TY - JOUR
AU - Lipsitz, George
AB - Abstract In the midst of the disarray and divisiveness that accompanies the pervasive presence of poverty, political powerlessness, and racism, working class black artists and activists in the underscapes of New Orleans and Houston deploy creative place making to transform urban sacrifice zones into sacred spaces. Staging festive street parades and performances in New Orleans and converting abandoned row houses into a collectively created work of living sculpture in Houston constitute acts of conjuring and creative place making. By telling alternative and oppositional stories about the history of these cities and their people, artistic projects turn places of containment and confinement into venues for envisioning and enacting new kinds of physical and psychological mobility. They counter the harsh realities in impoverished communities by honoring the deceased through performances that figuratively bring them back to life, honor departed ancestors and summon their spirits, and offer resilient love as an antidote to social death. IN THE MIDST of the disarray and divisiveness that accompanies the pervasive presence of poverty, political powerlessness, and racism, working-class black artists and activists in the underscapes of New Orleans and Houston deploy creative place making to transform urban sacrifice zones into sacred spaces. Working with a sparse array of tools inside spaces of containment and confinement, residents of impoverished neighborhoods shaped by displacement, dispossession, disinvestment, and disadvantage learn to conjure into existence a new world rich with possibility. Staging festive street parades and performances in New Orleans and converting abandoned row houses into a collectively created work of living sculpture in Houston constitute acts of conjuring and creative place making. By telling alternative and oppositional stories about the history of these cities and their people, these artistic projects turn places of containment and confinement into venues for envisioning and enacting new kinds of physical and psychological mobility. The street parades and the restored row houses constitute acts of improvisation in time and space, voicing what Fred Moten calls “the piercing insistence of the excluded” (Moten, 2003, 223). In manifesting a collective refusal of unlivable destinies, street parades and restored row houses expand the temporality of the present by evoking the struggles of the past and foreshadowing the future arrival of a long-promised but persistently deferred freedom. They enable people to transcend the degrading conditions of the present through physical manipulation of human bodies and material objects in specific places. They imbue the world with the potential for making right things come to pass (Thompson, 1984, 91). Through practical work in the world manipulating quotidian objects in everyday settings, they promote recognition, exploration, and cultivation of the latent value of undervalued places. In so doing, they encourage an augmented ability to discern the untapped talents of undervalued people. Their art and artistry seek to turn the toxic into the tonic and humiliation into honor. At these sites, black people draw on an array of local and global resistance traditions to affirm their right to the city, to strengthen their ties to one another, and to cultivate their shared capacity to create a democratic future. Both street parade performance in New Orleans and abandoned row house renovation in Houston manifest the persistence of Afro-diasporic religious traditions inside seemingly secular practices and processes. In Afro-diasporic religious traditions, spiritual forces are present in people, places, and things; they inhabit enclosed times and places. Practical work in the world can summon the sacred into existence (Smith 1994; Chireau 2006; Thompson 1984). Seemingly frivolous objects and events can contain significant moral import to those trained to recognize it (Small 1998, 25; Thompson 1998). Projects of art-based community making such as street parades and row house renovations deploy a sense of parallel vision; they discern the possibilities of plural functions in seemingly singular objects. Not satisfied with what things are, they imagine what they might become. Broken appliances, shards of shattered glass, and discarded toys become recuperated as decorations on abandoned houses. Clapping hands, stomping feet, sticks tapping on bottles, and rhythmic chants reveal the existence of multiple temporalities unconstrained by clock time or calendar time. Multiple rhythms in music deepen the capacity of participants to recognize the existence of multiple forces latent in surface appearances of singularity (Small 1998, 23). The ordinary streets and avenues that serve as simple and functional thoroughfares for commerce and pedestrian travel the other three hundred and sixty-four days a year become a treasured site of festive congregation and theatrical performance on carnival day. Empty, abandoned, and dilapidated row houses on an inner city street have no apparent use value or exchange value according to the standards of the dominant forces in society, but in the eyes of neighborhood artists and activists these dwellings have the potential to be rebuilt and restored as repositories of collective memory and visual reminders of a community’s linked fate. Through conjuring and creative place making, spaces emblematic of the degraded nature of the present can be made to foreshadow the possibility of a fulfilled future. CONJURING AND CREATIVE PLACE MAKING As Theophus Smith explains, in Afro-diasporic religion, conjuring entails a collective practice of summoning the spirits to change the world. Just as a conjure doctor heals the sick by manipulating roots, herbs, and powders, street parades and row house renovations cure social ills by following prescribed patterns of performance and practice