Fluent Essays

Do not plagiarize Paper should be well written and organizedThis is for a music classDeliver work on time In a one-page paraphrase, you should be able to communicate the substance of a scholarly article or book chapter concisely, elegantly, and comprehensively. You should not think of the paraphrase as a general summary of a reading without any substantial information.First, read my “Some Remarks on Reading Scholarly Articles.” (Links to an external site.) Then read Eric Porter, Jazz and Revival, American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 593–613 (Links to an external site.). (This would be the format for the first footnote—see guidelines below.) After completing the reading, write a one-page paraphrase of it. Observe the following guidelines.Compose your paper in Times New Roman, 12-point font, single spaced, without any space between paragraphs (open the Paragraph setting in Word and make sure that it is set to single space without any extra space between paragraphs. I will show you how to do this if you are unable to do it on your own.) Put your name in a header, not in the main text.The first sentence should be a thesis statement (either Porter’s or your own) that communicates the principal claim of the article. This should be followed by a footnote giving the bibliographic information for the article. (The bibliographic information should follow exactly that given above.)Then for the rest, go page by page and write one or two sentences distilling the most important content. These sentences should not generalize the content, but communicate specific detail concisely. Periodically include in parentheses the page numbers or page number ranges for the information you distill. Make sure that the sentences connect logically to the others so that the draft has an overall cohesiveness. It should not read like a random assemblage of information.Include descriptions of important evidence (sometimes mentioned only in the notes).Aim for a total length of around 650 words.This activity is aimed to help you grapple with the very different kind of writing encountered in scholarly articles. You can meet with me to discuss preliminary drafts if desired. porter__jazz_and_revival.pdf some_remarks_on_reading_scholarly_articles.pdf one_page_paraphrase___music_class.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview Jazz and Revival Eric Porter American Quarterly, Volume 61, Number 3, September 2009, pp. 593-613 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aq/summary/v061/61.3.porter.html Access Provided by University of California @ Santa Cruz at 12/16/10 10:05PM GMT Jazz and Revival | Jazz and Revival Eric Porter M y first visit to New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita coincided with the 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. At Jazz Fest and elsewhere in the city that week, I witnessed familiar, though locally inflected, patterns of consuming jazz (and other forms of African-American music). There were differently integrated audiences across the city and evidence of nonblack people’s (and some black people’s) deep respect and collective desire for certain aspects of blackness and their simultaneous anxieties about a threatening black (and particularly poor black) presence. Acts of identification and disidentification via black music have long histories, which can be traced back to the antebellum period in the United States.1 Yet, such acts in the present must also be understood as participating in a local, national, and, indeed, global cultural economy that is intimately connected to neoliberal restructuring. In other words, when thinking about the future of New Orleans at Jazz Fest, it was difficult not to suspect that within the modes (institutional, financial, discursive, affective) through which this music was cherished lay both hope for the future and the seeds of reproducing older formations of racism and some of its recent manifestations. Responding to the political urgency and critical space generated by the August and September 2005 storms, this essay offers some preliminary thoughts on the politics of “jazz and revival.” Although this story is still unfolding, I wish to ponder here the notion that “the culture” can enable the reconstruction of New Orleans. I address some of the thorny issues that have emerged when jazz, in particular, has been invoked or deployed to rebuild New Orleans, given the competing claims on the city and its musical cultures, the fault lines of race and class in play before and after the storm, the long-standing ways that local musical cultures have reflected both social possibilities and social exclusions, and the complexities that emerge when the complicated cultural practices of the past and present collide in the context of disaster. Wandering through the tents and arenas of Jazz Fest that spring, one could easily get swept up in the grand sense of multiracial communion promoted by the festival organizers. Also compelling was the idea, expressed by musicians ©2009 The American Studies Association 593 594 | American Quarterly and audience members alike, that a shared love for the music and the city could somehow bring them both back. The stated theme of the festival was “homecoming.” There were simply sublime moments offered by local luminaries: Irma Thomas joining Paul Simon to sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Anita Wright singing “I Will Survive,” and the impromptu Sunday afternoon jam session in the jazz tent, which culminated