives Matter. Its form and function<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as a representative embodiment of the past<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>stood in direct opposition to the grotesque minstrel mask and its play with referential confusion. Despite the differences in historical narrative, the performative commemoration of the 1811 rebellion aesthetically competed with the countless Confederate and Civil War pageants held in the South. Within the genre itself, it was to offer a symbolic counterrepresentation of the past<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>while drawing on established aesthetics of embodied <em>imitatio<\/em>. Yet the actual preparations for the 1811 revolt had taken place in disguise, under the cover of carnival masks. <\/p>\n<p>The scandal around Zulu may be read as symptomatic. \u201cAuthenticating\u201d references to invented traditions on both sides might also signal a broader contemporary forgetting of a carnivalesque-creolized <em>dispositif<\/em> of subaltern performativity<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>one that runs counter to the representational logic of the symbolic politics of the ruling class. In both cases, a <em>practical<\/em> knowledge of dynamic performative aesthetics, of minor mimesis, fades from view, even as it still reemerges in second lining, in local, collective forms of dancing along<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>subtly undermining dominant representationalisms of hegemonic culture and its faceist epistemology.<\/p>\n<p>The specter of iconoclasm, by contrast, was already being summoned as early as 1991 by white supremacists. Neo-Nazi and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, who had publicly worn brown-shirted Nazi uniforms in 1970s New Orleans, called for resistance against carnival desegregation.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn484\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref484\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>484<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This desegregation, he warned, would lead to Jackson Square being renamed Stevie Wonder Square and hence to the destruction of the tourist hub of the French Quarter. At the time, Duke himself equated all opponents to Confederate monuments with Nazis. His tale of an alleged Black hijacking of New Orleans\u2019s city center was a textbook right-wing populist alt fact, overwriting the gentrification already underway in surrounding back streets. Still, the Jackson Memorial linked to Confederate propaganda remains untouchable to this day, while many in nearby neighborhoods have been displaced by incoming white middle-class families.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/45_-Lee-Circle-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2024.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows an empty monument pedestal; in front of it, someone on a light horse rides by. Behind barricades, spectators are visible.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1866\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7424\" style=\"width:65%; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/45_-Lee-Circle-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2024.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/45_-Lee-Circle-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2024-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/45_-Lee-Circle-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2024-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/45_-Lee-Circle-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2024-113x150.jpg 113w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/45_-Lee-Circle-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2024-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/45_-Lee-Circle-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2024-850x1133.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 45:<\/strong> Lee Circle, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, 2020. Photo: Evelyn Annu\u00df.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Duke\u2019s nightmare, however, seemed to come true elsewhere<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that is, in a different way<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>more than twenty-five years later. Today, anyone following Zulu or the other well-known uptown parades down St. Charles Avenue to Canal Street, to the edge of the historic French Quarter, will come across an empty pedestal at Lee Circle. The middle of this traffic circle<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>surrounded by unsightly new buildings and nearby expressways, and right next to a still-&#173;functioning private Confederate museum<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>looks a bit like an open wound in the urban landscape. Since 2017, only the pedestal has remained to mark where, in 1884, a bronze statue of General Robert Edward Lee once was erected<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the largest of its kind in the whole country.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn485\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref485\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>485<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The bare pedestal continues to signal how the United States, despite the Confederacy\u2019s defeat in the Civil War, has been littered with such revisionist monuments, even outside the Deep South. After Reconstruction, they became symbols of commemorative politics: tools for modernizing racist ideology by mythologizing the old South.<\/p>\n<p>The monumentalized Lee quite literally gave the politics of Jim Crow, of white supremacy, a face<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in bronze. After his death, Lee, a plantation owner himself, became <em>the<\/em> icon of the Civil War. He had helped crush the Harpers Ferry revolt, fought in the Mexican American War, and served as general in chief of the Confederate Armies. After the war, he became a hero to right-wing white supremacists. From the height of the \u201c elevated carnival\u201d until 2017, his enormous figure<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>arms crossed in command<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>looked north over New Orleans, that is, over the city\u2019s Black neighborhoods. Thanks to the protest by Take \u2018Em Down NOLA, only the massive pedestal, with its interior staircase, now towers over the area where Mardi Gras parades pass. Yet removing the statue marked a high point in the campaign against Confederate nostalgia and the defense of white dominance. Iconoclasm then took on a life of its own when activists failed in bringing down the Jackson monument in the French Quarter, fracturing potential coalitions in a way that may be seen as emblematic of broader political developments.<\/p>\n<p>As the group continued seeking media attention, both iconoclastic energies and currents of symbolic politics began to turn against carnival itself<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>following a politics of respectability shaped by educated elites. Take \u2018Em Down NOLA did not attack the white nouveau riche Mardi Gras, such as the Krewe of Choctaw and their use of \u201cIndian\u201d masks glossing over colonial sociocide, nor the invitation-only balls of New Orleans\u2019s still-segregated carnival elites, themselves a parallel society.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn486\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref486\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>486<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Echoing the semantic shift of Jim Crow<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the transposition of the name of a figure \u201ctoo slippery \u2026 to police\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn487\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref487\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>487<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> into the designation of an apartheid-like, binary classification system<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Zulu Blackface instead became the central campaign target in 2019. This referential displacement transposed the shiftiness of \u201cJim Crow\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>now reused to name today\u2019s racist policing and systematic mass incarceration of Black male youth<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>into an Afropessimist narrative of a direct link between ongoing structural violence, disrespect, and the carnival.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn488\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref488\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>488<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Where the statue of Lee had surveyed the gradual gentrification of the back streets and their Black residents beginning in the late 1960s<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>roughly coinciding with the forced removals in Cape Town<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Zulu was now being cast as a kind of mobile monument to current power structures. <\/p>\n<p>Adolph Reed Jr., among others, has criticized the anti-Zulu campaign as focused on symbolic politics<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as undercutting a historical understanding of shifting modes of exploitation and exclusion. In an appeal to distinguish between the plantation, Jim Crow, and today\u2019s structures of inequality, he has named Take \u2018Em Down NOLA a race-reductionist \u201cneoliberal alternative to the left\u201d:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">The city is certainly a better place for being rid of those monuments, and having removed them from public display could be a step toward finally defeating the Lost Cause Heritage ideology that remains too useful a tool of the right for making class power invisible in both the past and the present. But, while the group\u2019s efforts contributed appreciably to pressing the issue and mobilizing some public support for removal, Take \u2018Em Down NOLA\u2019s campaign also obscured class power, ironically in the same way as did the fin-de-si\u00e8cle ruling class that erected the monuments. For Take \u2018Em Down NOLA and other antiracist activists, the monuments\u2019 significance is allegorical; they are icons representing an abstract, ultimately ontological white supremacy that drives and reproduces racial inequality in the present as in the past. The monuments, that is, are props in the broader race-reductionist discourse that analogizes contemporary inequality to Jim Crow or slavery.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn489\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref489\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>489<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In critiquing the Afropessimist politics of the activists, Reed calls for historicizing racist policies and their class dimension, that is, for situating and differentiating them more carefully. His critique also highlights what remained absent from the anti-Zulu campaign: the question of gentrification<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and with it, who attends the parades where, when, and why.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn490\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref490\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>490<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> With Reed, the protest against Zulu blackface as ostensibly misrepresentational overlooks the people who take over the streets after the Rex parade ends and Zulu proceeds alone into the back streets: despite police barricades, in the very neighborhoods once under the gaze of Lee\u2019s monument, the parade becomes an occasion for celebrating together. Along the packed sidewalks, the crowd calls to mind the earlier function and form of the mutual aid clubs and burial organizations as grassroots self-help networks: as neighborhood-based assemblages of solidarity for those long excluded from public welfare. Hence, even if the Zulu Club has evolved from a fraternal gang into a kind of patriarchal surrogate royalty, its collective celebration in the back streets of New Orleans is still akin to practices of second lining and surviving manifestations of collective support<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in masking, as well as funeral processions.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn491\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref491\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>491<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In spite of ongoing gentrification, the Mardi Gras hustle and bustle in the streets of these neighborhoods thus also resonates with the political and historical context in which Zulu first arose around 1900: the staking of a claim on street carnival for everyone, for <em>tout-monde, <\/em>through loosely shared gathering. Zulu\u2019s ambivalent spectacle thus still sparks affective energies in the streets<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>slipping past iconoclasm bound up with representationalism. Here, rather than at the threshold of elite carnival, an aesthetics of performing a social otherwise emerges within carnival<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>though maybe rather on the ground than on the floats. In the back streets, questions of transoceanic lines of flight indeed come into view.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/46_Zulu-Parade-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2020.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows a carnival float on which costumed people in blackface \u2014 some with feather headdresses \u2014 two leopard figures, and an oversized blackface figure with a leopard headband can be seen.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1051\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7425\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/46_Zulu-Parade-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2020.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/46_Zulu-Parade-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2020-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/46_Zulu-Parade-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2020-1024x769.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/46_Zulu-Parade-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2020-150x113.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/46_Zulu-Parade-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2020-768x577.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/46_Zulu-Parade-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2020-850x638.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 46<\/strong> Zulu Parade, Mardi Gras, Trem\u00e9, New Orleans, 2020. Photo: Evelyn Annu\u00df.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>According to a Mardi Gras legend said to be from the 1930s, the Zulu King set off from Cape Town the day after Christmas to journey to New Orleans. The tale seems to creolize and reframe the story of Zwarte Piet, the blackface figure who accompanies the Dutch Sinterklaas and arrives by ship from Spain to the Netherlands, now retold through a southern Atlantic lens.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn492\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref492\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>492<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> It thus also gestures toward distant and now-transformed kinship relations that are obscured or blocked by invented origin myths. It is likely that creolized, carnivalesque masking practices shaped by transatlantic contact traveled into the Caribbean via New Orleans sailors, and by around 1900 had reached Cape Town. Both port cities<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>one at the mouth of the Mississippi, the other on the Cape<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>touch the Atlantic and act as related zones of contact. Their familial resemblance shows up in their colonial-era architecture, such as the cast iron balconies of Bourbon and Long Streets, each outfitted in line with nineteenth-century trade routes, bearing the architectural signature of colonial port towns. But it is also reflected in their creolized carnival repertoires, shaped by a first wave of globalized mass culture and adapted locally over time.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn493\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref493\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>493<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Read against the grain, McQueeny\u2019s interpretation of transatlantic Zulu history evokes the counterhegemonic performative transpositions of blackface that appeared in the Cape Town carnival, along with its later, postapartheid afterlife that is not Afrofolkloric but ornamental in character. To date, efforts by Cape Town\u2019s carnival organizers to establish sustained ties with the Zulu Club in New Orleans have largely failed. The similar creolized carnival practices of those labeled \u201cColoured\u201d under apartheid remain unacknowledged by both the Zulu Club and Take \u2018Em Down NOLA. So far at least, the transoceanic lines of flight visible through Zulu have been displaced in New Orleans by arbitrary genealogies<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>narratives of origin, authenticity, and kinship. These narratives, can be seen not only as acts of surrogation but also as indicators of possible alliances that have been blocked so far.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn494\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref494\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>494<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/47_LJ-Goldstein-und-Mia-Sarenna-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2019.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows someone in a fur coat and crown, face white, one eye painted black, laughing for the camera with a similarly dressed child sitting in a stroller.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1866\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7426\" style=\"width:65%; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/47_LJ-Goldstein-und-Mia-Sarenna-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2019.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/47_LJ-Goldstein-und-Mia-Sarenna-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2019.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/47_LJ-Goldstein-und-Mia-Sarenna-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2019.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/47_LJ-Goldstein-und-Mia-Sarenna-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2019.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-113x150.jpg 113w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/47_LJ-Goldstein-und-Mia-Sarenna-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2019.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/47_LJ-Goldstein-und-Mia-Sarenna-Mardi-Gras-New-Orleans-2019.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-850x1133.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 47<\/strong> LJ Goldstein und Mia Sarenna, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, 2020. LJ Goldstein Private Collection (New Orleans).<\/span><\/p>\n<h4 id=\"2\">Oddkinships II (Krewe du Jieux, Krewe of Julu)<\/h4>\n<p>In New Orleans itself, local practices of relating hint at the potential for new forms of solidarity. In the mid-1980s, the Krewe du Jieux transposed Zulu-style blackface into a means of confronting antisemitic stereotypes. Iconic Zulu Club characters such as the Witch Doctor were reinvented as the Rich Doctor, among others.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn495\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref495\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>495<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Krewe du Jieux repurposed old parade floats from the nineteenth-century elite carnival<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which also excluded Jews<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and redecorated them as \u201cOrtho Ducks Floats\u201d and similar tongue-in-cheek entries. Donning fake noses and Marx Brothers-style glasses, the krewe danced through the streets with bagels on necklaces during both Mardi Gras and Jewish holidays. After Hurricane Katrina, they reappeared as \u201cwandering jieux\u201d for Mardi Gras, calling attention to the lack of state support for New Orleans\u2019s newly homeless. In their performative parody of antisemitism, the point is not simply to deconstruct but to empty out heavy signs to spark new and previously unthinkable modes of relating to another on the street. <\/p>\n<p>Later on, the Krewe of Julu took up the Zulu parade reference.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn496\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref496\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>496<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> These performative transpositions of Zulu parades by often short-lived, loosely organized Mardi Gras clubs<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>drawing links between antisemitic and racist discrimination<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>serve as an open invitation to <em>tout-monde<\/em> in the crowd to puzzle out the tangled references, to momentarily laugh away the politics of Othering and perhaps dance along. Their aterritorial, meandering mode of dragging undermines attempts to lock referentiality in place. Instead, it evokes performative unpredictability as a source of relating. Seen through the lens of how these other gangs cite Zulu, Mardi Gras here becomes a specific kind of contact zone<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>one that enables scattered, fluid gatherings while simultaneously calling hegemonic societal structures across different forms of discrimination into question.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/48_Krewe-du-Jieux-Mardi-Gras-2006-nach-Hurricane-Katrina.