in concrete material settings (Smith 1994, 31). Conjuring parallels and builds on a wide range of Afro-diasporic sacred practices that revolve around deploying material objects and moving bodies in prescribed patterns, such as Mande spirit writing, Vodun, Santería, Candomble, and Rastafarianism. In African American life and culture, these sacred practices have long served secular purposes. The prayers and ring shouts staged secretly in brush arbors in slave communities, the sacred singing of black soldiers during the Civil War, and the freedom songs of the twentieth-century black freedom movement functioned as what Smith describes astutely as “prophetic incantation: as religious expression intending to induce, summon, or conjure the divine for the realization of some emancipatory future” (Smith 1994, 59; Jabir 2017). The values, processes, and practices of Afro-diasporic religion shape the guiding logic of New Orleans street parades and Houston row house renovation, forging new realities from a mixture of African retention and New World invention (Buff 2001, 11). African spiritual and religious traditions teach that evil is not abstract, but rather, as Yvonne. P. Chireau explains, “situational, immediate and located in the domain of human actions and relations” (Chireau 2006, 75). Both positive and negative spirits can be found in physical objects and human bodies (Chireau 2006, 40). Seen from this perspective, evil is more a matter of the triumph of the powerful over the powerless than a battle between absolute right and absolute wrong. Evil cannot be eliminated, but it can be negotiated, manipulated, and reconfigured for purposes of good. Redeploying material objects and reconfiguring physical spaces comprise eminently practical responses to political oppression and suppression (Smith 1994, 25, 38, 40). Challenging power imbalances requires collective insurgent action to contest and transform the mechanisms of oppression. The same black bodies that are the targets of street surveillance, stops, frisks, and arrests can become a powerful representation of potential power when massed in public parades resonant with aggressive festivity and exuberant display. The same small, dilapidated, and even abandoned houses emblematic of neighborhood disinvestment and decline can become iconic representation of residents’ imagination and ingenuity when renovated and decorated by conscious and creative artists. In this way, the very signs and symbols of negative ascription can become the raw materials assertions of positive self-affirmation. SACRED SPACES IN NEW ORLEANS The black communities in New Orleans and Houston are replete with African influences and retentions. Traces of the African past appear in the architecture of houses, the ironwork on buildings, funeral processions, grave markings, and the ways in which people cook, dance, dress, and speak. Moreover, as port cities on the Gulf Coast hosting ships from Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica, and other parts of the African diaspora, the African influences dating back to the days of slavery in New Orleans and Houston have reappeared and been replenished in recombinant form through direct contact with the Caribbean. When New Orleans musician Cyril Neville moved to New York City and found himself living among Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, and Haitians, he felt at home because their ways of being in the world reminded him of New Orleans, especially “the slave trade with Africa, souls being shipped and abandoned, culture confused and commingled, the sense of oppression, the sense of relaxation, humid heat hanging over your head like a hammer, carnivals and rituals and a heat that goes from morning till night, drums that talk like singers and singers that talk like drums” (Neville et al. 2000, 233). Black people in New Orleans have long located centers of spiritual power outside of established churches and cathedrals. Blending Vodun and Catholic traditions, home altars enshrine spiritual power inside poor people’s houses. Jars of water placed at front doors, white stones arranged around the boundaries of a yard, mirrors attached to outside walls, and Bibles left open at night preserve African ways of using material objects for moral ends. Vessels of water connote connections to ancestral generations. Strategically placed stones “medicate” and protect a dwelling from intruders. Mirrors flash back evil intent toward covetous or jealous outsiders. Open Bibles reference the sacred power of words central to Mande spirit writing. Yard artists attach bottles to trees to capture, contain, and incapacitate evil spirits. They place decorated hub caps and tires in front of their homes to evoke the desire and power to move freely. Pinwheels and streamers harness the energy of the wind. Art projects assembled from items discarded in the trash demonstrate that devalued products and devalued people might actually have value to the discerning and creative mind. Elaborate funeral processions and parades call a community into the streets to celebrate the value of life among a people sentenced to social death by their oppressors (Thompson 1984). In New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day, St. Joseph’s Day, and Super Sunday, working-class Black men masquerading as “Indian” tribe members assemble to march, dance, and display costumes they have spent months sewing stitch by stitch (Lipsitz 1990; Sakakeeny 2002). Some may have indigenous ancestry, but the masking and marching manifests a strategic anti-essentialism wherein Blacks honor their own resistance to white rule by asserting affinities with Indigenous opposition to conquest and colonization. The enormous amount of work attendant to masking as a Mardi Gras Indian serves a dual purpose. The time-consuming labor of acquiring cloth, feathers, and beads; of designing and sewing costumes; of rehearsing songs, hand claps, and dance