with “What Does It Mean to Miss New Orleans,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and many words of appreciation for local musicians and ordinary folk who returned to New Orleans for Jazz Fest and for the visitors who traveled to the city to support them. Such homecoming rituals were played out across town, as displaced New Orleanians returned home to celebrate their city. I witnessed this, for example, at a brass band show at Donna’s Bar and Grill and at an art opening and impromptu jam session at a friend’s home. Such performances affirmed, in the words of Matt Sakakeeny, that “place has anchored culture and culture has anchored place in New Orleans, creating a dialogic relationship whereby culture is constituted in place and constitutive of place.”2 Culture was also being deployed as a more specifically economic resource at Jazz Fest. It was clear that the good feelings of homecoming and multiracial communion were intertwined with the desire to generate capital, as when one performer thanked people for their “moral support” and for their “financial support.” Many local musicians were displaced by Katrina and had difficulty finding work in the storm’s aftermath. For some, Jazz Fest represented a paycheck, either through the few gigs available to them on the festival grounds or in the clubs filled with tourists during Jazz Fest season. Perhaps more important, Jazz Fest represented the possibility of more paychecks if the crowds and enthusiasm accurately signified the local music industry’s revival. More than one musician on stage, and cultural worker I spoke to off-stage, talked about the fundamental importance of the music and tourist-friendly festivals to the city’s collective spiritual resolve and to its tax base. These invocations of culture as a tool for reconstructing New Orleans speak to George Yudice’s account of the complex ways that “culture as resource” serves and constitutes residual and emergent forms of power and knowledge in the neoliberal era. As a resource, culture “is the lynchpin of a new epistemic framework in which ideology and much of what Foucault called disciplinary society . . . are absorbed into an economic or ecological rationality, such that management, conservation, access, distribution, and investment—in ‘culture’ and the outcomes thereof—take priority.” Yudice adds that culture as resource fills the political void caused by the neoliberal shrinking of government and a decline of normative civic participation.3 This perspective has been commonly Jazz and Revival | voiced in New Orleans after the storm. As local artist and radio producer Jacqueline Bishop put it, early in 2007, “in post-Katrina, most New Orleanians are convinced that it is the role of art and artists to rebuild our city, especially since we have no leadership.”4 We must be attuned, however, to both the progressive and regressive ways that culture as resource fills the political void and, concomitantly, to how such processes are connected to economic restructuring. Culture is central to the new economy of the global age and its attendant division of labor, and to the formation of “communities,”—understood, depending on the context—as economic development projects, marketable commodities, political blocs, or social problems. The creative economy, as Yudice notes, enables the upward flow of capital to a multiculturalism-friendly professional managerial class, while “subordinate or minoritized groups have a place in this scheme as low-level service workers and as providers of ‘life giving’ ethnic and other cultural experiences.” Yet, in the void created by “degovernmentalization,” the “‘disorganized’ capitalism that spawns myriad networks for the sake of accumulation also makes possible the networking of all kinds of affinity associations working in solidarity and cooperation.” And “culture, understood not only affirmatively but, even more important, as a group’s difference from overarching norms, has become the foundation for claims to recognition and resources.”5 Jazz Fest, as the list of artists mentioned earlier indicates, fits into a pattern long-established at other jazz festivals, in which the wide range of sounds sold and celebrated under the rubric “jazz” signifies an array of musical meanings and functions. When thinking about how Jazz Fest exemplifies the role of culture in the reconstruction of New Orleans, we should consider what Lisa Lowe has termed the “multiplicity of the festival-object.” Examining a 1990 multicultural arts festival in Los Angeles, she identifies competing narratives at work in the exhibits, performances, spatial arrangements, and acts of consumption evident at that festival. The challenge, she argues, is not to “reconcile the narratives or to determine one as dominant.” Rather, it is to understand how competing narratives may produce “both a mode of pluralist containment and a vehicle for intervention in that containment,” as they simultaneously elide “material differentiations” among racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities and expose cracks in the slick, pluralistic facade.6 Jazz has for many decades been a visible signifier of the possibilities of multiracial democracy in the United States and for black achievement and distinction. Many such narratives begin in New Orleans, which, as a port city in a succession of empires and an important crossroads in the southern United 595 596 | American Quarterly States, provided the multicultural milieu that musicians, and most notably black and Creole