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows three costumed people in white protective suits with red tape applied. Two wear gag glasses with fake eyebrows, fake noses, and black hats; another wears a blue headscarf. They hold signs reading \u201cJieux wander into K.A.O.S.\u201d\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1257\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7427\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/48_Krewe-du-Jieux-Mardi-Gras-2006-nach-Hurricane-Katrina.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/48_Krewe-du-Jieux-Mardi-Gras-2006-nach-Hurricane-Katrina.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-300x269.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/48_Krewe-du-Jieux-Mardi-Gras-2006-nach-Hurricane-Katrina.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-1024x919.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/48_Krewe-du-Jieux-Mardi-Gras-2006-nach-Hurricane-Katrina.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-150x135.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/48_Krewe-du-Jieux-Mardi-Gras-2006-nach-Hurricane-Katrina.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-768x690.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/48_Krewe-du-Jieux-Mardi-Gras-2006-nach-Hurricane-Katrina.-LJ-Goldstein-Private-Collection-New-Orleans-850x763.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 48:<\/strong> Krewe du Jieux: L. J. Goldstein, Valerie Minerva, White Boy Joe Stern, Mardi Gras 2006, following Hurricane Katrina. L. J. Goldstein Private Collection (New Orleans).<\/span><\/p>\n<p>This has produced lasting micropolitical effects. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the authorities failed to provide aid in the so-called \u201ccity that care forgot,\u201d it was, not least, those who had earlier borrowed from Zulu masking practices who revived the legacy of the mutual aid clubs. Allegedly, the first house rebuilt by those affiliated with the Krewe du Jieux was Ronald Lewis\u2019s House of Dance and Feathers, a private museum in the flooded Ninth Ward way beyond the city center.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn497\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref497\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>497<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The museum tells the story of the Black Indians<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>nomadic gangs of Black men in \u201cAmerindian\u201d-style masks<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as the story of a creolized Mardi Gras that references anything and everything. Outside the spectacles of the commercial elite, the possibilities of relating fostered by carnival and the networks it produced on the ground gave rise to concrete solidarity, to collective mutual aid across different masking practices and neighborhoods.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn498\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref498\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>498<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> These alternative ways of relating become legible through a shift in focus from representation and iconoclasm to allegorical dirty dragging<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>an unpredictable, mimetic mode of collective referencing through performative transposition.<\/p>\n<h4 id=\"3\">\u201cOther\u201d Indigenizations (Black Indians)<\/h4>\n<p>\u201cREIGN OF REX ENDS\u201d is the headline on page&#160;7 of the Ash Wednesday issue of the <em>Times Democrat<\/em>, dated February&#160;25, 1903. Since its creation in 1872, Rex had ruled as King Carnival: the white face of a newly invented Mardi Gras that, after the Civil War defeat, increasingly aimed at mass tourism. The <em>Times Democrat<\/em>\u2019s coverage of the elite Mardi Gras and its courtly pageantry played into Southern mythmaking<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>casting Confederates of the Jim Crow era as \u201cmen who have gone forth to die for their country.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn499\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref499\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>499<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> But visually, the politics of this narrative are oddly undercut by the eye-catching elements of the new medium of the time. Because of the images on the page, the title \u201cReign of Rex Ends\u201d takes on a different resonance. The design of the page frames the text with photos of Mardi Gras from the street. Rex and Comus are nowhere to be seen on this Ash Wednesday page. As such, the version of Mardi Gras the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> commits to print here seems to unsettle the crowd control orchestrated by the \u201celevated carnival\u201d of masked white men<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>at least on page 7. Thus, its headline appears to mark not so much the end of carnival but the fall of high society.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library.jpg\" alt=\"A black-and-white newspaper page from 1903 containing several articles and four photos of carnival scenes.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1900\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7428\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library-221x300.jpg 221w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library-755x1024.jpg 755w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library-111x150.jpg 111w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library-768x1042.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library-1132x1536.jpg 1132w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/49_-Times-Democrat-25.-Februar-1903-7.-New-Orleans-Public-Library-850x1154.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 49:<\/strong> <em>Times Democrat<\/em>, February 25, 1903: 7. New Orleans Public Library.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>And in fact, today, it is the images of roving gangs<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>those that took shape in the back streets during the Jim Crow era<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that have come to mark the visual signature of Mardi Gras. So far, the photographs published by the <em>Times Democrat <\/em>have usually been considered in isolation; here, I want to treat them as a constellation to explore this <em>other<\/em> version of modern Mardi Gras and its visual-political legacy. The <em>Times Democrat<\/em> printed four photographs, each positioned at the center edge of the page: the top one is titled \u201cBAND OF MARDI GRAS INDIANS,\u201d the bottom one reads \u201cTHE WHITE MONKEY WAS A FAVORITE COSTUME.\u201d On the left is a bearded man dressed like a pirate; the caption is \u201cTHIS MAKE-UP CREATED A SENSATION.\u201d On the right, a \u201cTELLING TRIO OF CLOWNS\u201d appears in harlequin-style costumes<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>evoking the tradition of whiteface clowns shaped by Joseph Grimaldi in London, an inverted prefiguration of blackface.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn500\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref500\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>500<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The <em>Times Democrat\u2019s<\/em> captions, however, do not distinguish between the vertical reference to \u201cBlack\u201d Mardi Gras and the horizontal reference to \u201cwhite\u201d Mardi Gras, either of which might be read into the faces depicted. Instead, the photos seem to gather different figurations of creolized carnival: vertically, gangs seemingly extending beyond the image frame; horizontally, a pirate and three clowns as quasi-transoceanic, nomadic figures. The images present street carnival in multiple forms of appearing in public: as a collective act with no front stage.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, these images feature an oddly placed <em>punctum<\/em>, something that subtly disrupts the boundary between onstage and offstage and draws attention to the entanglement of heterogeneous masking practices.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn501\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref501\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>501<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In the photo \u201cBAND OF MARDI GRAS INDIANS,\u201d a Pierrot-like figure dressed in white with a long-nosed half mask appears tucked into the lower left corner; in the image of the \u201cWHITE MONKEYS\u201d with their stiff dark masks, a couple wearing white face veils and flowing garments is inserted along the right edge. These images within images seem to highlight the lines of flight between the different photographs, weaving a sense of flickering presence and absence into the visual presentation. One could interpret this visual rhetoric as a reflection of the hydra-headed history of \u201caesthetic commoning\u201d in street carnival<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn502\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref502\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>502<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a history pushed aside by hegemonic spectacles. In this sense, we may read the page title as suggesting that this history might still gain a <em>survie<\/em> after the so-called reign of Rex.<\/p>\n<p>The text, by contrast, seems to give over the graphic montage to hegemonic laughter, as becomes clear in its reference to the \u201cBAND OF MARDI GRAS INDIANS.\u201d The page picks up a second article from page 3 titled \u201cMIRTH REACHES CLIMAX<em>.<\/em>\u201d Under the subheading \u201cMaskers Throng Streets. Fantastically Dressed Bands Cut Up Queer Antics,\u201d the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> carnivalizes its reading of the images while inserting political context. The piece, namely, expresses regret over the supposed disappearance of the \u201cIndians,\u201d thus linking the photo to a well-worn trope that echoes the sociocidal removals east of the Mississippi during the 1830s and to a shift in masking practices:<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn503\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref503\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>503<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">From early morning until late in the afternoon happy maskers thronged the streets and kept the spectators amused by their queer antics \u2026 <br \/>However as pleasant as was the day and as funny as were the maskers, they could not make up for what they were lacking in numbers \u2026 The Indians in particular, who have heretofore been numerous, and who have gone through the streets in war paint, seemingly on the warpath, were lacking in numbers. There were a few, but very few. It must be that they have changed their camps, or that they can find no more stones out of which to make javellas, or that their bow and arrow have been broken.<br \/>It is not likely that they have gone to another city, because New Orleans is the only Carnival city in the Union where they can be appreciated. Let them bring back their wigwams, and their squaws and their pappooses. Let them wage again their merry war of mirth.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn504\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref504\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>504<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The Mardi Gras article on the supposed fading of the Indians references forced migration and sociocide, as well as the puritanical antimasking laws in effect elsewhere at the time, and a change in carnival fashion. What comes into view are thus not only the violent political conditions negotiated through the Indian mask, but also their linking to the carnivalesque<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>suggested visually by the paper-nosed figure inserted like a <em>punctum<\/em> into the photograph. <\/p>\n<p>The use of stereotypical imagery of Northern Plains Indians, which the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> photo vaguely recalls, has served many purposes. Such \u201cAmerindian\u201d masks have been deployed for the Boston Tea Party of 1773, where settlers protested British colonial rule, in nineteenth-century antirent protests, and in twentieth century\u2019s shaman-inflected hippie escapism. This \u201cIndianization of misrule,\u201d as Philip J. Deloria puts it in his book <em>Playing Indian,<\/em> had little to do with the people stereotypically quoted.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn505\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref505\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>505<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Rather, it can be read as refiguring and exoticizing the \u201cwild men\u201d drawn from European, masculinist masking.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn506\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref506\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>506<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Deloria interprets the transposition of Old World European rites of rebellion into the US setting as a kind of ongoing minstrelsy:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Rough music groups acted to reinforce traditional, customary social orders, not to play on the edges of revolution. \u2026 Old World misrule rituals remained in the customary repertoire of many colonists. Periodically rejuvenated by arriving immigrants, they could be activated and reshaped according to the needs of specific local groups.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn507\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref507\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>507<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>During the era of capitalist industrialization shaped by colonial racism and extractivism, the figure of the Indian was harnessed to signify a new, yet untouched world.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn508\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref508\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>508<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Much like the early use of blackface in the 1830s to create the tramp persona, the \u201cIndian\u201d responded to a contemporary craving for a premodern, nonurban, and unruly elsewhere. In contrast to Benjamin\u2019s contextualization of new barbarism or Kafka\u2019s literary staging of becoming-&#173;Indian<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>decidedly referencing to minor, nonrepresentational modes of mimesis within then globalized mass culture<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>this Indianized figure operates instead as a hegemonic tool of what might be called an exoticizing \u201cself-indigenization.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn509\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref509\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>509<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> As a projection screen, it depends on the absence of actual \u201cAmerindians\u201d: their forced removal, their extermination, and the erasure of the survivors within the segregationist order that took hold also in New Orleans after the Civil War. In this obscene register of complicity, the culturally loaded figure of the \u201cvanishing Indian,\u201d already heavily mythologized by 1900, was dragged along as a kind of colonial spoils, as a mask to represent revolt. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/50_-Band-of-Mardi-Gras-Indians-Times-Democrat-vom-25.-Februar-1903-Seite-7.jpg\" alt=\"An old black-and-white newspaper image showing a group with feather decorations \u2014 an excerpt from the previous image.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1277\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7438\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/50_-Band-of-Mardi-Gras-Indians-Times-Democrat-vom-25.-Februar-1903-Seite-7.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/50_-Band-of-Mardi-Gras-Indians-Times-Democrat-vom-25.-Februar-1903-Seite-7-300x274.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/50_-Band-of-Mardi-Gras-Indians-Times-Democrat-vom-25.-Februar-1903-Seite-7-1024x934.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/50_-Band-of-Mardi-Gras-Indians-Times-Democrat-vom-25.-Februar-1903-Seite-7-150x137.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/50_-Band-of-Mardi-Gras-Indians-Times-Democrat-vom-25.-Februar-1903-Seite-7-768x701.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/50_-Band-of-Mardi-Gras-Indians-Times-Democrat-vom-25.-Februar-1903-Seite-7-850x775.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 50<\/strong> Band of Mardi Gras Indians, <em>Times Democrat<\/em>, Februar< 25 1903: 7 (detail). New Orleans Public Library.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In the carnival back streets, however, this figure took on an unpredictable afterlife<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>one that the <em>Times Democrat<\/em>\u2019s commentary and images subtly suggest, when read against the grain. For those who, after the collapse of Reconstruction, found themselves increasingly shut out, Mardi Gras became a platform for collectively staging the promise of freedom<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>mediated by performative transpositions. \u201cPlaying Indian\u201d in this sense also resonated with the masking practices of those, whose access to civic life was gradually foreclosed by Jim Crow, despite the Union\u2019s victory and slavery\u2019s abolition. For the people of the back streets<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>cultural cousins to the Atjas of Cape Town\u2019s townships<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the creolized gang figure of revolting \u201cIndians\u201d became an allegory of an imagined otherwise, an urban maroon existence.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn510\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref510\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>510<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>And it is precisely in this context that the image of the \u201cBAND OF MARDI GRAS INDIANS\u201d can be read: the earliest known photograph of a masking practice that now plays a signature role for New Orleanian Mardi Gras. Scholars often turn to this press photo from the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> as a source for tracing the genealogy of the now so-called Black Indians. Instead of focusing on origins, however, I want to ask how their street appearances relate to their specific surrounding, how they are charged discursively, what affectives they schlepp along and how they become confronted with neocolonial appropriation.<\/p>\n<p>As a nomadic, street-carnival gang figure, the Indians<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>with Kim Vaz-Deville<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>emerged in modern Mardi Gras after the collapse of Reconstruction, during the Jim Crow era.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn511\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref511\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>511<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Resisting the carnival\u2019s shift into orderly, parade-style processions, they moved through segregated streets on their own terms, crossing unseen boundaries. To pick up on Elizabeth Maddock Dillon\u2019s work on transatlantic \u201cperformative commons,\u201d their creolized citation of the figure of rebellious indigeneity might be read as \u201ca performative intellectual act: one that made the commons thinkable in both aesthetic and political terms.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn512\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref512\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>512<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The earliest sources depict the Black Indians as a domain of combative masculinity: in 1895, eight years before the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> published its Indian photo, \u201ca band of hostile Indians\u201d had clashed with \u201csome white maskers\u201d in a way that led to their names being recorded. \u201cOn closer examination the Indians were discovered to be colored men,\u201d the <em>Daily Picayune<\/em> reported on February&#160;27.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn513\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref513\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>513<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In their book <em>Jockomo<\/em>, Shane Lief and John McCusker interpret this as \u201cperhaps the earliest definitive news citation of a group of black men dressed as Indians in New Orleans on Mardi Gras.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn514\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref514\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>514<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> As they show, the gang included a veteran and sons of former soldiers in the Corps d\u2019Afrique of the Union Army, many of whom were politically active during Reconstruction.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn515\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref515\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>515<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Pushed out of civic life in the Jim Crow era, stripped of civil rights and office, Black veterans and their descendants turned to carnival. Roaming through New Orleans, they reasserted their presence in the city: \u201crechanneling their shared experiences as actual warriors into a Carnival identity,\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"> <span><a href=\"#fn516\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref516\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>516<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> as one reads in <em>Jockomo<\/em>. In contrast to the <em>Times Democrat\u2019s<\/em> framing, these were men who had gone forth to fight for their <em>freedom<\/em>. Mardi Gras became a refuge for reimagining Black militant masculinity. This may faintly recall Kafka\u2019s literary reflection on the yearning to \u201cbecome an Indian.