steps serve to block out negative elements in the outside world. Yet at the same time, creative activity enables an inner journey. Men who perform arduous and low-wage labor jobs and who are called by their first names by employers whom they must refer to as “Boss,” “Mister,” or “Sir,” welcome the dignity and status offered to them as “Indians.” Some see this kind of transformation as religious. Donald Harrison Jr, the Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flames, explains masking in exactly this way, confiding to an interviewer “When I’m into the Indian thing, that’s a religious experience for me. I live it year-around. It’s something for your inner self, expressed through your outer self” (Berry 1999, 36). The Mardi Gras Indians retrace the footsteps of their ancestors through rituals that proclaim their right to the city, a right denied them daily by police racial profiling. They parade without permits to claim ownership over public spaces. They treasure the places where they march because of their use value as loci of collective memory, as places for congregation, self-affirmation, and self-activity. As they march through the neighborhoods in which they live, their aggressive festivity pulls people into the streets behind them to move, dance, and chant to the rhythms of the tribe. In a city where police harassment and vigilante violence has routinely inhibited the free movement of poor blacks through the physical spaces of the city, carnival processions provide a rare opportunity for assembling in public. A distinct spatial imaginary governs the line of march. Like the rara processions staged by collectives of worshippers who serve the spirits in Haiti, the Indians and their second lines stop to congregate at places imbued for them with sacred meanings, pausing and performing at key crossroads, corners, cemeteries, and sites of social gathering like parks and taverns (McAlister 2002, 86). Indian processions stop to dance and sing outside a parking lot at the corner of South Claiborne and Poydras Street, across the street from a fenced in tennis court at the intersection of LaSalle and Washington streets and along the neutral ground that divides North Claiborne Avenue. Urban renewal and highway building projects have transformed the physical landscapes of each of these places, but they persist in memory as sites imbued with powerful meaning. For many years, the corner of Poydras and South Claiborne served as the “battlefield,” the place where Indian tribes from different neighborhoods would converge on carnival day to engage in symbolic and sometimes actual physical battles (Hannusch 1985, 262). The intersection of LaSalle Street and Washington Avenue attracts carnival revelers because of the longtime presence there of the Dew Drop Inn Lounge and Restaurant, a home for rhythm and blues music and musicians that closed in 1972. That site witnessed a brutal police attack on a peaceful assembly of Mardi Gras Indians on St. Joseph’s Day in 2005, so assembling there is a declaration of evil’s victory’s as temporary and reversible (Dr. John 1994, 48, 72; Reckdahl, 2005). The long strip of neutral ground along Claiborne Avenue serves as an especially important gathering place for Mardi Gras Indian parades and performances, because this part of the street was once an important thoroughfare in the black community. The neutral ground had a paved walking path in the center bordered by grass on the sides. It sat close to homes and businesses, and functioned as common ground, a place where people could play games, wash cars, hold picnics, and assemble for parades (Wright 1997, 132). Federal, state, and municipal authorities selected North Claiborne Avenue as the site for the downtown section of the I-10 freeway in the 1960s. Building the elevated highway destroyed hundreds of oak trees, leveled the former home of nineteenth-century activist Homére Plessy, and demolished blocks and blocks of vibrant and thriving neighborhoods. To this day, the enormous pylons that support the overhead freeway loom menacingly over the streetscape, blocking the sun and impeding free movement below. Construction of the freeway decreased the property values of black-owned homes and businesses while increasing the value of suburban white property by facilitating commuting from the suburbs to the city. The new spatial configuration turned the previously bustling North Claiborne business district into an eerie and empty buffer zone. Instead of vibrant street life with pedestrians frequenting local night clubs and restaurants, the avenue became a sparsely populated stretch pockmarked by the occasional discount drug store and drive-through fast food outlet. Convening at Claiborne and Poydras, Washington and LaSalle, and along the North Claiborne neutral ground enables the Indians to expand the temporality of the present by connecting it to memories of the past. Just as creative place making draws on artistic imagination and improvisation to foreshadow a future freedom, ritual celebrations at memory-laden sites by the Indians connect today’s problems to the past, keeping alive consciousness of histories of displacement and dispossession as the crucial components of the degraded linked fate endured in the present. By returning to places like the neutral ground on North Claiborne, street parades and performances challenge the closures of development and its narratives of linear progress. They draw on Afro-diasporic understandings of time that insist that resolutions are only temporary fixes that must be renegotiated again and again (Small 1998, 44). Like the Indian songs, dances, and costumes that echo past representations but make them new each time through innovation and improvisation, performances at sacred sites remember, reenact, and revise the serial displacements central to African American existence. Most of the black population of New Orleans came to the city initially because of