musicians, drew upon as they created a variety of urban and urbane musical styles they eventually synthesized into something called jazz near the beginning of the twentieth century. New Orleans has since been seen as the “cradle” of a music that was uniquely “American” because of its hybrid composition and also because of the heroism of musicians such as Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet, who created great art despite, and in the face of, structures of white supremacy. Such perspectives have been voiced both from liberal and radical perspectives, by musicians and others. For some, jazz history and culture affirm the nation’s success in overcoming its racist legacies. For others, the jazz world betrays many of the racial contradictions of the nation, while illustrating the need for further struggle.7 Indeed, the representations of democracy in action and African-American distinction presented at Jazz Fest are open to a range of interpretations. One could certainly read the brass band stage, the second line processions winding their way through the fairgrounds, and the educational exhibits on Mardi Gras Indians and second line culture as an explicit validation of unique, local musical cultures and also of the black working-class communities that have sustained them. Second lining is a tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century. It involves public processions generally led by members of the social and pleasure clubs who sponsor them, brass bands, and dancers. These individuals constitute the “main line” of the parade. The term “second line” refers to members of the public, the fans, and the curious, who fall in behind the main line. In New Orleans, one will see ersatz second lines constituted at tourist-friendly or society events, but there is a much more communally focused tradition of second lining in black neighborhoods sponsored by social and pleasure clubs, some of which have also been around since the late nineteenth century. There are about five dozen of these clubs at present, although many club members are still displaced by the storms. Each typically sponsors a yearly Sunday parade—some of which, before the storm drew as many as five thousand people—but the clubs also hold dances and other functions and may parade for other reasons, such as jazz funerals. As Helen Regis’s illuminating ethnographic research demonstrates, continually evolving, community-based second line events have long played important social roles in black New Orleans. Although she emphasizes that there are diverse interests and orientations informing these participatory rituals, collectively they may be understood as facilitating a sense of connection to place, affirming members’ neighborhood and its history, constituting Jazz and Revival | alternative forms of community and civil society, reclaiming urban space in the face of the community’s material and symbolic marginalization as well as from police and drug trade violence, and engaging in implicit and occasionally explicit political protest against police brutality, gentrification, and other issues facing black working-class and poor people.8 And given that at least some members of these social and pleasure clubs see it as their mission to share and generate respect for their musical traditions and their communities by making these rituals more public and reaching out across racial and class lines, we may see in these Jazz Fest performances and exhibitions a kind of grassroots attempt, with official support, to cash in these cultural resources as a means of generating wider respect for, and knowledge about, New Orleans’s working-class black communities that could go hand in hand with an equitable reconstruction of the city.9 Equitable reconstruction, of course, has not been the dominant trend since the storm. The suddenly apparent social conditions of poor (primarily black) people in New Orleans brought to light, for many, not only the white supremacist legacies of slavery and Jim Crow but also the continuing effects of a generation of deindustrialization, urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and neoliberal social and economic policies (cuts in education, health care, welfare, etc.) often enacted against, and justified through, the lives of the black urban poor. So did the subsequent horrors many people experienced because of the government’s slow and limited response to the crisis; officials’ failure to improvise around bureaucratic roadblocks; the “passive indifference” and outright hostility toward poor black New Orleanians expressed by local, state, and federal officials; and the privileging of corporate profits rather than workers’ or residents’ rights through no-bid contracts, tax relief, and the relaxation of labor and environmental laws during the initial phases of rebuilding.10 Yet the fact that others read the government’s failures as proof that the state should play a smaller role (outside of the military and criminal justice system, that is) in society illustrated the extent to which the power elite’s cultural work around neoliberalism has been so effective. So did media hysteria surrounding black people’s behavior during and after the event, which began with reports that they were irresponsibly slow to evacuate, continued through racially differentiated descriptions of removing food from shuttered grocery stores, and culminated with hysteria over a perceived return to savagery in the Superdome. It is also clear that such media coverage played a functional role, justifying the state’s neglect after the fact and reproducing the idea that black people represent a continuing threat to civil society. 