Black Freedom, Black Markets

Notes on New Orleans Black Masking Indian Tradition

Bibliographic Data

ID7867412
AuthorsMarc D Perry (0000-0003-1567-6575, The University of Texas at San Antonio, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume24
Issue2
Pages108-116
Publication date2021-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Anthropology of North America (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2475-5389 • E-ISSN: 2475-5389
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/nad.12149
OpenAlexW3211525180
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited28

This article explores some of the complexities between Black beauty, alterities of Black possibility, and oppositional refusal on one hand, and Black vulnerability—if not expendability—on the other as lived among members of New Orleans Black Masking Indian community vis‐à‐vis the city’s tourist‐driven cultural economy. At center sits a dichotomy of Blackness that figures some African American New Orleanians as commercially assimilable and therefore valued Black subjects, and those otherwise deemed un‐assimilable and hence ultimately dispensable. Amid such bifurcated economies of desire/disposability generative of a kind of “contractual Blackness,” some Black Masking members craft entrepreneurial strategies through which local African American cultural traditions serve as currencies that afford entry to a raced marketplace otherwise largely inaccessible. While such creative agencies suggest a critical foregrounding of Black subjects rather than simple objects of market consumption, they also appear to underscore some of the ambiguities, if not enduring vulnerabilities of Black refusal and its liberatory promise amid the current moment

Aesthetics · African american · Art · Beauty · Black market · Black women · Craft · Ethnology · Foregrounding · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Race, History, and American Society

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