the reign of terror that accompanied the betrayal of Reconstruction in Louisiana in the late nineteenth century. Whites used shootings, lynchings, and mob violence to steal black property and prevent black political participation. People whose ancestors came to Louisiana initially because they had been kidnapped from their homes in Africa and forced to labor as slaves in the New World found themselves displaced once again when the termination of legal slavery produced new forms of subordination and suppression that prevented physical and economic mobility. In the cities they migrated to, such as New Orleans, residential segregation and public and private violence kept black people confined to neighborhoods that they neither owned nor controlled. Each time they built a vibrant economic and social world, white supremacist powers destroyed it and dispersed its inhabitants to new spaces of deprivation. The area originally known as Congo Square because slaves congregated there remained an important locus of working-class black social life along Rampart Street during the first third of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, however, local authorities began urban development projects that included renaming the site Beauregard Square in honor of an officer of the Old Confederacy, reconfiguring the contours of Rampart Street, and leveling sixteen blocks of historic buildings in the nearby Tremé section, the oldest continuously inhabited black neighborhood in the nation (Rodgers 1993, 6). Some residents found themselves compelled to move to the area around Dryades Street where they created a new center of black life and culture organized around the city’s second largest shopping district. An estimated ninety-five percent of the shoppers on Dryades Street were blacks, but no blacks worked as clerks or managers serving this public. The money that black consumers spent in white-owned stores where they were not allowed to work made Dryades Street an exporter of capital to white neighborhoods in the suburbs. When residents protested against having to shop in stores where they could not work, store owners closed up shop and abandoned the area (Rodgers 1993, 67–69). Street parades and performances may seem like small and feeble responses to the cumulative aggressions and injuries of white supremacy. Yet oppressed people can take action only in the arenas that are open to them with the tools they have at their disposal. Sometimes that works to their advantage. If the Biblical David had gone out to fight Goliath with a sword, David would have been defeated. In that situation, however, a small slingshot turned out to be a better choice of weapon. Despite its tiny size and limited force, when deployed in the right way, the slingshot functioned as a great equalizer, neutralizing the height, weight, and power advantage of a giant. Street parades and performances, like other forms of Afro-diasporic creative place making, are efforts to find a great equalizer. They might not win many—or even any—battles, but at the very least they keep alive a culture of opposition that makes it possible to live to fight another day (Rawick 1972). In making the world more joyful and worth living in during the present, and perhaps preparing the community to be ready for effective insurgency in the future when circumstances permit, they also engage in collective practices that bring order to a disorderly world and contest the radical divisiveness of poor communities by fashioning new ways of being and working and creating together. STREET PARADES The street parade calls a community into being through performance. Participants include members of brass bands and social clubs who know each other well and work together every day rehearsing and planning performances. The entire procession, however, depends upon the spontaneous assembling of the “second line,” an array of individuals who assemble spontaneously to clap, dance, wave umbrellas, and turn sticks and bottles into percussion instruments as they follow the band. Musicians and second liners improvise displays of individual virtuosity, but these displays are judged by how well they fit into the collective trajectory of the group. Unexpected moves by musicians and dancers reveal hidden potential and possibility. They display advanced capacities for invention, adaptation, and change, and challenge others to respond to their displays. Second liners roll on the ground and crawl under parked cars, but then jump up and climb telephone poles and dance on top of buildings. Blending together continuity and rupture, dancers both glide and jerk. They seem to float smoothly at some moments, but then drop to the ground as if hit by a bullet, only to rise again and continue gliding (Sakakeeny 2013, xi). Musicians accompany these displays with changes in melody and rhythm while maintaining the responsibility of moving the entire procession along. They become keenly aware of the spaces they traverse and the possibilities those places provide and prohibit. Under the freeway on North Claiborne and under other street overpasses, the acoustics of the concrete and asphalt in an enclosed space of the street amplify the sound, so these are the places where the ensemble raises the volume of the instruments and the drums to excite the crowd with fast and familiar anthems. When the road narrows or the parade turns and marchers have to pass through a congested space, the musicians will slow the pace of their playing and marching to make sure the group stays intact (Sakakeeny 2013, 25). The musicians who play in brass bands for street parades have to be well schooled in New Orleans traditions of improvisation and accompaniment in music and marching. One crucible of these practices has been the jazz funeral, a singular expression of a local sensibility that serves serious purposes while seeming simply festive and unrestrained. After the church ceremony for the dead, the