Full Description
On many Sundays, Black New Orleanians dance through city streets in Second Lines. These processions invite would-be spectators to join in, grooving to an ambulatory brass band for several hours. Though an increasingly popular attraction for tourists, parading provides the second liners themselves with a potent public expression of Black resistance.
Rachel Carrico examines the parading bodies in motion as a form of negotiating and understanding power. Seeing pleasure as a bodily experience, Carrico reveals how second liners' moves link joy and liberation, self and communal identities, play and dissent, and reclamations of place. As she shows, dancers' choices allow them to access the pleasure of reclaiming self and city through motion and rhythm while expanding a sense of the possible in the present and for the future.
In-depth and empathetic, Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line blends analysis with a chorus of Black voices to reveal an indelible facet of Black culture in the Crescent City.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Author's Note: Web Companion
Chapter 1 Coming Out the Door
Interlude A Barbara Lacen Keller
Chapter 2 Community
Interlude B Rodrick "Scubble" Davis
Chapter 3 Spirit
Interlude C Gerald Platenburg
Chapter 4 Freedom
Interlude D Terrylyn Dorsey
Chapter 5 Do Watcha Wanna
Interlude E Nicole Lazard
Chapter 6 Home
Interlude F Joe Stern
Epilogue: Social Aid and Pleasure in a Pandemic
Notes
Bibliography
Index