\u201d But the Black Indians\u2019 appearance in public, like that of Zulu, belonged to a specific political context. It was a context, in which underground forms of self-organization emerged, mutual aid clubs were founded<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and rivalries sometimes played out in armed proxy battles for territory.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn517\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref517\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>517<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Unlike the historical reenactment of the 1811 Slave Revolt described above, this form of nomadic, creolized \u201cbecoming-Indian,\u201d ranked in paramilitary order from Big Chief to the front-dancing Spy Boy, aimed to elude hegemonic (mis-)representation. Bypassing the elite carnival, the Black Indians, organized into separate tribes, responded to political defeat by building parallel societies via creolized figurations.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn518\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref518\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>518<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> After the end of Reconstruction, they also gave an acoustic afterlife to the resistance against the plantation system:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Madi cu defio, en dans dey, end dans day<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>Madi cu defio, en dans dey, end dans day<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>We are the Indians, Indians, Indians of the nation<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>The wild, wild creation<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>We won\u2019t bow down (We won\u2019t bow down)<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>Down on the ground (On that dirty ground)<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>Oh how I love to hear him call Indian Red<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>I\u2019ve got a Big Chief, Big Chief, Big Chief of the Nation<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>The wild, wild creation<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>He won\u2019t bow down (We won\u2019t bow down)<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>Down on the ground (On that dirty ground)<br \/>\n\t\t\t<br \/>Oh how I love to hear him call Indian Red<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn519\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref519\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>519<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Indian Red<\/em> has become part of New Orleans\u2019s sonic branding; thanks to recordings, live shows, and the annual Jazz Fest, the song that bookends the marathon rehearsals of the Indian repertoire leading up to Mardi Gras has also entered global pop culture. At the same time, it points to both the local legacy of the maroons<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>who escaped the plantocracy, retreated into the wilderness, and founded independent communities<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and the history of the Black Indians under Jim Crow.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn520\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref520\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>520<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Today, many tribes have to come with U-Hauls from other neighborhoods to their old, now gentrified stomping grounds, in order to hit the streets. Against the backdrop of gentrification, <em>Indian Red<\/em>, their song about refusing to bow down, has also acquired a new signification.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows a man with two black braids wearing a pink feather suit decorated with colorful bead embroidery.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"2093\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7440\" style=\"width:65%; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2-201x300.jpg 201w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2-685x1024.jpg 685w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2-100x150.jpg 100w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2-768x1148.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2-1027x1536.jpg 1027w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2-1370x2048.jpg 1370w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/51_-Tootie-Montana-Big-Chief-der-Yellow-Pocahontas-1991.-The-Michael-P.-Smith-Collection.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-2-850x1271.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 51:<\/strong> Allison Tootie Montana, Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas, 1991. The Michael P. Smith Collection. The Historical New Orleans Collection (THNOC 2007.0103.2.122). Photo: Michael P. Smith.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In contrast to the first historical photograph discussed above, the Black Indians by now appear in dazzling feathered suits adorned with handcrafted beadwork that covers and magnifies their entire bodies<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>radiating into their surrounding far more spectacular than the courtly pageantry of the elites and at the same time evoking a touch of revue show extravagance. The aesthetic form of their appearances also faintly relates to the transposition of blackface into ornamental glitter masks covering the whole head in Cape Town\u2019s carnival. Painstakingly created over months, the Indian suits highlight the ties of moving bodies to their environments and to other dancers. Suit colors signify tribal relations, suit variations are aligned with rank. Moving like roving gangs that<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>to outsiders<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>unpredictably appear and disappear, the Indians share traits with early Zulu formations but have never become part of the \u201celevated carnival.\u201d For decades, they have faced racist police brutality and gentrification.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn521\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref521\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>521<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Where Louis Armstrong Park now stands on the flattened ground of Congo Square<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the former meeting place for disenfranchised, displaced \u201cAmerindians\u201d and enslaved Africans<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and Interstate&#160;10 has sliced through the old back streets since the late 1960s, people\u2019s relations to another are continually renewed in small bars during carnival season: through the creolized movement and sound practices, mock war dances, call and response routines<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and most memorably, through <em>Indian Red<\/em>. On Mardi Gras and on St. Joseph\u2019s Night after Ash Wednesday, the tribes meet in the streets, eventually coming together like modern-day maroons in the \u201cecho-space\u201d beneath I-10.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn522\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref522\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>522<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/52_Second-Big-Chief-Jeremy-Stevenson-Monogram-Hunters-meeting-Big-Chief-Corey-Rayford-Black-Feathers.-Mardi-Gras-Practice-First-and-Last-Stop-Bar-Treme-New-Orleans-2019.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows a crowd in a packed bar watching two people mock war dance.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"939\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7442\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/52_Second-Big-Chief-Jeremy-Stevenson-Monogram-Hunters-meeting-Big-Chief-Corey-Rayford-Black-Feathers.-Mardi-Gras-Practice-First-and-Last-Stop-Bar-Treme-New-Orleans-2019.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/52_Second-Big-Chief-Jeremy-Stevenson-Monogram-Hunters-meeting-Big-Chief-Corey-Rayford-Black-Feathers.-Mardi-Gras-Practice-First-and-Last-Stop-Bar-Treme-New-Orleans-2019-300x201.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/52_Second-Big-Chief-Jeremy-Stevenson-Monogram-Hunters-meeting-Big-Chief-Corey-Rayford-Black-Feathers.-Mardi-Gras-Practice-First-and-Last-Stop-Bar-Treme-New-Orleans-2019-1024x687.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/52_Second-Big-Chief-Jeremy-Stevenson-Monogram-Hunters-meeting-Big-Chief-Corey-Rayford-Black-Feathers.-Mardi-Gras-Practice-First-and-Last-Stop-Bar-Treme-New-Orleans-2019-150x101.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/52_Second-Big-Chief-Jeremy-Stevenson-Monogram-Hunters-meeting-Big-Chief-Corey-Rayford-Black-Feathers.-Mardi-Gras-Practice-First-and-Last-Stop-Bar-Treme-New-Orleans-2019-768x515.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/52_Second-Big-Chief-Jeremy-Stevenson-Monogram-Hunters-meeting-Big-Chief-Corey-Rayford-Black-Feathers.-Mardi-Gras-Practice-First-and-Last-Stop-Bar-Treme-New-Orleans-2019-850x570.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 52:<\/strong> Big Chief Jeremy Stevenson, Monogram Hunters, meeting Big Chief Corey Rayford, Black Feathers. Mardi Gras Practice, First and Last Stop Bar, Trem\u00e9, New Orleans, 2019. Photo: Ryan Hodgson Rigsbee.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Various origin stories have been attributed to the New Orleans Indians. These stories reflect changes in dominant cultural narratives. In the 1970s, Michael P. Smith interpreted the emergence of Black Indians during Mardi Gras around 1900 as a pop-cultural citation referring to the promotional parades of the Buffalo Bill Shows, which at the time were making their way through New Orleans. Those same shows may also have left unpredictable traces among the Tresterer of Austria\u2019s Pinzgau region, whose headdresses bear a strikingly \u201cIndian\u201d look.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"> <span><a href=\"#fn523\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref523\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>523<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Smith, who assembled the first major photographic archive of the New Orleans\u2019s Indians, also pointed to the post-Civil War deployment of Black Buffalo Soldiers against the \u201cAmerindian\u201d population. In his early texts, he understood the Black Indians\u2019 practices as a kind of mimicry directed at military adversaries within a tangled colonial constellation.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn524\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref524\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>524<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In doing so, he highlighted how mimesis could be used to negotiate fluid alliances, enmities, and forms of complicity. Maurice M. Martinez, by contrast, stressed the link to maroon communities<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>where \u201cAmerindians\u201d and African American fugitive slaves lived together<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in his 1976 film <em>The Black Indians of New Orleans<\/em>, which included the 1903 photograph. Martinez saw what some might call Indian drag as an act of political solidarity and of claiming common ancestry. He drew attention to family ties between the enslaved and the disenfranchised dating back before the Jim Crow period, even if the suits seem to cite iconic Plains Indians rather than local tribes.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/53_Spy-Boys-Meeting-of-the-Tribes-Mardi-Gras-Treme-I-10-Bridge.-New-Orleans-2020-2.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows two people in colorful feather suits confronting each other on a street beneath an overpass, observed by bystanders.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1051\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7439\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/53_Spy-Boys-Meeting-of-the-Tribes-Mardi-Gras-Treme-I-10-Bridge.-New-Orleans-2020-2.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/53_Spy-Boys-Meeting-of-the-Tribes-Mardi-Gras-Treme-I-10-Bridge.-New-Orleans-2020-2-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/53_Spy-Boys-Meeting-of-the-Tribes-Mardi-Gras-Treme-I-10-Bridge.-New-Orleans-2020-2-1024x769.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/53_Spy-Boys-Meeting-of-the-Tribes-Mardi-Gras-Treme-I-10-Bridge.-New-Orleans-2020-2-150x113.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/53_Spy-Boys-Meeting-of-the-Tribes-Mardi-Gras-Treme-I-10-Bridge.-New-Orleans-2020-2-768x577.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/53_Spy-Boys-Meeting-of-the-Tribes-Mardi-Gras-Treme-I-10-Bridge.-New-Orleans-2020-2-850x638.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 53<\/strong> Spy Boys, Meeting of the Tribes, Mardi Gras, Trem\u00e9, I-10 Bridge. New Orleans, 2020. Photo: Evelyn Annu\u00df.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>As mentioned above, Deloria interprets the indigenous figure in dominant US culture as a transformation of Old World European \u201cwild men\u201d like the Perchten. Yet with regard to the Black Indians, Afrocentric origin stories have become increasingly prominent. Allusions to West African artisanal traditions have played a major role<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>exemplified by Fi Yi Yi, a Black Indian tribe led by Big Chief Victor Harris until 2024.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn525\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref525\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>525<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In these Afrocentric references to a cultural \u201celsewhere,\u201d the personification of indigenous revolt takes on a new role: that of asserting a history of one\u2019s own.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn526\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref526\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>526<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The obviously invented traditions of supposedly unchanging elite Old Liners such as Comus and their ilk, for their part, might have contributed to genealogical interpellations that may actually obscure entangled histories of mimetic practices and their complex performative transpositions. Yet the desire to trace African roots, especially under the contemporary pressures of modern branding, may itself hold specific risks.<\/p>\n<p>In the wake of neocolonial usages of today\u2019s discourses on decolonization,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn527\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref527\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>527<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Black Indian masking practices face the threat of being turned into global museum artifacts. While the Indians have at times been accused of cultural appropriation on US social media, prominent European museums are buying up their most spectacular suits at steep prices as showpieces. Some of the most elaborate suits<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>newly designed each year for Mardi Gras and until now mainly displayed in small community-based collections, such as the Backstreet Cultural Museum founded and curated by Sylvester Francis or Ronald Lewis\u2019s House of Dance and Feathers<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn528\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref528\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>528<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>are assuming a new economic function. This shift brings not only increased competition but also changing ascriptions of meaning.<\/p>\n<p>What may initially seem like long-overdue global recognition risks pulling the Indians\u2019 masking practices out of sociopolitical context. And not least due to copyright concerns, it is reshaping relations within the tribes themselves. Their masks have become recast elsewhere, sometimes through a romanticized lens of decolonial resistance, whereas the specific context of these performances <br \/>and their repertoire have at times been superseded. Thus, single artifacts like suit patches have become subjected to the exhibition logic of autonomous art.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn529\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref529\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>529<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The local street carnival, it seems, has entered the international museum circuit, and citations of the figure of revolt have been absorbed into a transcontinental cultural machine. \u201cMardi Gras Indian performances are no longer restricted to the peripheral areas of New Orleans and have moved to the world of museums and jazz festival performances,\u201d Aur\u00e9lie Godet observed early on, in 2017.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn530\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref530\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>530<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The authenticity ascribed to the Indians also tends to obscure both their new commercial value and their new role as the \u201creal back stage\u201d of contemporary city marketing. Further, with their arrival in European museums, the Indians have become entangled in decolonial efforts shaped by the image problems of ivory tower institutions who must deal with their looted artifacts<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>efforts that, paradoxically, might do more to obscure than clarify the local agency of the Indians and their street-based meetings of the tribes.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog.jpg\" alt=\"A colorful catalog cover for Black Indians de la Nouvelle-Orl\u00e9ans shows someone with a white-painted face and a turquoise feather suit sitting wide-legged, holding a staff topped with a skull.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1627\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7441\" style=\"width:65%; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog-258x300.jpg 258w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog-881x1024.jpg 881w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog-129x150.jpg 129w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog-768x893.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog-1322x1536.jpg 1322w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/54_Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-Titelblatt-Katalog-850x988.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 54<\/strong> Catalog cover of <em>Black Indians de la Nouvelle-Orl\u00e9ans<\/em>, Mus\u00e9e du Quai Branly \u2014 Jacques Chirac, Paris, 2022.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Black Indians de la Nouvelle-Orl\u00e9ans<\/em> was the title of a meticulously curated 2022 exhibition at the Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Jacques Chirac, France\u2019s &#173;official ethnological museum. In downtown Paris, huge billboards featured a lone nameless Indian sitting wide-legged on the steps of a typical New Orleans-style wooden house.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn531\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref531\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>531<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Instead of people roving the streets, the advertisement also serving as the exhibition catalog\u2019s cover showed a single body frozen in time. What is lost in this emblematic visual staging is a sense of collective movement. The door behind the figure is apparently sealed with a white-painted board, echoing the color palette of the feathered costume and the pale-painted face staring into the camera. The mouth is hidden behind a half-mask, as if to illustrate the silence of the figure. The face is nearly eclipsed by the turquoise feathers and the richly beaded suit in brown hues, which brings together &#173;various signs with untethered meanings. The catalog cover makes it clear that what we are looking at is a curated ensemble, designed first and foremost to evoke familiar associations with New Orleans. One hand rests on a skull mounted on a wooden staff, invoking voodoo tropes. The photograph, enigmatically titled <em>Mystic Medicine Man, \u201cLove Medicine\u201d<\/em> by Danielle C. Miles, might also signal a claim to art photography curated for a globalized market. This kind of framing paradigmatically reflects the current shift in how Mardi Gras is received: it subjects the Indians to the logic of today\u2019s museum world. <\/p>\n<p>In Paris, the exhibition acquired a distinct political function in light of current calls for decolonization and France\u2019s rapid loss of influence as a former colonial power in today\u2019s Africa<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a role that has rather a tangential connection to New Orleans and its French colonial past.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn532\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref532\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>532<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>While the Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly placed the Indians within the broader context of the Middle Passage, Klan terror, and racist minstrelsy,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn533\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref533\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>533<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> it largely avoided addressing the concrete shifts in political and social agency<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>whether during the Jim Crow era or in response to today\u2019s gentrification. Instead, a focus on West African visual traditions allowed the museum to showcase its own artifacts under a decolonial banner, both in the exhibition and the accompanying conference. In the process, the museum\u2019s collections were subtly rebranded through a framing critical of colonialism. To what extent does this interpretive framing cater to the contemporary branding strategies of museums in former empires? And to what extent do such readings obscure creolized cultural practices whose power has long lain in their rejection of dominant genealogical narratives? That said, would it really be preferable not to hold an exhibition like <em>Black Indians de la Nouvelle-Orl\u00e9ans<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and risk keeping the Indians\u2019 spectacular artistry from view outside of New Orleans?