597 598 | American Quarterly In the wake of such devastation and representation, discussions about how New Orleans will be rebuilt and just who will populate the city in the future have been paramount. Local residents and activists across the country have argued eloquently for a right of return for all New Orleanians, regardless of race, class, and status as homeowners, as well as for their visions for the city to be realized when reconstructing the city. Yet, from the very beginning, the reconstruction of New Orleans, whether by design, indifference, or incompetence, has seemed geared toward excluding at least some of its working-class and, especially, poor black residents. Approximately one-quarter of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina population of 450,000 is still displaced, and that fraction is disproportionately black and poor. Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB) defined the terms of reconstruction for the first several months after Katrina. While the commission included Wynton Marsalis and others who publicly argued that all neighborhoods should be restored, others on the commission, composed primarily of local business elites, voiced an exclusionist agenda. The BNOB report, released several months after the storm, suggested it may not be economically or environmentally feasible to bring back certain neighborhoods, like the Lower Ninth Ward, giving validation instead to efforts to downsize the city, focusing redevelopment on its wealthier, higher, and generally whiter areas, and making the city more amenable to corporate investments. Nagin ultimately distanced himself from the plan when it became politically untenable and began promoting instead a “so-called market-focused recovery.” Individuals seeking to return to New Orleans and rebuild would assess their own risk of future disasters, and make their own decisions about how to proceed given available funds from government grants, insurance payouts, and loans available to them. The city, in turn, would determine how much capital to invest in different neighborhood infrastructures based on how many people in them decided to rebuild. Although the ultimate outcome of such planning remains somewhat unclear, Lawrence Powell points out that there is “an unmistakable Darwinism to Nagin’s market-driven recovery . . . only the fittest seem likely to survive: those with resources and determination.” Renters, especially the working poor, have very little influence under such a system and face high prices and limited supply in the rental market, contributing to high numbers of displaced people and those squatting or living with friends and relatives. The state’s response to the rental crisis, of providing tax credits to developers for building low-income housing, has generated cash flow to small developers who sell these credits to corporations, who in turn use them to lower their tax bills, but who have, as of yet, provided little in the way of Jazz and Revival | new low-income housing. Adding to the crisis is HUD’s controversial decision to close down some of the city’s still structurally sound public housing or to convert it to mixed-income units.11 As the State of Louisiana’s Road Home Program, financed with a $7.5 billion federal block grant, finally began to provide funds for owners of damaged properties, offering them a choice between a grant to assist with rebuilding or selling their damaged property back to the state, the rate of people taking the buyouts was particularly high in New Orleans’ black working-class neighborhoods with high rates of home ownership, such as the Lower Ninth Ward. Given the slow pace of recovery, problems getting insurance payments, and what many perceive as the hostility to their return to the city, many have simply given up hope that their neighborhoods will be restored and have decided that, rather than rebuild, they will take the money and make a go of it in another city. In a local context where the connections between music and civic identity have been long established, and in a broader neoliberal context where “culture as resource” “has become the foundation for claims to recognition and resources,” invoking music to respond to the exclusionary vision of the city’s future is appealing. It makes sense as well, given how audible the music has been in narratives across the planet about the city and its future. The state of the music has even been seen as a kind of barometer of the city’s recovery. A May 2007 NPR story about a Knowledge Is Power Program charter school, for example, used the somewhat dissonant sounds of the school band as a symbol that the public education system—albeit in a semiprivatized manner– was coming back.12 Immediately following the storm there were a number of high-profile benefit concerts and CD releases designed to raise money for displaced musicians and other victims of Katrina. An obvious example was the Higher Ground benefit concert and CD release organized by Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter/ composer and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who was born and raised in New Orleans. And since then, at both the local and national local levels, artists, activists, businesspeople, political leaders, academics, and others have invoked or tried to mobilize the existence of New Orleans’s unique musical culture ... Purchase answer to see full attachment