band leads mourners to the cemetery playing and marching slowly. Once the body is in the ground, however, a festive and erotic celebration of life ensues, as the band plays up-tempo tunes like “Didn’t He Ramble” leading a joyful procession back to town. The dead are symbolically brought back to life for a conversation with the living through this ritual. The precarity of black life and the hardships of black labor inform a sense that the dead have been released from toil and travail, while those who remain on earth renew their efforts to make a life lived fully and richly, finding something left to love in a world that can seem relentlessly unloving. The Katrina Conjuncture The longstanding tradition of the jazz funeral emerged from the contours of black lives in the agrarian, mercantile, and industrial eras. The postindustrial period, however, brought changes that provoked new practices. Capital flight, automation, economic restructuring, the evisceration of the social wage, mass incarceration, and police violence made black life even more precarious than before. Containerization in the shipping industry eliminated the thousands of longshore jobs through which black workers could earn wages that enabled them to purchase homes and automobiles and envision a better life for their children. Attacks on and reductions in employment in the public sector devastated the economy of the black middle class, while reduced spending on social services, health care, and environmental protection hit hardest among the black poor. The inter-generational poverty and cumulative vulnerabilities inflicted on African Americans in New Orleans became visible to the entire world in 2005 when inner city residents were trapped inside the city as flood waters rose around them. Decades of housing discrimination relegated black residents of the city to sections of town most likely to flood. Emergency plans to evacuate New Orleans made no provision for people too poor to own cars and unable to drive to higher ground. Blacks leaving the city on foot were turned back by armed police officers at the city limits, while authorities dispatched armed personnel to guard stores from looting but made no efforts to provide water, food, and medicine to people who desperately needed them. United Nations rapporteurs on housing and minority issues condemned the response to the disaster by local officials as in violation of international legal and moral standards. City and federal officials ridiculed the UN findings and took no responsibility for the conditions they made black people endure (Woods 2010). Before and after the hurricane, joblessness, housing insecurity, inadequate education, untreated medical and mental health problems, and cuts in social services undermined community cohesion and promoted the growth of an underground economy organized around the drug trade. Embarrassed by the symptoms of social decay but unwilling to expend funds to address its causes, local, state, and federal officials operating under the authority of the war on drugs engaged in regimes of relentless stops, frisks, and arrests in black neighborhoods, while prosecutors sought and judges provided draconian jail and prison sentences. The war on drugs provided a revanchist reaction to the black freedom struggles of the mid-twentieth century. Instead of desegregating opportunities and life chances in society through civil rights policies and asset building programs, governments “fixed” the race problem by making it a crime problem, criminalizing the black poor and incarcerating them in record numbers. As sociologist Douglas Massey notes, the rate of crimes committed by blacks did not increase relative to whites in either absolute numbers or percentages, but police authorities targeted infractions by blacks for maximum prosecution and punishment (Massey 2007, 94–95). Starting with the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and continuing on through the 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, federal policy consistently promoted increased sentences for minor offenses, removed judicial discretion in sentencing, and attached collateral consequences to criminal convictions that followed ex-offenders for the rest of their lives (Lipsitz 2012). Predatory and punitive policing fills the Orleans Parish Prison with poor people who have not been convicted of crimes. Ninety percent of the 1,591 inmates in Orleans Parish Prison as of March 2016 were awaiting trial because they were unable to make bail. In a city where the poverty rate is double the national average, many cannot afford even minimal bail fees. Eighty-five percent of the people who go through the criminal justice system cannot afford a lawyer. There is a clear racial dimension to who gets arrested. During the first quarter of 2016, black women were fifty-five percent more likely to be arrested than white women; black men were fifty percent more likely to be arrested than white men. Black males who make up twenty-eight percent of the city’s population comprise eighty percent of the jail population (Vera Institute 2016). Mass incarceration exacerbates the disintegration of social networks and social bonds, unleashing a wave of violent crimes that leave black people underprotected even while overpoliced. Young people with no discernible future prospects for survival and subsistence turn to the trade in crack cocaine to try to live boldly, grandly, and in affluence, if only for a while. The violence unleashed by rivalries over turf and trade increasingly takes the lives of young people. Eventually, the jazz funeral that honored the long lives of elders as they passed on was joined by what became known locally as “the crack funeral,” an observance designed to honor young lives cut short. These mourners broke with tradition, insisting that the brass bands play up-tempo numbers on the way from the church to the cemetery, as if the precariousness of their