New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians: mediating racial politics from the backstreets to Main Street - Document (original) (raw)

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In November 2008, the Mardi Gras Indian Victor Harris, from The Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors, was invited to display some of his handmade costumes, referred to locally as "suits," in New Orleans' first biennial art exhibition, Prospect.1 (Fig. 1). Harris is among the numerous African American men and women who, on Mardi Gras, St. Joseph's Day, and other occasions, perform wearing beaded and feathered suits, accompanied by friends, neighbors, and family who constitute the so-called second line. The catalog accompanying the Prospect.1 exhibition characterizes Harris's suits as displaying "a highly personal style with an African inflection" (Tancons 2009:59). Indeed, Harris's suits, unlike those of other Mardi Gras Indians who more explicitly reference Native American culture, also incorporate materials associated with African art, such as raffia, kente cloth, and cowrie shells, and include face masks and African-inspired shields.

For all its well-intentioned efforts to focus attention on a neglected art form, Prospect.1, like other catalogs and exhibitions of its kind, failed to historicize Black Indian aesthetics. For example, there is no discussion of how the suits made by Victor Harris differed from those worn earlier by New Orleans' Black Indians. In the nineteenth century, Mardi Gras Indians, restricted to New Orleans' working-class African American neighborhoods and never featured in museums, made less ornate suits, using discarded beads, turkey feathers, and fish scales as their primary artistic media (Fig. 2). As racial politics changed and Mardi Gras Indians gradually migrated into the wider public realm, their suits became increasingly elaborate. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, they began to be featured in documentary films and to perform at New Orleans' numerous music festivals. By the 1990s, Indians were consciously trying to outdo each other's creative skills as images of Indians appeared in glossy photography books and on postcards (see Breunlin this issue, Breunlin and Lewis 2009). In recent years, some Indians, such as Victor Harris, have displayed their highly personalized handcrafted suits internationally and are striving to make a name for themselves as contemporary artists.

The goal of this essay is to examine the how Mardi Gras Indian suits and performances have allowed African Americans to navigate the racial politics of New Orleans and eventually move from the backstreets, which I define as New Orleans' working-class African American neighborhoods, to Main Street. (1) I approach Black Indian suits as performative objects of cultural mediation that, as Margaret Drewal argues, constitute discursive practices whose aesthetic forms are constantly changing in response to the politics of the moment (Drewal 1991:17). In particular, I draw upon the research done by Monica L. Miller, whose Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity considers how men of African descent in the diaspora use clothing and dress to define their masculine identity in different political and cultural contexts as they negotiate constructions of race, sexuality, and class (Miller 2009:3-5).

The act of dressing up and "stylin' out," according to Miller, "attempts to escape stereotypes, fixity, essentialization--signify...

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Gale Document Number: GALE|A338037185