<\/p>\n<p>In any case, the exhibition\u2019s curatorial concept largely leaves out entanglements with early <em>Playing Indian<\/em> pop culture and today\u2019s creolized forms of resistance, along with questions about how segregation policies may have gained an afterlife in current gentrification and the concomitant displacement of the small neighborhood bars from which the Indians emerge. These kinds of class-specific questions of location and dislocation seem ill-suited to the terms of current European decolonial discourse and the local myth-making around indigenous knowledge, which has shaped figurations of \u201cthe Indian\u201d since the nineteenth century. In this context, the otherwise impressive and carefully researched exhibition also gestures toward invocations of African indigeneity<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>maybe also an ethnologizing contemporary transposition of nineteenth-century European Indianism<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and toward the epistemology of Eurocentric genealogical thinking. That may be the price for gaining international recognition for masking practices that have long been marginalized.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn534\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref534\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>534<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> As it seems today, however, the figure of \u201cthe Indian\u201d has become projected onto Black bodies in a specific way<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>perhaps also as a counterweight to the media erasure of the mass deaths of nameless migrants at the borders of the EU that uncannily accompanies the Blaxploitation-coined popularity of Black Lives Matter and related imagery when mobilized within Europe.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows a white house fa\u00e7ade with stucco, four columns, two statues, and the carving \u201cLe Pavillon\u201d under a blue sky.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1827\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7444\" style=\"width:55%; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte-230x300.jpg 230w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte-785x1024.jpg 785w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte-115x150.jpg 115w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte-768x1002.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte-1177x1536.jpg 1177w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/55_Le-Pavillon-Hotel-Poydras-Street-New-Orleans-Postkarte-850x1109.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 55<\/strong> Le Pavillon Hotel, Poydras Street, New Orleans, Postkarte. \u00a9 Le Pavillon Hotel.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>What is missing in the specifically situated museal reception of the Black Indians, then, is not just the question of how a figure of revolt might be politically utilized<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>or, how the figure of the Indian has been reinvented as a signifier of urban, creolized maroons, for example. This omission also means that concrete references to labor or material conditions cannot be made legible.<\/p>\n<p>While the Paris catalog cover foregrounds beaded imagery, the so-called downtown suits are often made of three-dimensional elements resembling ornate plasterwork or stucco. These full-body ornamental suits can be read as specifically situated materializations. They also gesture to contexts of labor, and that is, to the social environment of the Indians<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in short, to the class relations that have long shaped their practices. This becomes visible in the work of Allison \u201cTootie\u201d Montana: Indian icon, Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas, and by profession a plasterer. In 2005, shortly before Hurricane Katrina, Montana died of a heart attack at City Hall while protesting police violence against the Indians. He is remembered as transforming intertribal street clashes over territorial rights into competitions for the best suit design<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and for introducing three-dimensional elements into suit-making.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn535\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref535\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>535<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The stucco facade or ceiling work at the restaurant of the Le Pavillon Hotel on Poydras Street in today\u2019s central business district, near the former segregated entertainment quarters of New Orleans, was modeled by Montana. It indicates a connection between plastering and sewing.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn536\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref536\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>536<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Looking at Montana\u2019s work, material relations become legible: a responsiveness to one\u2019s surroundings, bound up with skilled labor. Transposed into Indian practices, these relations and their situatedness may remain largely obscured in Afrocentric genealogical narratives. To understand where the Indians come from, one might then rather need to look to the vanishing back street bars<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and with them, to the specific social and labor conditions that shaped respective practices.<\/p>\n<p>Yet even beyond this local New Orleanian context, new and still unforeseeable lines of flight may emerge. The African \u201croots\u201d of the Indians themselves can be read as a rhizomatic blend of transcontinental entanglements<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>also further complicating my earlier view of creolizing. If one traces Indianized masking practices on the African continent before the Middle Passage<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that is, already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>this paradoxically complicates later interpretations. It undermines a unilinear retrospective Africanization of the Indian figure, both in New Orleanian local historiography as well as the Paris exhibition. This also helps challenge the idea that the world only globalized through the plantation underbelly of \u201cprimitive\u201d accumulation.<\/p>\n<p>In his 2017 study <em>From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians<\/em>, Jeroen Dewulf unsettles romantic notions of Africa as a \u201cvirgin motherland\u201d before the transcontinental slave trade.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn537\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref537\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>537<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Researching precreolized mimetic practices in Africa, he teases out the layered history of European expansion. Dewulf shows how Iberian-Catholic theatrical traditions were adopted by Central African brotherhoods beginning in the early seventeenth century. These brotherhoods emerged during the Christianization promoted by Alfonso&#160;I, king of the Kingdom of Kongo<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>predating the Middle Passage. Dewulf traces how their performances repurposed and subverted colonial <em>autos sacramentales<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Jesuit morality plays that dramatized battles between Christians and Moors, later recast with \u201cAmerindian\u201d or African figures.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn538\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref538\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>538<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> He argues that these danced, fraternal masking practices may have provided a cultural space of resonance for the later creolized reception of the Indian figure in the US South, introduced to the area through early maroons who escaped from Spanish \u201cexploration\u201d ships even before New Orleans was founded<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>or, through the afterlife of these practices in Caribbean carnival.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn539\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref539\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>539<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The performative transposition of this African-Iberian substrate, he argues, was a response to the post-Reconstruction period. Mardi Gras, with its relative freedoms, offered space for forming mutual aid organizations. However, long before the Old Liner krewes and the carnival of anglophone elites, Dewulf maintains, these forms had already been carried on through Catholic Black brotherhoods on the African continent, that is, before the establishment of transatlantic slave trade routes.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn540\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref540\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>540<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Around 1900 at the latest, he then concludes, they were reactivated under new social conditions and translated into the carnival setting in New Orleans.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTime and again,\u201d he writes in <em>Black Brotherhoods<\/em>, \u201cscholars narrowly reduced anti-colonial resistance to the attachment to pre-colonial traditions and failed to understand that, in many cases, the appropriation and reinvention of the idiom of the colonizer was a much more effective strategy in dealing with colonial aggression.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn541\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref541\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>541<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Indeed, on second glance, the suits in the earliest known Mardi Gras photograph of the Indians in the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> seem to remotely allude to Orientalist aesthetics. Along with the gendered dynamics of the Indians\u2019 masking practices, this may lend support to Dewulf\u2019s brotherhood thesis. Highlighting alternative flight lines of mimetic amalgamations, Dewulf thus challenges simplified understandings of creolization that begin with the idea of untouched precolonial territories in Africa and Europe. What emerges instead is a sense that transcontinental contacts and entanglements were never solely shaped by European colonial hegemony. Accordingly, the creolized afterlife of what may have been a Central African \u201cappropriation\u201d of a European, male-coded theatrical genre also pushes back against the culturalist-retrotopian narratives of decolonization mobilized not least in the global marketing of the Indians. What in Paris seemed to be hard-won recognition of the Indians\u2019 masking practices<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>practices that were indeed policed and suppressed for over a century<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>may undermine their political potential: to forge multidirectional transoceanic modes of relating, defying the ongoing dirtiness of hegemonic societal conditions.<\/p>\n<p>As Saidiya Hartman underscores in <em>Lose Your Mother<\/em>, the descendants of the Middle Passage did not come from kings and queens of some mythic ancestral continent.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn542\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref542\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>542<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> They came instead from African subalterns<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>those brutally captured during European expansion, sold, marched across West Africa, locked in dungeons, and shipped off into the plantation system. As Sylvia Wynter also shows, people had already been marked as \u201cwithout lineage\u201d in the Kongolese caste system, consigned to enslavement, and later ruthlessly exploited by a global bourgeoisie. In her talk with David Scott, she explains: \u201cThe opposite to slave is not only being free: the opposite to slave is also <em>belonging <\/em>to a lineage.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn543\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref543\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>543<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> And in her essay \u201c1492\u201d she states: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">In other words, by making conceptualizable the representation, in the earlier place of a line of noble hereditary descent, of a bioevolutionarily selected line of eugenic hereditary descent, the symbolic construct of \u201crace\u201d mapped onto the color line has served to enact a new status criterion of <em>eugenicity<\/em> on whose basis the global bourgeoisie legitimates its ostensibly bioevolutionarily selected dominance<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as the alleged global bearers of a transnational and transracial line of eugenic hereditary descent<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span><em>over<\/em> the global nonmiddle (or \u201cworking\u201d) classes, with its extreme Other being that of the \u201cjobless\u201d and \u201chomeless\u201d underclass, who have been supposedly discarded by reason of their genetic defectivity by the Malthusian \u201ciron laws of nature.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn544\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref544\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>544<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Even so, the creolized figure of Indian-style revolt perhaps gives rightful place to a memory of the underclass that is more multidirectional than linear. The Black Indians, at any rate, evoke both unpredictable transoceanic relations and the sociocidal legacy of colonial extractivism cutting through both African and Indian reconfigurations. A reading of Mardi Gras that underscores multidirectional memory, moreover, does latently inform the parts of the Paris exhibition curated by Steve Bourget and his team that bring gender into play.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn545\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref545\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>545<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>Thanks to the work of cocurator Kim Vaz-Deville, references to minor feminine figures, who have only recently started gaining broader &#173;attention, accompany the exhibition of Black Indian suits: to wit, the Baby Dolls. Loosely associated with the Indians, these nomadic Mardi Gras figures do not form a single tribe, nor do they appear as Queens accompanying a Big Chief. Rather, they disrupt notions of patrilineal African heritage and heroism. Even their suits on display in Paris as sculptural costumes suggest queer-feminist, cross-cutting modes of performative transpositions. In doing so, they challenge a regime of ethnologizing validation that has dominated Europe since the nineteenth century and continues to shape its museum culture<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>one that the Black Indians may be encountering in the wake of their globalized recognition. It is through the Baby Dolls, after all, that creolized masking practices become legible not as \u201cethnic drag,\u201d but as a dirty dragging from below<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>something well worth recalling in view of the current right-wing carnival.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/56_Ausstellung-Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows an exhibition room displaying elaborate, colorful feathered suit sculptures in shades of red, pink, blue, and orange.\" width=\"1535\" height=\"1152\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7431\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/56_Ausstellung-Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022.jpg 1535w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/56_Ausstellung-Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/56_Ausstellung-Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-1024x769.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/56_Ausstellung-Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-150x113.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/56_Ausstellung-Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/56_Ausstellung-Black-Indians-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans-Musee-du-Quai-Branly-\u2013-Jacques-Chirac-Paris-2022-850x638.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1535px) 100vw, 1535px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 56:<\/strong> Exhibition <em>Black Indians de la Nouvelle-Orl\u00e9ans<\/em>, Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly \u2014 Jacques Chirac, Paris, 2022. Foto: Evelyn Annu\u00df.<\/p>\n<h4 id=\"4\">Performing Otherwise (Baby Dolls)<\/h4>\n<p>By hearsay, they appear as a feminized, queer transfiguration of mob revolt: a kind of many-headed hydra of the back streets. As infamous chorines<em>, <\/em>they bear no individual names, no marks of rank that would slot them into a hierarchy.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn546\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref546\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>546<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Their backstories live almost entirely in the realm of oral fabulation. In local carnival historiography, these \u201cworldly women\u201d were overlooked long after their first appearances and were barely recognized outside their immediate environment,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn547\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref547\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>547<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> especially since they appeared \u201conly\u201d by dancing<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>as loose ambient figures. At first, they were not pictured at all; yet as Vaz-Deville notes, they embodied \u201cone of the first women\u2019s street masking practices in the United States.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn548\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref548\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>548<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> As the Americanized post-Reconstruction elite carnival evolved alongside increasing segregation, masked women were associated with prostitution.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn549\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref549\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>549<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> For these chorines, white elite parade floats and balls were unquestionably off limits. Branded as dirty, they were not deemed photographable by the new media of the time, mostly occupied with \u201celevated\u201d spectacles. Still from the back streets, they were sung into being as figurations of sexualized desire in the era\u2019s ragtime<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and linger, specter-like, in today\u2019s sound archives.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn550\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref550\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>550<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Though later temporarily forgotten, they belonged to the nomadic gangs of high society\u2019s castoffs who, during Jim Crow apartheid, showed up outside official parades<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>interwoven with the emergence of mutual aid and pleasure clubs. <\/p>\n<p>Unlike King Zulu with his procession or the Indian Big Chiefs and their entourage, they enter the scene as \u201cqueer\u201d escorts of a creolized spatial claiming: not as bystanders,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn551\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref551\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>551<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> but as moving, unruly bodies<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>inviting \u201c<em>tout-monde<\/em>,\u201d as Glissant would call the people in the streets, to dance along. They appear as a diffuse choral assembly, opening up space for others<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>for potentially unbounded gatherings. As a kind of supporting crowd, they move on their own terms. They do not invoke heroic gestures. Rather, they provide a collective act of care<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>celebrating the streets as sites of possible engagement. And it is here, in the streets, where their resisting potential is situated.<\/p>\n<p>Their performance shifts between giving space and briefly dancing themselves out of their surrounding in solo bursts<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>translating their loose, collective assembly into a repertoire of unique interplays and counterplays of bodily movements. They show up and vanish unpredictably<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>echoing the moves of all kinds of beings in syncopated jumps, reaching beyond the people immediately present. When they touch the street while dancing, they underscore their embeddedness within this open environment. These days, they also perform for the phone cameras of the audiences they pass by, bridging the here-and-now with an elsewhere. Well beyond the local streets, they evoke the joy of spontaneous gatherings.