existence demanded gratification immediately because any of them might die at any time (Sakakeeny 2013, 149). Treated as disposable by the economy and the state and headed for deaths that maybe no one would grieve, they take pains to honor each other through funeral parades. As one youth explained to an interviewer, “When we cry, who hurts for us? Nobody but us” (Sakakeeny 2013, 57). The break with tradition enacted by brass bands playing up tempo numbers on the way to the graveyard initially upset distinguished scholar and poet Brenda Marie Osbey. A former poet laureate of the state of Louisiana and one of the most astute and esteemed authorities on local traditions and history, Osbey eventually came to see the logic of the new temporality of the funeral from the vantage point of the young musicians in the bands. “I began to think that perhaps it is not merely all right but appropriate that the very young mourners of the very young dead begin their celebration as soon as the casket is removed to its hearse,” Osbey reflects, adding “their own lives being so susceptible to the same fate, who knows when they might have the chance to ‘do it up right’?” (Sakakeeny 2013, 149). Performance as Pedagogy The life and death issues arbitrated by the industrial era jazz funeral and its accelerated version in the postindustrial age appear in full relief in the work of another group that marches on carnival days, the Skeletons, also known as the Bone Gang. Unlike the Indians, who spend an entire year sewing expensive feathers, beads, rhinestones, and cloth into elaborate costumes, the Skeletons enter into carnival on a low budget. Some make their costumes by painting black stripes on white long underwear to resemble a skeleton. The gang members secure large bones with hunks of raw meat hanging from them from butcher shops and march out into the streets in search of “bad men”—local toughs who harass and frighten their neighbors. They surround their targets, talk about how bad they are, and warn them to mend their ways. Over time, they may invite the malefactors to join the crew, to channel their energies in a new direction by replacing the thrills of fighting, hustling, and stealing with the fellowship of planning and executing carnival performances (Turner 2009). The Skeletons do not openly criticize or proselytize. Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions infuse the Skeletons with the understanding that people who seem “bad” may be merely distorted, out of step, and lacking in the balance and grace needed to contest an unlivable destiny. The Bone Gang does not humiliate the men they confront. In fact, they give them a special kind of recognition: the inverted honor of being known as really bad. Yet they do so in a playful way that attempts to discover something left to love in people whose life trajectories have often rendered them distinctly unlovable (Rose 2014). Ostracizing the criminals could back them into a corner and exacerbate their bad behavior, shutting them off from reciprocal ties to the community. Inviting them to channel their anger, resentments, and desires for recognition into a form of festive play, however, reconnects them to the social world around them. These practices proceed from the premise that seemingly bad people can have good qualities, that the surface appearances of “what is” often occlude the possibilities of “what can be.” The energy, initiative, and assertiveness required to be a criminal could serve other purposes if redirected. Indeed, it is squarely in the community’s interest to redirect it, because the system of residential segregation and the police protection extended to white neighborhoods guarantee that most of the victims of black criminals will be black. The images of death that permeate the Bone Gang masquerade serve multiple purposes. The Skeletons appear as ghosts from past generations who have come back to remind the living of the fragility of their existence. They yell “you’re next” to their targets, threatening death as punishment for bad behavior, but also using the inevitability of death as a spur for desiring and savoring a rich and fulfilled life. As one Bone Gang member informed a researcher, “We want to scare you and teach you that you never know when you’re gonna go. Death can come at any time, so you better make the best of the life you have” (Turner 2009, 120). At the same time, the Skeletons constitute a form of resistance against a collective social death by reaching out to young people and using fear to instill positive values in them. “We go after kids,” a Bone Gang member proclaims, “to stress them a point about going to school. ‘Are you being good? If not I’m gonna see you tonight.’ We put fright into them to remind them of what they are supposed to be about” (Turner 2009, 120). Shaming and teasing individuals thought to be thieves and hustlers and fighters constitute innovative forms of community policing that avoid actual police intervention. Black residents of New Orleans do not expect police officers, prosecutors, judges, or jailers to protect the black community. Aggressive policing generally produces the very violence it purports to prevent. Long-established practices of racial profiling in making stops, searches, and arrests, overcharging actual and imagined violations of petty offenses, systematically disproportionate sentencing, and physical assaults on suspects and inmates do not make people feel safer. Mass incarceration dissolves needed social networks, interrupts work histories, fragments families, and creates constant battles by destabilizing temporary truces between rivals. In a setting where the police cannot be counted on for protection, the people have to find ways to protect themselves. The Skeletons do what the Black Panther Party tried to do during the short decade of its existence, to police a neighborhood without the presence of the police by channeling the violent impulses of