Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? Historical metaphors and mythical realities in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.681120934607Keywords:
Hurricane Katrina, jazz, New Orleans, Spike LeeAbstract
In many of Spike Lee’s films, jazz is a medium of cultural transformation, enabling African-Americans and other ethnic and racial groups to understand the cultural legacies on which their collective identity depends, by reconciling them for better or worse to their common history as citizens of the United States. The recurrent theme in all of Lee’s films is the cultural consequences of excluding African-Americans from that history, especially given their enormous influence on it, and the losses and distortions that necessary follow from such exclusions. In When the Levees Broke (2006), his four-part television documentary about the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, Lee transforms this theme into a powerful story of individual and collective cultural rebirth through jazz. In this essay, I want to offer some initial thoughts on how Lee connects this story with the dominant historical metaphors and mythical realities of nationhood in the United States, especially those that identify jazz with the themes of displacement, homelessness and homecoming.
References
Callenbach, E. (2006) ‘When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts’. Film Quarterly 60(2): 4–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2006.60.2.4
Casey, J. (1993) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
DaMatta, R. (1991) Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Gabbard, K. (1996) Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and American Cinema. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
——(2008) ‘Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland’. In The Spike Lee Reader, ed. Paula J. Massood, 175–95. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gracyk, T. (2002) ‘Jazz after Jazz: Ken Burns and the Construction of Jazz History’. Philosophy and Literature 26(1): 173–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/phl.2002.0011
hooks, b. (2009) Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, V. E. (1997) ‘Polyphony and Cultural Expression: Interpreting Music Traditions in Do The Right Thing’. In Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, ed. Mark A. Reid, 50–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, S. (2006) When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. HBO. DVD.
Lipsitz, G. (2006) ‘Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship’. Cultural Anthropology 21(3): 451–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.2006.21.3.451
Marsalis, W. (2005) ‘Saving America’s Soul Kitchen’. Time, 11 September.
——(2006) ‘Soul Model for America’. In My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers, ed. Rosemary James, 29–30. New York: Touchstone Books.
Peretti, B. (1992) The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Porter, E. (2009) ‘Jazz and Revival’. American Quarterly 61(3): 593–613.
Raeburn, B. (2009) New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
——(2013) ‘Jamming with Disaster: New Orleans Jazz in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’. In Forces of Nature and Cultural Responses, ed. Katrin Pfeifer and Niki Pfeifer, 169–84. Dordrecht: Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5000-5_9
Ramsey, F., and C. E. Smith (1958) Jazzmen. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Reich, H. (2005) ‘New Orleans Heritage Threatened by Katrina’. Chicago Tribune, 2 September.
Reid, M. A. (1997) ‘Introduction: The Films of Shelton J. Lee’. In Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, ed. Mark A Reid, 1–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Regis, H. (1999) ‘Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals’. Cultural Anthropology 14(4): 472–504. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1999.14.4.472
——(2001) ‘Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line’. American Ethnologist 28(4): 752–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2001.28.4.752
Regis, H. A., and S. Walton (2008) ‘Producing Folk at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival’. Journal of American Folklore 121(408): 400–440. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jaf.0.0029
Sakakeeny, M. (2010) ‘“Under the Bridge”: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans’. Ethnomusicology 54(1): 1–27.
——(2011) ‘New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System’. Black Music Research Journal 31(2): 291–325. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/blacmusiresej.31.2.0291
Smith, Michael P. (1994) ‘Behind the Lines: The Black Mardi Gras Indians and the New Orleans Second Line’. Black Music Research Journal 14(1): 43–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/779458
Spera, K. (2011) Groove Interrupted: Loss, Renewal, and the Music of New Orleans. New York: St. Martin’s Press/Picador.