<\/p>\n<p>Dancing, they appear as minor figures who give rise to collective constellations<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>fluid, open, and ever-shifting. In doing so, they counteract the transposition of the proscenium stage into street carnival by the so-called Old Liner krewes of high society. It is said, that their name once directly referred to their jobs as sex workers and was later reclaimed by middle-class women as a sign of feminist empowerment.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn552\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref552\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>552<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> As the tale goes, the Baby Dolls were first called so by their pimps in the 1910s and came out of Black Storyville, the segregated red-light district once known as Coon Town, just steps from what is now New Orleans\u2019s central business district, near Le Pavillon Hotel and Lee Circle.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn553\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref553\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>553<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <em>Baby Dolls<\/em> is not just a cutesy nickname; it marks the specific labor conditions of women who, after abolition, had nothing but their bodies to sell<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>some of whom were hyperexploited like living dolls in brothels known as circuses.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn554\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref554\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>554<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf they were not making a scene,\u201d Kim Vaz writes of their carnival mode, \u201cBaby Dolls were where the scene was happening.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn555\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref555\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>555<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The moving spatiality of the Baby Dolls lacks any frame, any fixed vanishing point. That they have become dance icons of New Orleans Mardi Gras<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and are now getting scholarly attention thanks to Vaz\u2019s work<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>signals a renewed political interest in what Saidiya Hartman elsewhere names <em>wayward lives<\/em>: \u201cAt the turn of the twentieth century, young black women were in open rebellion. They struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn556\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref556\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>556<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Branded under Jim Crow as both the \u201clowest of the low\u201d and as marketable commodities, the Baby Dolls evoked the lingering echo of sexualized violence and its associated forms of blaxploitative visibilization in a city that was once the epicenter of the Southern human trade until the fall of the plantation system.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn557\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref557\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>557<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Dancing collectively in the streets, however, they also staged a kind of anarchic street performance<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>an enactment of potential ungovernability and shared agency. They emerged as both companion figures and counterpoints to subaltern masculinity, in the very moment that gender relations had begun to shift. Their acts of giving space can be seen as loose forms of another kind of mutual aid: a performative promise in creolized drag not to be governed as under Jim Crow.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn558\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref558\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>558<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>Without referring to the Baby Dolls themselves, Hartman describes such collective modes of performing as \u201cthe practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn559\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref559\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>559<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> She places a \u201cchoreography of the possible \u2026 which was headless and spilling out in all directions,\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn560\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref560\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>560<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> in the neglected zones known as \u201cthe ward\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>\u201curban commons where the poor assemble\u201d:<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn561\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref561\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>561<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> spaces where the longing for another world are performed in \u201cwayward practices.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn562\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref562\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>562<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> From this perspective, the nomadic, choral apparitions of the New Orleans Baby Dolls evoke a <em>queer<\/em> episteme of nongenealogical, transoceanic, ostensibly minor<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>dirty<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>mimesis, carrying a potential for a decidedly <em>political<\/em> desire.<\/p>\n<p>Doing justice to the Baby Dolls may mean not retroactively individualizing them, that is, not countering their role as collective minor figures. Therefore, this is not about giving each one a personal backstory or asingular voice, in a well-established fashion of counterhistory, nor about making them into vessels of identification through fabulated oral history. Rather, this is to bring into view the \u201cenvironmental politicality\u201d of their street appearances<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>opening up space to gather and exposing a collective capacity for joyful relationality. As a loose and moving chorus, the Baby Dolls help to imagine and experience entanglements that resist the violence of segregationism, of Jim Crow apartheid and its afterlife<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>still blocking other societal ways of relating.<\/p>\n<p>In the aesthetic form their public appearance takes, they raise the question of which specific modes of production create existing separations in the first place. As indicated by their name and outfits, the Baby Dolls\u2019 apparitions refer to a context of gendered human commodification shaped by the plantation system and furthered by Jim Crow.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn563\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref563\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>563<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In a city where the sex industry, tied to carnival, became a tourist attraction, they deliberately and ostentatiously drag along particular historical articulations of human commodification. Their outfits might read as stylized exaggerations of those of sex workers from past eras. Thus, they reflect the gender politics implied in what Mbembe, pointing to the production of precarious lives and \u201cdirty\u201d labor, calls the \u201cBlack condition.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn564\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref564\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>564<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In this way, they expose the gendered aftereffects of colonial extractivism and racial-capitalist hyperexploitation, that is, the subjection of people to become bare labor.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn565\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref565\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>565<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Through their carnivalesque appearance, they confront the fetish character ascribed to Black bodies under the American plantation system and its aftereffects. Staging themselves collectively as unruly bodies, however, they may hint to sensing a different life for <em>tout-monde<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The Baby Dolls were first reported to appear at New Orleans\u2019s Mardi Gras around 1912.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn566\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref566\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>566<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Supposedly armed, dressed in ultrashort satin skirts, wearing ruffled old-style baby bonnets and carrying baby bottles filled with alcohol, they showed up in gangs during Mardi Gras<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>throwing money around and hiring jazz bands, defiantly challenging their living conditions.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn567\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref567\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>567<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> At a time when it was seen as unseemly for white women to mask, the Baby Dolls turned the back streets of New Orleans into stages for playful \u201cimpromptu street corner competitions\u201d (Vaz) and open dance floors. Some of their dance moves<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>called drags<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>made visible the act of schlepping along. And with their satin suits<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which also embraced older, as well as fuller, bodies<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>with their Victorian-style bonnets, they appeared as counterfigures to fantasies of feminine purity that thrived under industrial capitalism, middle-class family values, and racist segregation. As dancing chorines, they embodied a challenge to what Sylvia Wynter elsewhere sharply terms \u201clineage-clannic identity.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn568\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref568\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>568<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Baby Dolls responded to the subaltern condition of attributed kinlessness with a danced enactment of relations beyond genealogy.<\/p>\n<p>They thus outshined the \u201celevated carnival\u201d and the patriarchal white ball culture of New Orleans, where face masks are still reserved for men and so-called debutantes appear as decorative stage props for elderly gentlemen. Whereas the balls of New Orleans\u2019s elite to this day promote marriageable young women in service to their families and as figurations of white, supposedly fragile virginity tinged with plantation nostalgia, the Baby Dolls were already defying such stagings of femininity in the 1910s. By invoking the flipside of the sanitized Southern mythology<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>actual conditions of extreme, often sexualized exploitation<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>they schlepp along a concrete sense of both the production of <em>bare<\/em> labor and the necessity of collective agency. Through their repertoire, they reject devaluation and open up the possibility of something beyond the bioeconomic conceptualization of the human. From the 1930s, with the emergence of a new consumer culture and the Jazz Age, images of the Baby Dolls began to circulate. Eventually, they gained broader public exposure through tourism magazines and New Deal social reform projects.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn569\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref569\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>569<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In 1948, <em>Holiday Magazine<\/em> printed one of several Baby Doll photos taken by Bradley Smith during Mardi Gras.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn570\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref570\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>570<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> These photos emphasize gender fluidity and gang mobility. But to be pictured also meant serving as a projection screen for desires of dirtiness produced by puritanical norms under the carnivalesque state of exception<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and it meant becoming a target of hygiene regulations, ideologies of social improvement, and bureaucratic control. With growing integration, rising standards of respectability, and intensified gentrification, the Baby Dolls then gradually vanished from sight. Supposedly, they first disappeared when the I-10 was built through the back streets of New Orleans, turning those neighborhoods into concrete wastelands and suburban access roads under the banner of modern urban planning. The disappearance of the Baby Dolls recalls how parts of the former Back o\u2019 Town might have begun to lose their role as a gathering place<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and perhaps also the cost that came with integrating into the suburbs elsewhere. It indicates the dominance of new infrastructures, of socially engineered environmental change and its price.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn571\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref571\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>571<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection.jpg\" alt=\"A black-and-white photo shows a dancing group in short white dresses and ruffled hats beside a wooden building. Power lines and a \u201cRegal Beer\u201d sign are visible in the background.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1786\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7445\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-235x300.jpg 235w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-803x1024.jpg 803w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-118x150.jpg 118w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-768x980.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-1204x1536.jpg 1204w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/57_-Baby-Dolls-New-Orleans-1944.-The-Historical-New-Orleans-Collection-850x1084.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 57:<\/strong> Baby Dolls, New Orleans, 1944. The Historical New Orleans Collection (THNOC MSS 536.33.3.1). Photo: Bradley Smith.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>That the Baby Dolls made a comeback after the turn of the millennium<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>right there under the bridge of former Back o\u2019 Town<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>suggests a lingering desire to bring the unfulfilled promises of other social possibilities back into memory through performing, against all odds.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn572\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref572\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>572<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Baby Dolls are said to have been reactivated from a bar in Trem\u00e9: the Mother in Law Lounge, located right next to the I-10 freeway bridge that was completed in 1969. The push is said to have come from the lounge\u2019s owner at the time, Antoinette K-Doe, who was deeply involved in all sorts of mutual aid work. In New Orleans, she was best known for dragging around a life-sized doll of her late husband, rhythm and blues singer Ernie K-Doe. Antoinette even ran him in effigy for mayor after Hurricane Katrina, to protest against corrupt reconstruction policies that hit the back streets hardest. <\/p>\n<p>Dancing out the door of the Mother in Law Lounge or other venues and into the street like living dolls<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>making an entrance into the public scene and jumping the rails<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the Baby Dolls evoke performative entanglements and transpositions.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn573\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref573\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>573<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Time and again, they show up as choruses of grief and protest at jazz funerals. Their dancing pushes back against police violence, whose main target is often young Black men: those hit the most by mass incarceration and prison industry exploitation. With their syncopated jumps, the Baby Dolls aim beyond the defense of their own immediate interests toward a collective gesture: making the New Jim Crow itself dance, to borrow from Marx.<\/p>\n<p>These days, they show up in varying constellations at funerals, during Mardi Gras, and on St. Joseph\u2019s Night<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>seizing on gatherings in the gentrified back streets as their stage. That they have gained popularity beyond these contexts may suggest a shift in the value of sexual capital, perhaps even pointing to the neoliberal aestheticization of sex work and today\u2019s image-driven feminized selfifications.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn574\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref574\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>574<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Yet if blackface and blaxploitation can be read as articulations of hypercommodified racialized visibility, the Baby Dolls show how their bodies are shaped not simply by personal autonomy but by the social conditions in which they are embedded. Their danced appropriation of visual gender codes from the Jim Crow era lays claim to a different kind of physical use value, one that defies being reduced to sexualized capital. From this perspective, they are a poor fit as icons of decontextualized individual empowerment. Much like black<em>face<\/em> at the South African Cape around 1900, which has morphed today into full-head ornate glitter makeup, their moving <em>bodies<\/em> confront the historical dirtiness of the very societal conditions in which they move. In doing so, the Baby Dolls mediate a broader notion of gender bending, while performing in the streets. They have always featured bodies that do not represent normative femininity<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>whether read as female or male.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn575\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref575\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>575<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Back in the Jim Crow era, which in many ways prefigured apartheid elsewhere, the Baby Dolls seem to have acted as an open chorus and refuge for anyone deemed sexually deviant<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which is to say, queer.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn576\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref576\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>576<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Challenging the kind of New Orleans exceptionalism critiqued by Thomas Adams and Matt Sakakeeny<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>which limits historiography to local framing<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the Baby Dolls show a loose kinship with other carnivalesque forms of appearance.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn577\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref577\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>577<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Dewulf, for instance, traces the <em>diabladas<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>whose name, as we will see, echoes in the Baby Dolls\u2019 punning performances<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>back to comic companion figures in Latin American carnival. These figures themselves evoke early Central African adaptations of <em>autos sacramentales<\/em> during Iberian Catholic colonialism. As Dewulf argues, this kind of performative transposition gained an afterlife in the masking practices of Black brotherhoods across diasporic histories of forced migration.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn578\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref578\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>578<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Baby Dolls\u2019 bonnets, on closer inspection, are even faintly reminiscent of the Orientalized headdresses seen in <em>autos sacramentales<\/em> that first referenced the figure of the Moor<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>later morphing into \u201cIndianist\u201d figurations. In this context, the Baby Dolls conjure up clownish, comic, queer figures, tied rhizomatically to cross-dressing, blackfacing, and playing Indian<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>figures long performed mostly by male bodies, and continually restaged in new contexts. They speak to the transoceanic entanglements of mimetic techniques negotiating societal conditions.<\/p>\n<p>Reading the Baby Dolls, then, is not about origin stories but about researching performative transpositions. It is about investigating collective modes of mimetic appearing whose functions are context-specific yet stretch beyond the local and the immediate here and now<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>toward a queer, creolized dragging that opens up the possibility of previously unforeseeable acts of relating. The ongoing right-wing carnival<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>during the pandemic, Klan hoods in supermarkets to mock mask mandates<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>stages a rehearsal for today\u2019s disruptive yet authoritarian politics. In contrast, the Baby Dolls\u2019 street performing gestures to nonlinear, global oddkinships. That can be exemplified with regard to the Latin American feminist strike movement and the queer guerilla performances of Marika Antifascista during the carnival of La Legua, Chile. Wearing short satin skirts and stylized headpieces with pink horns, they dance through the streets as antifascist protest figures.