hustlers and fighters into ceremonial and symbolic displays staged in the name of helping the community. The Street Parade and Gender Women participate in street parades and funerals. “Second lining to me is a boost to my life,” declares JeNean Sanders a member of the We Are One Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Pointing to the community-making dimensions of marching in the streets, Sanders observes “When there is celebration [second line], a memorial [jazz funeral], or even when the people want to protest the injustice in their lives, we can come together, clapping our hands and singing, see our friends and family, and get the strength to overcome” (Sakakeeny 2013, 34). Yet despite women’s strong identification with the parades and their enthusiastic participation in them, the rituals themselves revolve powerfully around assertions of masculine identity and agency. The distinctly gendered aspects of New Orleans street parades are constitutive rather than incidental, but more than sexism is at work here. Drawing on research on African cultures by John Szwed and Roger Abrahams, rara scholar Elizabeth McAlister argues that a distinction between work and play distinguishes which spheres are attached to which gender. The African imaginary about these issues seems a complete inversion of the Euro-American framework in which work inhabits a putatively male sphere defined by productive paid labor outside the home that establishes individual identity, while play refers to private and often domestic leisure activities in a woman-centered realm. In the Afro-diasporic world view, by contrast, the category of work concerns the mutually supportive activities of the extended family and community that are learned from the mother inside the home. The sphere of work thus revolves around family cooperation and coordination in domestic settings under the aegis of women. This domestic sphere is not simply private, however; the work done in it prepares people for and connects them to the needs of the broader community. The sphere of play, in contrast, is a masculine realm oriented around asserting individuality in public settings. Yet in keeping with the traditions of both conjuring and Christianity, the realization of individual difference takes place within a community. In a reference to rara in Haiti that applies equally to street parades and performances in New Orleans, McAlister explains that “play is associated with the crossroads or the street, with men, and with establishing one’s reputation” (McAlister 2002, 32). Bone Gangs dressed as skeletons threatening wrongdoers with death and Mardi Gras Indians waving mock hatchets and singing songs and chanting phrases boasting of their bravery and readiness to fight constitute their individual identities through public play in sacred spaces. Yet these individual identities serve community purposes by displaying mastery and skill, compelling collective collaboration and movement, and claiming the right to public spaces. The domestic sphere of women where work takes place is also solemn and sacred. Moreover, the economic positions of black men and women have never allowed for the kind of separation of gender spheres that it is held up as the ideal (although often and increasingly not in the actual practice) of whites (Davis 1983). Yet Afro-diasporic retentions and New World inventions make the world of work at home different for women than the world of play as it functions for men. It is that sphere, that woman’s sphere, that Project Row Houses in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood attends to in innovative ways through works of art-based community making that revolve around the home as a woman centered sphere of cooperation and solidarity that has public as well as private purposes. ROW HOUSES Just as New Orleans residents view the neutral ground under the North Claiborne overpass and the corners of Washington and LaSalle and Poydras and South Claiborne as sacred because of their prior uses as sites of community congregation, Project Row Houses identifies a common place as a sacred space. The project stretches over more than thirty blocks in Houston’s Third Ward in what was recently an impoverished and largely abandoned neighborhood dismissed as a slum by city officials. A seemingly dead area has been brought back to life by a community coalition of artists and activists who discerned value in an undervalued place and in the people residing in it. Renovating, redecorating, and restoring small houses, rescuing them from demolition, and repurposing them for use as art studios and galleries set in motion a social process that eventually led to a collaborative community effort that revitalized the neighborhood by increasing its housing stock, attracting new businesses, and creating new places for recreation and congregation. Like the neutral ground under the North Claiborne overpass in New Orleans, even when the neighborhood deteriorated, the streets of the Third Ward held sacred and symbolic value to black people in Houston as historical sites of struggle. The freed people who flocked to Houston after the Civil War and settled in the Third Ward positioned their shotgun houses close together in communal fashion. Led by Baptist preacher and former slave Jack Yates, they pooled their money to purchase ten acres of land at the corner of Elgin and Dowling streets, which they cleared and landscaped. Underscoring their linked fate and collective history, they gave the public space they created the name of Emancipation Park. They held public “Juneteenth” celebrations there every year to commemorate the day slaves in Texas learned about the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus, people who had been enslaved and designated by the law as having the legal status of property, upon becoming emancipated pooled a significant amount of the first few meager earnings to buy land for a community purpose. They