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn579\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref579\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>579<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Streamed and shared around the world via social media, they seem to visually echo the Baby Dolls\u2019 outfits. In resisting the current gendered backlash of a new, sprawling, globally networked broligarchic authoritarianism, these \u201clittle antifa devils\u201d also summon memories of resistance to the 1970s Chilean coup<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>signaling the early alignment of neoliberalism and fascism. The Baby Dolls\u2019 kindred street performing, then, calls attention to potential political lines of flight that have long remained unthinkable.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn580\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref580\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>580<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/58_Marika-Antifascista-Le-Legua-Chile-2023.-Foto-Elianira-Riveros-Piro.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows a dancing group in black and pink net costumes with short satin skirts and stylized headpieces on a festively decorated street. They carry a sign reading \u201cMarika Antifascista.\u201d\" width=\"1400\" height=\"930\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7446\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/58_Marika-Antifascista-Le-Legua-Chile-2023.-Foto-Elianira-Riveros-Piro.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/58_Marika-Antifascista-Le-Legua-Chile-2023.-Foto-Elianira-Riveros-Piro-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/58_Marika-Antifascista-Le-Legua-Chile-2023.-Foto-Elianira-Riveros-Piro-1024x680.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/58_Marika-Antifascista-Le-Legua-Chile-2023.-Foto-Elianira-Riveros-Piro-150x100.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/58_Marika-Antifascista-Le-Legua-Chile-2023.-Foto-Elianira-Riveros-Piro-768x510.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/58_Marika-Antifascista-Le-Legua-Chile-2023.-Foto-Elianira-Riveros-Piro-850x565.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Abbildung 58:<\/strong> Marika Antifascista, La Legua, Chile, 2021. Photo: Elianira Riverors Piro.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Marika Antifascista has no direct link to the contemporary Mardi Gras Baby Dolls. Nor do their dancing or their far-flung cousins map out a blueprint for political organizing. However, this dancing <em>as if they were free<\/em> gestures toward unforeseen encounters that stretch beyond simple face-to-face relations. From this decidedly nongenealogical, aterritorial perspective, it makes sense to further fabulate distant entanglements: such as with the red-costumed devil figures in Cape Town who flank the local Indians, the Atjas. Perhaps the Baby Dolls even echo the stage entrance and etymology of <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Hellequin<\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the minor, comic figure from \u201chell\u201d in European popular theater. Soot-smeared and personifying precarity, the figure known elsewhere as <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Harlekin<\/span>, as Rudolf M\u00fcnz points out, does not step onstage in an orderly fashion; likely entering the world of the <em>comici dell\u2019arte<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>however untraceably<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>via the charivaris and diableries in the sixteenth century,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn581\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref581\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>581<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> their mode of making an entrance is jumping: the leap that shatters theatrical framing.<\/p>\n<p>From the dancing Baby Dolls, one thus can easily make connections to all sorts of dragging, as a kind of <em>schlepping in leaps<\/em>. This includes their distant kinship with Old European Perchten parades. In Gastein, Austria, the Perchten are accompanied by a <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Hanswurst <\/span>couple. Evoking Venetian carnival, the so-called <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Bajazzl<\/span> each lead a Poppin on a leash<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a doll said to bring fertility, which they hurl at young girls.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn582\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref582\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>582<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> The Baby Dolls\u2019 \u201cunruly bodies\u201d may parody such masculinist sexualizations of carnival throws<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span><em>Kamelle<\/em> and all<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>but they also remind us that mimetic appearances can be hijacked. The amalgamations of performative transpositions they conjure are indeed dirty<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>too slippery to police.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn583\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref583\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>583<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> No one can pin down exactly where these constantly moving figures \u201creally\u201d come from or what they \u201cstand for.\u201d As creolized figurations, they show that referencing is not a \u201cstraight practice.\u201d In their ever-changing ways of entering the street<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in nomadic forms of touching across<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>they evoke a desire to collectively do justice to the \u201crags\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn584\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref584\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>584<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> by queering them.<\/p>\n<p>On closer inspection, they upend genealogical stories and binary conceptions of gender. Their outfit<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>aligned with Mardi Gras\u2019s carnivalesque traditions<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>brings a pun to the scene. Their satinwear plays with the demonization of their bodies, fusing fabric (satin) and designation (Satan)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a label akin to <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Hellequin<\/span>. Read as \u201clittle devils,\u201d <em>diablitas<\/em>,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn585\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref585\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>585<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> the Baby Dolls interweave references to newborns and sexualized femininity into living dolls that seem to take on a life of their own. They enact a practical knowledge of nonreproductive, deterritorializing, queer temporality, inherent in their appearance and scene-making. This temporal knowledge runs counter to the crude historicist logic of straight, linear \u201cclannic identity\u201d prized by the patriarchal high society Old Liners and their retrograde pageants. The Baby Dolls, instead, perform what might be called <em>a temporal dragging of transoceanic entanglements<\/em>. Their paradoxical appearance, as oversexualized babies in female-outfitted grown bodies, brings a nongenealogical concept of temporality to work. They articulate an implicit understanding of the intertwined temporalities that come with performative transpositions. By ripping masking practices out of context and putting them to new use, the Baby Dolls show how to blow off epistemologies of lineage-based identity and the territorial claims that come with it. Through danced citations, they bring to life an \u201calternative theatricalization of kinship.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn586\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref586\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>586<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Obviously, this kind of dragging carries a spatial charge that goes beyond dancing in the here and now of the New Orleans back streets. Like the Indians, the Baby Dolls are part of a larger cast of figures in creolized carnival. As early as the 1880s, they show up in Martinique and Trinidad as a three-in-one character: a doll, a child, and a \u201cfallen\u201d woman.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn587\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref587\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>587<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> While in New Orleans the baby doll and the staging of womanhood have long fused into an embodied persona, in Caribbean carnival, people carry white, blue-eyed baby dolls and use them to mock-shame bystanders as presumed fathers, demanding child support.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn588\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref588\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>588<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This kind of street theater<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>akin to the carnivalesque tradition of festive begging<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>also links back to Kewpie: the drag icon from District Six, whose image in a baby doll outfit opens this book and whose name echoes a baby doll frequently celebrated in contemporary US pop songs. Together, these references show that dragging is always socially situated, while also offering the transformative potential of metamorphic translation<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>gesturing toward the possibility of global political change.<\/p>\n<p>In their dancing, the Baby Dolls claim their fight against different forms of apartheid. They perform and allegorize what is known in New Orleans as second lining. Etymologically, second lining is not just about following the parade or dancing in tow; it is about <em>seconding<\/em>: dancing together in chorus and counterpoint. The Baby Dolls\u2019 second lining thus opens space for minor, singular performances, dancers stepping in and out, while these fluid transitions of movement weave into constellations where, at least for a while, all kinds of people can find room. The Baby Dolls come in the streets as nomadic support characters. They accompany other gangs, yet outside anyone\u2019s control. Dirty conditions notwithstanding, their dancing in drag also gestures &#173;indirectly toward the queer afterlife of that fabulous, transoceanic hydra invoked by Rediker and Linebaugh.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn589\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref589\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>589<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In deterritorializing public space and laying claim to the right to remain, to move, and to be free for <em>tout-monde<\/em>, they do not stand for heroic gestures, as if they might bring about change in one go. Instead, they stir a faint memory of all kinds of loose, infamous people<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>whose &#173;origins might not be traceable, yet who may leap up elsewhere<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>who, just by appearing, resist dominant separations and identitarian politics. Through their space-giving movement, the Baby Dolls become legible as carnivalesque allegories of resistance to old and new practices of boundary-making, while highlighting the scandal of violence shaping both past and present. Their dirty dragging<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>trailing \u201cbehind actually existing social possibilities,\u201d as Freeman puts it elsewhere<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn590\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref590\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>590<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>may also take aim at the present-day masked uprisings that push for new apartheid regimes, drawn along arbitrary lines of color and gender. Read thus, the Baby Dolls do not just take the streets; through a kind of performative materialism, they are giving rise to a sense of other possible ways of relating<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>from under the bridge, from a wrecked place that still, faintly, evokes the ruins of former fairy lands like Kewpie\u2019s District Six. Moving, jumping, leaping, the Baby Dolls radiate this political and epistemic potential of <em>dancing-with<\/em> as an affective resource of collective joy<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>spilling outward, to be taken up anew, figured differently and emerging again <em>elsewhere<\/em> \u2026 <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/59_Baby-Dolls-\u203aunder-the-bridge\u2039-Treme-New-Orleans-2024.jpg\" alt=\"A color photo shows a dancing, brightly costumed group in short ruffled dresses with matching headpieces, accompanied by a brass band under a highway overpass.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"933\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7447\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/59_Baby-Dolls-\u203aunder-the-bridge\u2039-Treme-New-Orleans-2024.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/59_Baby-Dolls-\u203aunder-the-bridge\u2039-Treme-New-Orleans-2024-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/59_Baby-Dolls-\u203aunder-the-bridge\u2039-Treme-New-Orleans-2024-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/59_Baby-Dolls-\u203aunder-the-bridge\u2039-Treme-New-Orleans-2024-150x100.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/59_Baby-Dolls-\u203aunder-the-bridge\u2039-Treme-New-Orleans-2024-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/59_Baby-Dolls-\u203aunder-the-bridge\u2039-Treme-New-Orleans-2024-850x566.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1400px) 100vw, 1400px\" \/><br \/>\n<span class=\"caption-text\"><strong>Figure 59:<\/strong> Baby Dolls, under the bridge, Trem\u00e9, New Orleans, 2024. Photo: Aur\u00e9lie Godet.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right\"><em>\u2026 movement<\/em> happens<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn588\" class=\"footnote-ref\"><sup>588<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<h4>Endnotes<\/h4>\n<hr>\n<ol start=\"456\">\n<li id=\"fn456\">\n<p>See Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 168; Cockrell, <em>Demons<\/em>, 1997: 36, here with reference to Black Mardi Gras Kings documented since 1826. On the history of the Pythian Temple, opened in 1909 and located on what is now Loyola Avenue, whose entertainment offerings and business spaces served those excluded under segregation, see Keith Weldon Medley, \u201cThe Birth of the Pythian Temple,\u201d <em>The New Orleans Tribune<\/em>, October&#160;24, 2017, <a href=\"https:\/\/theneworleanstribune.com\/2017\/10\/24\/the-birth-of-the-pythian-temple\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/theneworleanstribune.com\/2017\/10\/24\/the-birth-of-the-pythian-temple\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref456\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn457\">\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/sheetmusicsinger.com\/highbrownsongs\/royal-coon\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/sheetmusicsinger.com\/highbrownsongs\/royal-coon\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref457\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn458\">\n<p>Chude-Sokei, <em>The Last \u201cDarky,\u201d<\/em> 2006: 124.<a href=\"#fnref458\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn459\">\n<p>See especially the 1913 film <em>Lime Kiln Field Day<\/em>, made with an all-Black cast and restored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=U-IdQ9APUHI\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.youtube.com\/watch?v=U-IdQ9APUHI<\/span><\/a>, accessed September 4, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref459\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn460\">\n<p>See the autobiography of Louis Armstrong, who contextualizes the term locally, and whose own appearance in 1949 as Zulu King was controversial nationwide at the time (<em>Satchmo<\/em>, 1954). Zulu was likely also the name given to the flambeaux carriers, the Black, unmasked torchbearers in the context of the \u201celevated\u201d white uptown carnival. See also McQueeney, \u201cZulu,\u201d 2018: 144. Felipe Smith refers to Zulu as \u201ca slur against bebop musicians\u201d and \u201cdark-skinned New Orleanians\u201d; see \u201cThings,\u201d 2013: 23.<a href=\"#fnref460\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn461\">\n<p>On the mourning traditions of the mutual aid clubs and burial societies, see Atkins, \u201cFrom the Bamboula,\u201d 2018: 97; Celestan, \u201cSocial Aid,\u201d 2022. For a broader historical perspective beyond New Orleans, see also Hartman, Anarchy,\u201d 2018: 471: \u201cMutual aid did not traffic in the belief that the self existed distinct and apart from others or revere the ideas of individuality and sovereignty \u2026 This form of mutual assistance was remade in the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, and the ghetto. It made good the ideals of the commons, the collective, the ensemble, the always more-than-one of existing in the world. The mutual aid society was a resource of black survival. The ongoing and open-ended creation of new conditions of existence and the improvisation of life-enhancing and free association was a practice crafted in social clubs, tenements, taverns, dance halls, disorderly houses, and the streets.\u201d<a href=\"#fnref461\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn462\">\n<p>Chude-Sokei is alluding here to Garber\u2019s <em>Vested Interests <\/em>(1992) and discussing various codings of Blackness in the transatlantic context; <em>The Last \u201cDarky,\u201d <\/em>2006: 138. Nyong\u2019o argues that minstrelsy \u201crefuse[s] to imagine an America without blacks\u201d; see <em>Amalgamation Waltz,<\/em> 2009: 132. The Zulu citation can thus be read as a carnivalization of segregation under globalized conditions of Black hypervisibility.<a href=\"#fnref462\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn463\">\n<p>See Leathem, <em>Gender and Mardi Gras<\/em>, 1994: 151, 156<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>157; Kinser, <em>Carnival, <\/em>1990: 234.<a href=\"#fnref463\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn464\">\n<p>On the status of the Zulu Queens, see Leathem, <em>Gender and Mardi Gras<\/em>, 1994: 157; Felipe Smith, \u201cThings,\u201d 2013: 27.<a href=\"#fnref464\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn465\">\n<p>See Roach, <em>Cities, <\/em>1996: 20<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>21. See also Cockrell\u2019s remark that blackface is \u201cnot to be taken at (white)face value, but at burlesque value\u201d; <em>Demons, <\/em>1997: 57.<a href=\"#fnref465\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn466\">\n<p>Roach, <em>Cities, <\/em>1996: 18<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>19.<a href=\"#fnref466\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn467\">\n<p>Roach, <em>Cities, <\/em>1996: 24. On Esu, see Gates, <em>Signifying Monkey,<\/em> 1989: 31<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>42. Chude-Sokei reads the West African trickster figures and their afterlives differently: \u201cBut because s\/he is a liminal figure, s\/he is also easily counterrevolutionary.\u201d <em>The Last \u201cDarky,\u201d<\/em> 2006: 113.<a href=\"#fnref467\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn468\">\n<p>Roach, <em>Cities, <\/em>1996: 24.<a href=\"#fnref468\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn469\">\n<p>Roach, <em>Cities, <\/em>1996: 4.<a href=\"#fnref469\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn470\">\n<p>On statements from the NAACP beginning in 1956, and subsequent campaigns that ultimately led to a temporary suspension of the Zulu blackface, see McQueeney, \u201cZulu,\u201d 2018: 151<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>155. <a href=\"#fnref470\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn471\">\n<p>On retrospective critiques of a simplistic politics of respectability, see Nyong\u2019o: \u201csince white supremacy affected African Americans as a group, the politics of respectability and uplift cannot be read simply as a \u2018middle-class\u2019 imposition upon the black working class. Respectability came to the fore as response to potentially degrading behavior and spectacle. \u2026 Carnival masks and one\u2019s Sunday best are both moments in the cycle of plebeian life. And furthermore, the work of gender in these matters must be emphasized: working class masculine culture cannot be made to stand in for working class culture as such.\u201d <em>Amalgamation Waltz,<\/em> 2009: 116<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>117.<a href=\"#fnref471\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn472\">\n<p>See Trillin, \u201cA Reporter,\u201d 1964: 119.<a href=\"#fnref472\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn473\">\n<p>See Felipe Smith, \u201cThings,\u201d 2013: 30<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>32 and 34.<a href=\"#fnref473\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn474\">\n<p>In 2006, after the flooding of primarily poor neighborhoods caused by infrastructure failure during Hurricane Katrina, twenty \u201cauthentic\u201d Zulu warriors, \u201cdressed in traditional garb and wielding spears and shields,\u201d were flown in from South Africa to lead the parade; see Ray Koenig, \u201cAfrican Zulu Warriors to Lead Off New Orleans Parade,\u201d <em>Times Picayune<\/em>, February&#160;8, 2006; see also McQueeney, \u201cZulu,\u201d 2018: 140. In the 1970s, by contrast, the Zulu Club emphasized that there was no connection to the South African Zulus; see Felipe Smith, \u201cThings,\u201d 2013: 30. On modern retraditionalizations of the South African Zulus as framed by African American scholarship, see Kruger, <em>The Drama,<\/em> 1999: 27, with attention to how they were represented in the United States as early as the beginning of the twentieth century: 31.<a href=\"#fnref474\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn475\">\n<p>McQueeney, \u201cZulu,\u201d 2018: 149. <a href=\"#fnref475\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn476\">\n<p>McQueeney, \u201cZulu,\u201d 2018: 149.<a href=\"#fnref476\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn477\">\n<p>Felipe Smith, \u201cThings,\u201d 2013: 32. <a href=\"#fnref477\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn478\">\n<p>Felipe Smith, \u201cThings,\u201d 2013: 26.<a href=\"#fnref478\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn479\">\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/actionnetwork.org\/groups\/take-em-down-nola\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/actionnetwork.org\/groups\/take-em-down-nola<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024. On the preceding 2017 action \u201cto bury white supremacy,\u201d see Maxson, \u201cSecond Line,\u201d 2020.<a href=\"#fnref479\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn480\">\n<p>On Take \u2018Em Down NOLA<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>described by Reed as \u201ca group organized through the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>see <em>Antiracism,<\/em> 2018: 106; see also A. Reed, \u201cThe Myth of Authenticity,\u201d 2019: 321<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>322. The local campaign was preceded by an article in the <em>New York Times<\/em>, perceived on the ground as denunciatory, written by a white journalist who, through selective quotations, portrayed the founder of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, Francis Sylvester, as a supposed minstrel apologist. See \u201cA Black Group Says Mardi Gras Blackface Honors Tradition. Others Call it \u2018Disgusting,\u2019\u201d <em>New York Times<\/em>, February&#160;14, 2019, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/02\/14\/us\/zulu-parade-new-orleans.html\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/02\/14\/us\/zulu-parade-new-orleans.html<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024. <a href=\"#fnref480\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn481\">\n<p>See Jeff Thomas, <em>Unmasked: New Orleans Community Responds to Zulu\u2019s BlackFace Tradition.<\/em>\u201dBlack Source Media, March&#160;17, 2019, <a href=\"https:\/\/blacksourcemedia.com\/unmasked-new-orleans-community-responds-to-zulus-blackface-tradition\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/blacksourcemedia.com\/unmasked-new-orleans-community-responds-to-zulus-blackface-tradition\/<\/span><\/a>; accessed September&#160;12, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref481\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn482\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theadvocate.com\/pdf_b6d10476-2fe7-11e9-b806-dbef4afb21d9.html\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.theadvocate.com\/pdf_b6d10476-2fe7-11e9-b806-dbef4afb21d9.html<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref482\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn483\">\n<p>On the revolt of 1811, which took place during carnival, see Rasmussen, <em>American Uprising<\/em>, 2011; Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 33; Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 253. On the reenactment initiated by a New York artist who works under the name Dread Scott, see the dedicated website <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slave-revolt.com\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.slave-revolt.com\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;12, 2023.<a href=\"#fnref483\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn484\">\n<p>On Duke, see Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 273<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>277. See also the photographs of Duke in SA uniform carrying a sign (Gas the Chicago 7), taken by Michael P. Smith at Tulane University in New Orleans (The Historical New Orleans Collection, 2007.0103.1.1.367).<a href=\"#fnref484\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn485\">\n<p>On the history of the monument designed by Alexander Doyle, which around the turn of the century served as a gathering site for a lynch mob, see Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 162.<a href=\"#fnref485\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn486\">\n<p>For the Krewe of Choctaw see https:\/\/www.kreweofchoctaw.com\/.<a href=\"#fnref486\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn487\">\n<p>Lhamon, <em>Jump Jim Crow, <\/em>2003: 23.<a href=\"#fnref487\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn488\">\n<p>See Alexander, <em>New Jim Crow, <\/em>2012; Gilmore, <em>Abolition Geography, <\/em>2022. <a href=\"#fnref488\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn489\">\n<p>A. Reed, \u201cAntiracism,\u201d 2018: 106. See also Lott: \u201cpart of the tony disgust that grew up around minstrelsy was simply a revulsion against the popular\u201d; <em>Love and Theft,<\/em> 1993: 98. On the critique of \u201cpresentist views about minstrelsy, that have \u2026 polluted our understanding of the early period,\u201d see also Cockrell, <em>Demons,<\/em> 1997: xi. In South Africa, too, criticism was voiced against the roughly contemporaneous iconoclasm of the related Rhodes Must Fall movement; see Mbembe, \u201cClosing Remarks,\u201d 2018.<a href=\"#fnref489\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn490\">\n<p>On critiques of US exceptionalism in Afropessimist perspectives (e. g., Wilderson III, <em>Incognegro,<\/em> 2015; <em>Afropessimism, <\/em>2020), see Thomas, \u201cAfro-Blue Notes,\u201d 2018; for an earlier view, see also Gilroy, <em>Black Atlantic,<\/em> 1995; <em>Postcolonial Melancholia,<\/em>2005. On critiques of the mythicization of Africa, see also Hartman: \u201cit is absolutely necessary to demystify, displace, and weaken the concept of Africa in order to address the discontinuities of history and the complexity of cultural practice.\u201d <em>Scenes of Subjection,<\/em> 1997: 74.<a href=\"#fnref490\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn491\">\n<p>On second lining in New Orleans, see Michael P. Smith, <em>Mardi Gras Indians,<\/em> 1994; Regis, \u201cBlackness,\u201d 2001; \u201cSecond Lines,\u201d 1999. On critiques of royalized origin stories, see Hartman, <em>Lose Your Mother,<\/em> 2008: 46, 87.<a href=\"#fnref491\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn492\">\n<p>On the figure of Zwarte Piet, who traditionally accompanies the Dutch St. Nicholas on December&#160;6 in colonial costume and blackface, see Bal, \u201cZwarte Piet\u2019s Bal Masque,\u201d 1999: viii. On the narrative of the Zulus\u2019 sea voyage to New Orleans, see McQueeney, \u201cZulu,\u201d 2018: 146.<a href=\"#fnref492\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn493\">\n<p>On the globalization of touring productions at the time, see Balme and Leonhardt, \u201cIntroduction\u201d and the special issue \u201cTheatrical Trade Routes\u201d in the <em>Journal of Global Theater History<\/em>&#160;1, no.&#160;1, 2016.<a href=\"#fnref493\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn494\">\n<p>On critiques of regionalist exceptionalism, see Adams and Sakakeeny, <em>Remaking New Orleans,<\/em> 2019, especially the introduction: 1<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>32.<a href=\"#fnref494\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn495\">\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.krewedujieux.com\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.krewedujieux.com\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024. On the \u201czulu-&#173;esque cast of character,\u201d see L.&#160;J. Goldstein: \u201cWe take these Jewish stereotypes that are thrown at us and we embrace them and roll around in them \u2026. Like a pig in the mud!\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/the-krewes-and-the-jews\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/the-krewes-and-the-jews<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref495\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn496\">\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TxHR2uBnYro\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TxHR2uBnYro<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref496\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn497\">\n<p>See Breunlin et al., <em>House of Dance and Feathers, <\/em>2009<em>.<\/em> <a href=\"#fnref497\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn498\">\n<p>On the disastrous reconstruction policy, see Lipsitz, \u201cNew Orleans in the World,\u201d 2011. For criticism of the lack of structural critique in corresponding volunteer activities after Katrina, however, see Vincanne Adams, \u201cNeoliberal Futures,\u201d 2019. On post-Katrina Mardi Gras, see Wade et al., <em>Downtown Mardi Gras<\/em>, 2019. Since then, the second lines have also increasingly attracted heterogeneous crowds.<a href=\"#fnref498\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn499\">\n<p>As was already quoted, with reference to Comus, by the <em>Times Democrat<\/em> on February&#160;25, 1903.<a href=\"#fnref499\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn500\">\n<p>On Grimaldi, who shaped the whiteface clown and also performed as a female impersonator, see Gibbs, <em>Temple of Liberty<\/em>, 2014: 130. On the rural etymology of the clown, corresponding to the figure of <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Arlecchino<\/span>, see Linebaugh and Rediker, <em>Hydra<\/em>, 2000: 333.<a href=\"#fnref500\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn501\">\n<p>On the relationship between presence and absence see Menke\u2019s contributions to studies on stage entrances: <em>ON\/OFF<\/em>, 2014; \u201cim auftreten,\u201d 2016. On the <em>punctum<\/em> as it \u201cpricks\u201d the observer, see Barthes, <em>Camera Lucida<\/em>, 1981: 25-27; on its \u201cability to allow metonymies,\u201d see also Wolf, \u201cDas, was ich sehe,\u201d 2002: 99. For criticism of Barthes\u2019 particularistic image readings, however, see Moten, <em>In the Break<\/em>, 2003: 208<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>here referring to Barthes\u2019 comment on the photo of the dead Emmett Till after his murder by white supremacists; Barthes, \u201cThe Great Family of Man,\u201d 1972: 101.<a href=\"#fnref501\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn502\">\n<p>As was put in a transatlantic context by Dillon, <em>New World Drama, <\/em>2014: 18.<a href=\"#fnref502\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn503\">\n<p>On the \u201cIndian removals\u201d and sociocidal settlement policy, see Bowes, <em>Land Too Good<\/em>, 2016.<a href=\"#fnref503\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn504\">\n<p><em>Times Democrat<\/em>, February&#160;25, 1903: 7. <a href=\"#fnref504\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn505\">\n<p>See Deloria, <em>Playing Indian<\/em>, 2022: 28. On the specifics of German Indianism, see the chapter on \u201cWinnetou\u2019s Grandchildren,\u201d in Sieg, <em>Ethnic Drag, <\/em>2009: 115<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>150; on its ambivalence, Balzer, <em>Ethik der Appropriation<\/em>, 2022; with reference to the Austrian <em>Tresterer<\/em>, Kleindorfer-Marx, \u201cJetzt kommen gar Indianer,\u201d 2018. Linebaugh and Rediker, by contrast, point to a different form of \u201cgoing native\u201d in the Americas in the seventeenth century: \u201cIn search of food and a way of life that many apparently found congenial, a steady stream of English settlers opted to become \u2018white Indians,\u2019 \u2018red Englishmen,\u2019 or<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>since racial categories were as yet unformed<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Anglo-Powhatans.\u201d <em>Hydra<\/em>, 2000: 34.<a href=\"#fnref505\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn506\">\n<p>Deloria, <em>Playing Indian<\/em>, 2022: 25. The translocal potential for resistance is also emphasized by Wynter, with reference to the colonized \u201cco-identifying themselves, transethnically, as, self-definingly, Indians.\u201d Wynter, \u201c1492,\u201d 1995: 41.<a href=\"#fnref506\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn507\">\n<p>Deloria, <em>Playing Indian,<\/em> 2022: 24.<a href=\"#fnref507\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn508\">\n<p>See Deloria, <em>Playing Indian,<\/em> 2022: 180. <a href=\"#fnref508\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn509\">\n<p>For my discussion of Benjamin and Kafka, see the second chapter.<a href=\"#fnref509\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn510\">\n<p>On Black Indians, see Breunlin, <em>Fire in the Hole<\/em>, 2018; Breunlin et al., <em>House of Dance and Feathers<\/em>, 2009; Dewulf, <em>From the Kingdom<\/em>, 2017; Godet, \u201cPlaying with Race,\u201d 2016: 264<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>269, \u201cLa recherche,\u201d 2022; Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019; Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Jacques Chirac, <em>Black Indians<\/em>, 2022, with the research overview especially in Godet, \u201cLa recherche,\u201d 2022; Vaz-Deville, \u201cLes Black Masking Indians,\u201d 2022; Smith, <em>Mardi Gras Indians<\/em>, 1994.<a href=\"#fnref510\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn511\">\n<p>See Vaz-Deville, \u201cLes Black Masking Indians,\u201d 2022. <em>Playing Indian<\/em> was part of the local Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, as historical sources show. In the 1830s, Indians appeared in the street carnival alongside <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Harlekin<\/span> and Turk figures, according to Lief in Lief and McCusker, referring to historical sources. <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019, 84.<a href=\"#fnref511\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn512\">\n<p>Dillon, <em>New World Drama<\/em>, 2014: 214; see also: 204<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>205.<a href=\"#fnref512\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn513\">\n<p><em>Daily Picayune, <\/em>February&#160;27, 1895; quoted in Lief and McCusker, Jockomo, 2019: 75.<a href=\"#fnref513\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn514\">\n<p>Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 75<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>76.<a href=\"#fnref514\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn515\">\n<p>Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 97<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>99.<a href=\"#fnref515\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn516\">\n<p>Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 104.<a href=\"#fnref516\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn517\">\n<p>On the expanded understanding of abolition that came with these efforts, see &#173;Gilmore, <em>Abolition Geography<\/em>, 2022. On the survival of slavery in segregation see also Hartman: \u201cThe plantation was not abolished, but transformed \u2026 extending the color line that defined urban space, reproducing the disavowed apartheid of everyday life.\u201d \u201cAnarchy,\u201d 2018: 476.<a href=\"#fnref517\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn518\">\n<p>On politics of retreat as a legacy of <em>marronage<\/em>, see Harney and Moten, <em>Undercommons<\/em>, 2016. A ban on feathers is documented as early as 1781, likely targeting precursors of these practices; see Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 30.<a href=\"#fnref518\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn519\">\n<p>Quoted in Shane and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 10; for the history of <em>Indian Red<\/em>, whose composition in the early twentieth century is attributed to the Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, Eugene Honore, see also Appendix II: 134<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>136. On <em>Indian Red<\/em>, see the early study by Lipsitz, \u201cMardi Gras Indians,\u201d 1988: 108. Dewulf traces <em>Indian Red<\/em> from the Spanish to a battle song of Black brotherhoods, \u201cFrom Moors to Indians,\u201d 2015: 38<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>39.<a href=\"#fnref519\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn520\">\n<p><em>Maroons<\/em> derives from the Spanish <em>cimarr\u00f3n<\/em>, meaning wild or unruly, and refers to those who escaped colonial rule by forming creolized fugitive communities; on the interdependence of creolization and <em>marronage<\/em> see Martin, <em>Jazz<\/em>, 2008: 111; on the resignification of the term, which was originally colonial and racist, see D\u00e4rmann, <em>Undienlichkeit<\/em>, 2020: 27. Michael P. Smith reads the Indians as \u201ccontemporary urban maroons\u201d; <em>Mardi Gras Indians<\/em>, 1994: 13. \u201cMadi cu defio\u201d apparently creolizes \u201cM\u2019all\u00e9 couri dans deser\u201d and could be translated as \u201cI am going into the wilderness\u201d; see Cable, \u201cCreole Slave Songs,\u201d 1886: 820; see also Kein, <em>Creole<\/em>, 2000: 124. <em>Indian Red<\/em>, interpret in this light, is about retreating into the landscape.<a href=\"#fnref520\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn521\">\n<p>On the depiction of Trem\u00e9, carnival, and urban politics, see also David Simon and Eric Overmyer\u2019s HBO series <em>Trem\u00e9 <\/em>(2010<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>2013), as well Godet\u2019s analysis in \u201c&#173;Multiple &#173;Representations,\u201d 2017. On the gentrification of Trem\u00e9 and the impact of Interstate&#160;10 on the epicenter of Back Street Mardi Gras around Claiborne Avenue, see Vaz-&#173;Deville\u2019s introduction to <em>Walking Raddy<\/em>, 2018, xiv; \u201cIconic,\u201d 2018: 149. <a href=\"#fnref521\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn522\">\n<p>On the \u201cecho-space\u201d below the I-10 bridge, see Carrico, \u201cMiss Antoinette K-Doe,\u201d 2018: 209. <a href=\"#fnref522\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn523\">\n<p>See Kleindorfer-Marx, \u201cJetzt kommen gar Indianer,\u201d 2018. <a href=\"#fnref523\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn524\">\n<p>For material on the Buffalo Soldiers, see Smith, <em>Mardi Gras Indians<\/em>, 1994: 95. The Michael P. Smith Collection is held in the Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC). The Buffalo Bill Show is discussed in Gill, <em>Lords of Misrule<\/em>, 1997: 140; Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 69<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>72; and Lipsitz, \u201cMardi Gras Indians,\u201d 1988: 104. <a href=\"#fnref524\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn525\">\n<p>On Fi Yi Yi, see Breunlin, <em>Fire in the Hole<\/em>, 2018; Bourget, \u201cVictor Harris,\u201d 2022. On the correspondence with Yoruba traditions, see Joubert, <em>Igba ay\u00e9<\/em>, 2022. For criticism of antimodern Afrocentric commodifications of identity in the context of New Orleans and the related fetishizing of supposed authenticity, see also the introduction by Adams and Sakakeeny: \u201cAll that makes New Orleans worthy of value and preservation is in its oppositionality to national values of progress and modernism. This antimodernism can become uneasily equated with racial primitivism, as when the performance traditions of Black New Orleanians are portrayed solely as vestiges from an African past rather than complex and cosmopolitan cultural formations \u2026 An oddly <em>Volksgemeinschaft <\/em>island of twenty-first-century social analysis, New Orleans continues to generate research that fetishizes collective meanings and the bonds of sociability as truly organic.\u201d <em>Remaking New Orleans, <\/em>2019: 5.<a href=\"#fnref525\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn526\">\n<p>\u201cIn this encounter Africa was a transformative force, almost mythico-poetic<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a force that referred constantly to a \u2018time before\u2019 (that of subjection),\u201d as Mbembe suggests with regard to US discourse, <em>Critique<\/em>, 2017, 26.<a href=\"#fnref526\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn527\">\n<p>For critique, see T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, <em>Against Decolonization, <\/em>2022.<a href=\"#fnref527\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn528\">\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.backstreetmuseum.org\/sylvester\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.backstreetmuseum.org\/sylvester<\/span><\/a>; <a href=\"http:\/\/houseofdanceandfeathers.org\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">http:\/\/houseofdanceandfeathers.org\/<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref528\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn529\">\n<p>See, for example, the handling of beaded patches from a Black Indian suit by Demond Melancon<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span> displayed at the wall as an autonomous art piece<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in the opening exhibition of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin under the direction of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung; see Casimir et al., <em>O Quilombismo<\/em>, 2023: 98<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>99.<a href=\"#fnref529\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn530\">\n<p>Godet, \u201cMultiple Representations,\u201d 2017: 230<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>231.<a href=\"#fnref530\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn531\">\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quaibranly.fr\/en\/exhibitions-and-events\/at-the-museum\/exhibitions\/event-details\/e\/black-indians-from-new-orleans-39606\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.quaibranly.fr\/en\/exhibitions-and-events\/at-the-museum\/exhibi&#173;ti&#173;ons\/event-details\/e\/black-indians-from-new-orleans-39606<\/span><\/a>, accessed Septem&#173;ber 24, 2024. <a href=\"#fnref531\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn532\">\n<p>For Mardi Gras and French colonial history, see Godet, <em>From Anger to Joy<\/em>, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref532\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn533\">\n<p>See the framing of the Paris exhibition with large-scale contemporary works on the Ku Klux Klan by Vincent Valdez, Michael Ray Charles, and Philip Guston; <em>Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span><em>Jacques Chirac, Black Indians<\/em>, 2022: 62<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>67, 78<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>83, 94<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>97.<a href=\"#fnref533\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn534\">\n<p>On the connection between recognition and gentrification of the Indians prior to the Paris exhibition, see Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 120.<a href=\"#fnref534\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn535\">\n<p>On the \u201cDowntown Style,\u201d which differs from the figurative elements of the uptown suits, see Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 17.<a href=\"#fnref535\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn536\">\n<p>Thanks to Big Chief Darryl Montana, who in 2019 brought me to the Le Pavillon Hotel to show me the stuccowork of his father and its correspondence with the design of the Indian suits. On his sewing and masking, see Sascha Just\u2019s documentary <em>Big Chief, <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/saschajust.com\/featured_item\/big-chief\/\"><em>https:\/\/saschajust.com\/featured_item\/big-chief\/<\/em><\/a><em>, <\/em>accessed February 18, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref536\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn537\">\n<p>See Dewulf, <em>From the Kingdom<\/em>, 2017; see also \u201cFrom Moors to Indians,\u201d 2015; \u201cFrom the Calendas,\u201d 2018; \u201cBlack Brotherhoods,\u201d 2015. On centuries-old trade relations between the African and European continents predating the Middle Passage, and related criticism of the \u201cmyth of first contact,\u201d see also McClintock, <em>Imperial Leather<\/em>, 1995: 227.<a href=\"#fnref537\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn538\">\n<p>See Dewulf, <em>From the Kingdom<\/em>, 2017: 91<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>93; Harrasser, \u201cBorrowed Plumes,\u201d 2025.<a href=\"#fnref538\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn539\">\n<p>On <em>sangamentos<\/em> and mock war dances, see Dewulf, <em>From the Kingdom<\/em>, 2017: 37<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>40, 189<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>198.<a href=\"#fnref539\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn540\">\n<p>For a description of a Black carnival king accompanied by \u201cIndians\u201d from 1823, see also Lief and McCusker, <em>Jockomo<\/em>, 2019: 82.<a href=\"#fnref540\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn541\">\n<p>Dewulf, \u201cBlack Brotherhoods,\u201d 2015: 31.<a href=\"#fnref541\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn542\">\n<p>On the relationship between ascribed kinlessness and enslavement, see Hartman, <em>Lose Your Mother<\/em>, 2008: 5, 86<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>88.<a href=\"#fnref542\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn543\">\n<p>Scott: \u201cRe-enchantment,\u201d 2000: 148; see also Edwards, \u201cWynter\u2019s Early Essays,\u201d 2001. On global history and the differentiation of various forms of enslavement, see Zeuske, <em>Handbuch Geschichte der Sklaverei<\/em>, 2013; on the adoption of African elements of superexploitation in the early Iberian-African Atlantic: 690, 848.<a href=\"#fnref543\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn544\">\n<p>Wynter, \u201c1492,\u201d 1995: 39-40. <a href=\"#fnref544\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn545\">\n<p>On decentering remembrance, with a focus on the entanglements of colonial history and antisemitism, see Rothberg, <em>Multidirectional Memory<\/em>, 2009. On the reflexive role of minor figures (\u201cNebenfiguren\u201d), see Menke, \u201chidden,\u201d 2024.<a href=\"#fnref545\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn546\">\n<p>See Hartman\u2019s concept of \u201cchorines\u201d as minor figures, which she develops from the chorus line, that is, from the enclosed stage space (\u201cto dance within an &#173;enclosure\u201d: 347); she defines choric performance forms as nonheroic figurations of mutual aid and collective action, as a performative promise of a different, nonhegemonic &#173;sociality, <em>Wayward Lives<\/em>, 2020: 345<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>349. <a href=\"#fnref546\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn547\">\n<p>Vaz-Deville, <em>Walking Raddy, <\/em>2018: 1.<a href=\"#fnref547\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn548\">\n<p>Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 6.<a href=\"#fnref548\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn549\">\n<p>See Brock, \u201cBaby Doll Addendum,\u201d 2018; Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 51. <a href=\"#fnref549\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn550\">\n<p>See Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 46<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>48; Bratcher, \u201cOperationalizing,\u201d 2018; Brock, \u201cAddendum,\u201d 2018. <a href=\"#fnref550\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn551\">\n<p>On the term<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>albeit in reference to complicit behavior under National Socialism<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>see Barnett, <em>Bystanders<\/em>, 1999.<a href=\"#fnref551\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn552\">\n<p>See Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 14. <a href=\"#fnref552\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn553\">\n<p>On the history of Storyville, built in 1897 as prostitution and gambling aimed at mass tourism were legalized, which was a segregated district and presumably \u201cthe toughest environment Black women had encountered since enslavement,\u201d see also Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 18, 66; Rose, <em>Storyville<\/em>, 1978. On the differing commodity character of <em>bare<\/em> labor in the context of plantation and prostitution, see Hartman, <em>Wayward Lives<\/em>, 2020: 25; on the persistence of violence in social relations, see Roach: \u201cThe question is not if slavery still exists but whether people treat each other as if it did.\u201d <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 231.<a href=\"#fnref553\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn554\">\n<p>See Atkins on Naked Dances in the brothels and the transposition of dancing into cultural techniques of survival: \u201cThrough dancing, the Baby Dolls (and groups like them) demarcated the space they inhabited and used their bodies to generate a sense of collective survival.\u201d \u201cFrom the Bamboula,\u201d 2018: 101<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>102, 104. Their sexualized forms of appearing in public allegorize resistance to what Zeuske refers to as the production of \u201cnaked capital.\u201d <em>Handbuch Geschichte der Sklaverei<\/em>, 2013: 613.<a href=\"#fnref554\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn555\">\n<p>Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 8; see also <em>Walking Raddy<\/em>, 2018; on the precarious history of transmission, see the recently published \u201cLes Baby Dolls,\u201d 2022. The Baby Dolls examined here are<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>contrary to what some stylized choreographies found online might suggest<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>first and foremost unruly figures. In 2013, the Louisiana State Museum in the Presbyt\u00e8re dedicated an exhibition to them for the first time: <em>They Call Me Baby Doll: A Mardi Gras Tradition<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/louisianastatemuseum.org\/museum\/presbytere\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/louisianastatemuseum.org\/museum\/presbytere<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024. See Atkins on the Baby Dolls\u2019 repertoire, \u201cFrom the Bamboula,\u201d 2018. At the Backstreet Cultural Museum, Sylvester Francis presented their outfits alongside the suits of the Indians and references to the tradition of jazz funerals and the Northside Skull and Bone Gang around Big Chief Bruce Sunpie Barnes (<em>Les squelettes sont en marche<\/em>, 2022)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a gang that, on Mardi Gras Day at dawn, goes door to door through Trem\u00e9, opening the carnival of the back streets, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.backstreetmuseum.org\/general-2\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.back<\/span><span class=\"Hyperlink\">streetmuseum.org\/general-2<\/span><\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=N-INwiutEG0\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=N-INwiutEG0<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024. <a href=\"#fnref555\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn556\">\n<p>Quoted from the opening of Hartman, <em>Wayward Lives<\/em>, 2020: xiii. <a href=\"#fnref556\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn557\">\n<p>On the afterlife of sexualized auction spectacles in the context of prostitution, see Roach, <em>Cities<\/em>, 1996: 224<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>233. On the relationship between port city and plantation, which produces both these forms of sexualized violence and forms of resistance, see Linebaugh and Rediker, <em>Hydra<\/em>, 2000: 46.<a href=\"#fnref557\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn558\">\n<p>On the critique of \u201cbeing governed in such a manner,\u201d see Foucault, \u201cWhat is &#173;Critique?,\u201d 1996, 392; see also Butler, \u201cWhat is Critique?,\u201d 2002.<a href=\"#fnref558\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn559\">\n<p>Hartman, <em>Wayward Lives, <\/em>2020: 227<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>228.<a href=\"#fnref559\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn560\">\n<p>Hartman, <em>Wayward Lives, <\/em>2020: 234.<a href=\"#fnref560\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn561\">\n<p>Hartman, <em>Wayward Lives, <\/em>2020: 4.<a href=\"#fnref561\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn562\">\n<p>Hartman, <em>Wayward Lives, <\/em>2020: xiii. <a href=\"#fnref562\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn563\">\n<p>Dillon refers to the historical racialization of slavery: \u201cmaking a body black \u2026 meant turning it into property\u201d; <em>New World Drama<\/em>, 2014: 139. Nyong\u2019o, in a different context, speaks of the transformation of hypervisibility \u201cinto a dignified shamelessness\u201d and contrasts corresponding forms of public performance with the pain porn of feminized depictions of victims; <em>Amalgamation Waltz<\/em>, 2009: 101.<a href=\"#fnref563\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn564\">\n<p>Mbembe, <em>Critique of Black Reason<\/em>, 2017: 15. <a href=\"#fnref564\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn565\">\n<p>On the concept of \u201cbare labor<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>labor stripped of the resources of social life and the capacity for social reproduction,\u201d see Dillon, <em>New World Drama<\/em>, 2014: 35, also 132. On gender-specific forms of bare labor, see Federici, <em>Caliban<\/em>, 2004.<a href=\"#fnref565\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn566\">\n<p>On the historical background of the Baby Dolls, see Johnson, \u201cFighting for Freedom,\u201d 2018.<a href=\"#fnref566\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn567\">\n<p>See Atkins, \u201cFrom the Bamboola,\u201d 2018: 90; Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 26; Vaz-Deville, <em>Walking Raddy, <\/em>2018: 2.<a href=\"#fnref567\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn568\">\n<p>Wynter, \u201c1492,\u201d 1995: 33. On the critique of genealogical ideologies of domination and their divisive function, see also Wynter in Scott, \u201cRe-enchantment,\u201d 2000: 148. On the \u201ckinlessness\u201d of the enslaved, see Mbembe, <em>Critique of Black Reason<\/em>, 2017: 33<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>34. On the critique of genealogical thinking, see also Erasmus, <em>Race Otherwise<\/em>, 2017: 125<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>132.<a href=\"#fnref568\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn569\">\n<p>With reference to the complementary, parallel universe of Hollywood white female child stars such as Shirley Temple and their clean baby-sex aesthetic, see Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 24; \u201cUnruly Woman Masker,\u201d 2018: 132. See also Merish, \u201cCuteness and Commodity Aesthetics,\u201d 1996; in a current context, see also the DFG research project by Kai van Eikels <em>Performance und die Macht des Schw\u00e4cheren: Unp\u00fcnktlichkeit, Ersetzbarkeit, Niedlichkeit<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/gepris.dfg.de\/gepris\/projekt\/517032562\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/gepris.dfg.de\/gepris\/projekt\/517032562<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024. <a href=\"#fnref569\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn570\">\n<p>\u201cMarching clubs, both white and Negro, hold small independent parades of their own starting early Mardi Gras morning. Costumes of marchers range from Jack and the Beanstalk to bonnetted Baby Dolls.\u201d This is the caption to a Baby Doll image by Bradley Smith in Basso Hamilton\u2019s \u201cBoom Town, Dream Town: New Orleans Retains its Old-World Charm, but Its Biggest Effort Today Is to Become a No. 1 Seaport,\u201d in &#173;<em>Holiday: The American Travel Magazine<\/em>&#160;3, no.&#160;2, 1948: 26<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>41 and 124<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>126, on 34.<a href=\"#fnref570\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn571\">\n<p>On the deterritorialization of the street in the context of control societal developments and the new relevance of private logistics companies under conditions of globalized capitalism, see Sebastian Kirsch\u2019s current FWF research project <em>Stra\u00dfenszenen\/Street Scenes<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fwf.ac.at\/forschungsradar\/10.55776\/J4833\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.fwf.ac.at\/forschungsradar\/10.55776\/J4833<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024; see also his book <em>Chor-Denken<\/em>, 2020: 507.<a href=\"#fnref571\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn572\">\n<p>See, for example, Baby Doll Cinnamon Brazil Black (centered in Figure 59)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>dancing in a costume mixing Indian and Baby Doll suits under the bridge: <span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2xadO5ipX4w<\/span>, accessed September&#160;24, 2024.<a href=\"#fnref572\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn573\">\n<p>See Florence, \u201cThe World That Antoinette K-Doe Made,\u201d 2018; Carrico, \u201cMiss Antoinette K-Doe,\u201d 2018.<a href=\"#fnref573\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn574\">\n<p>See Illouz and Kaplan, <em>What Is Sexual Capital?<\/em>, 2022: 64<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>103. <a href=\"#fnref574\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn575\">\n<p>See Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 7; \u201cIconic,\u201d 2018: 147. See also Atkins, \u201cFrom the Bamboula,\u201d 2018: 90; Honora, \u201cDancing Women,\u201d 2018: 195<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>196. Pacey assumes that the official incorporation of the so-called moffies into the Cape Town carnival corresponds with and predates developments in the New Orleans Mardi Gras; \u201cEmergence,\u201d 2014: 119<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>120.<a href=\"#fnref575\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn576\">\n<p>On \u201cmale Baby Dolls,\u201d see Vaz Deville, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 86<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>91. See also Godet, \u201cGender Bending,\u201d 2025. On the history of Black queerness and the heteronormativity of respectability politics in the context of the Civil Rights movement, see Russel, \u201cThe Color of Discipline,\u201d 2008. On the \u201cbourgeois, neo-Victorian ideals of the African American middle class\u201d and the \u201canti-erotic prudery of racial uplift\u201d as opposed to the \u201cnaked mask,\u201d see also Chude-Sokei, <em>The Last \u201cDarky<\/em>,<em>\u201d<\/em> 2006: 202<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>203.<a href=\"#fnref576\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn577\">\n<p>See Adams and Sakakeeny, <em>Remaking New Orleans,<\/em> 2019.<a href=\"#fnref577\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn578\">\n<p>See Dewulf, <em>From the Kingdom, <\/em>2017; on the diablitos, see <em>From the Calendas<\/em>, 2018: 17; on the kinship of diabladas, morenos and Indians, see<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in the context of the Bolivian carnival<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>also Lecount Samak\u00e9, \u201cDancing for the Virgin and the Devil,\u201d 2004.<a href=\"#fnref578\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn579\">\n<p>On Marika Antifascista, queer carnival, and the connection to the feminist strike movement in Latin America, see Cabello and Diaz, \u201cDie Stra\u00dfe wird queer,\u201d 2023, <a href=\"https:\/\/tdz.de\/artikel\/593b6dfb-a0eb-48a5-a772-5ba3d88a4f2c\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/tdz.de\/artikel\/593b6dfb-a0eb-48a5-a772-5ba3d88a4f2c<\/span><\/a>, accessed September&#160;11, 2024. These open collectives are referred to as <em>cuerpo-territorio<\/em>; see Gago, <em>Feminist International<\/em>, 2020 (Chapter 3, \u201cBody Territory\u201d: 60<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>77). Building on Echeverri (<em>Territory<\/em>, 2005), see also Govrin, <em>Politische K\u00f6rper<\/em>, 2022: 173<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>221, on 216. On transversal practices of care, see Lorey, <em>Demokratie<\/em>, 2021: 161<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>198; <em>Democracy, <\/em>2022.<a href=\"#fnref579\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn580\">\n<p>On the connection between Baby Dolls and activist protest in the Caribbean, see Marshall, \u201cDiasporic Baby Dolls,\u201d 2021: 10<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>12. <a href=\"#fnref580\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn581\">\n<p>See M\u00fcnz, <em>Das \u201candere\u201d Theater, <\/em>1979: 102. <a href=\"#fnref581\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn582\">\n<p>See Hutter, \u201cSalzburger,\u201d 2002: 12.<a href=\"#fnref582\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn583\">\n<p>In reference to the <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jim Crow <\/span>persona, see Lhamon, <em>Jump Jim Crow, <\/em>2003: 23.<a href=\"#fnref583\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn584\">\n<p>Benjamin, <em>The Arcades Project<\/em>, 1999, 460, N1a, 8 (in German, <em>Lumpen<\/em>:<em> Das Passagen-Werk, <\/em>V.1, 1991: 572; N 1a, 8).<a href=\"#fnref584\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn585\">\n<p>See Vaz, <em>Baby Dolls<\/em>, 2013: 96.<a href=\"#fnref585\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn586\">\n<p>Dillon, <em>New World Drama, <\/em>2014: 189.<a href=\"#fnref586\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn587\">\n<p>See Marshall, \u201cDiasporic Baby Dolls,\u201d 2021: 3; McIntyre, \u201cBaby Doll,\u201d 2021: 3, 12; Franco, \u201cWomen Maskers,\u201d 2018. For the Black Indians, similar correspondences can be identified in relation to the <span class=\"Kapitaelchen_Englisch\">Jonkonnu<\/span> festivals in the Bahamas; see Sands, \u201cCarnival Celebrations,\u201d 1991. On the Trinidad carnival, see also Hill, <em>Trinidad Carnival<\/em>, 1972.<a href=\"#fnref587\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn588\">\n<p>See Marshall, \u201cDiasporic Baby Dolls,\u201d 2021: 5. See also Michael P. Smith\u2019s photo from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 1986, which still depicts a Baby Doll with a doll; <em>Mardi Gras Indians<\/em>, 1994: 74.<a href=\"#fnref588\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn589\">\n<p>See Linebaugh and Rediker, <em>Hydra, <\/em>2000.<a href=\"#fnref589\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn590\">\n<p>Freeman, <em>Time Binds, <\/em>2010: xiii; on allegorical temporality: 69<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>71.<a href=\"#fnref590\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn591\">\n<p>Gilmore, <em>Golden Gulag, <\/em>2007: 248.<a href=\"#fnref591\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; In the back streets of New Orleans, the contemporary displays of power and authority \u201cin drag\u201d\u2014which variously referenced Perchten, court spectacles, and minstrel blackface\u2014were, by the early twentieth century at the latest, undermined by appearances in public marked by shifting conflicts. Hardly photographed in the decades that followed, but visually ubiquitous today, this Mardi &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-7664","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>Second Lining &#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\/mdwp008-008\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Second Lining &#8211; mdwPress\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp; In the back streets of New Orleans, the contemporary displays of power and authority \u201cin drag\u201d\u2014which variously referenced Perchten, court spectacles, and minstrel blackface\u2014were, by the early twentieth century at the latest, undermined by appearances in public marked by shifting conflicts. 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