countered the market logic of personal gain and private wealth accumulation with an investment in a shared social space intended to help secure their newly won freedom by deepening their ties to one another and securing their ability to congregate in public. For nearly a century in the days of Jim Crow segregation, Emancipation Park was the only public space in Houston that blacks could occupy safely. It became the center of a rich social world as Third Ward residents established businesses, schools, social clubs, religious institutions, and arts centers. They transformed the relentless and brutal racial segregation that crowded them into one small neighborhood into exuberant and festive congregation. The residents of the row houses that were clustered along the side streets that intersected with Dowling Street flocked to jazz and rhythm blues performances staged at the El Dorado ballroom just across the street from Emancipation Park. Adjacent and nearby were a restaurant, a drugstore, a clothing store, a photography studio, a shoeshine parlor, and an appliance store. Guitarist and blues musician Lightnin’ Hopkins played sets at the El Dorado and other local clubs, but he also turned Dowling Street itself into an entertainment venue, riding buses that traversed it all day long, playing his guitar, singing, and thanking passengers for the money they dropped in his hat (Wood 2003, 75, 85). In 1970, twenty-one-year-old Carl Hampton and his Peoples Party II organization distributed free food and clothing to needy residents at the party’s headquarters in the 2800 block of Dowling, a short distance from the park.. Meeting these basic needs was not an end in itself, Hampton explained, but an organizing tool designed to mobilize collective action against the conditions in the neighborhood: its dilapidated houses, unpaved streets, backed-up storm drains, inadequate bus service, uncollected garbage, and relentless acts of police brutality (Wright 1979). Conjuring Public Space Revered as a locus of collective struggle by a community poor in resources but rich in memories, Project Row Houses came into existence through artistic acts of conjuring by local resident and internationally renowned artist John Biggers. In 1980, these shotgun houses in the Third Ward captured his attention and called out to him to conjure a new identity for them by putting paint on canvas. Biggers was employed as a professor in the Department of Art at Texas Southern University located in the Third Ward. He did not initially intend to make the row houses the subject of his art. He was drawn to do so, however, by a circuitous journey that began when he was commissioned to paint a mural honoring Houston civil rights activist Christia Adair. As a leader of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Adair had helped craft the litigation in the 1940s that successfully challenged Texas laws that allowed political parties to limit voting in primary elections only to whites as a way of circumventing the right to vote guaranteed to blacks by the Fifteenth Amendment. Despite being harassed and threatened repeatedly by police officers and private vigilantes alike, Adair worked tirelessly and effectively to win a measure of justice and inclusion for blacks in Houston. Her efforts proved decisive in getting blacks added to the voting rolls, being called for service on juries, securing government jobs, winning equal access to service at lunch counters and the freedom to try on clothes in department store dressing rooms. Eager to find the sources of the energy, initiative, and imagination that propelled Adair into a life of activism, Biggers walked the streets of the Third Ward neighborhood where she lived. He became fascinated by the beauty and power of the rows of nearly identical shotgun houses, by the way they stood side by side like a line of people with linked arms. On close inspection, the houses revealed important individual differences and distinctions, yet their uniform size and shape evidenced overarching unities. To Biggers, they combined solidarities of sameness with dynamics of difference in a way that encapsulated how the black community itself nurtured and sustained both individuality and collectivity. Local lore attributes the term “shotgun house” to the linear alignment of rooms in a small dwelling, as if one could fire a shotgun in the front door and have the pellets exit the back door without hitting anything inside. Scholars, however, attribute the name to an African language term as it became transformed by English speakers. The Dahomey-Fon word “to-gun” means place of assembly (Vlach 1977). Following patterns of architecture long established in Africa, the shotgun house proved especially adaptable to New World conditions. It was inexpensive and efficient. Often no more than six hundred square feet, the shotgun house could be built cheaply and constructed on a small plot of land. It provided a kind of natural cooling system in the hot Texas summers, because it was only one room wide and had no hallways, so with the aligned front and back doors open, breezes blew straight through the dwelling. The physical spaces of the house mean that daily living was conducted mostly in communal spaces and in full view of the other members of the household. Front doors that opened onto small porches close to the street connected the household to a shared public domain (Andrews n. d.). While maintaining the privacy of a stand-alone dwelling, the position of the shotgun house in a line of houses with nearly touching front porches created a communal public space and an interactive ethos. It blended emotional intimacy with collective identity encouraging people to feel connected to each other (Thompson 1995, 108). Biggers drew a connection between the houses and the remarkable women like Christia Adair who lived in them (Wardlaw 1995). Although he had been working at a college located in the Third Ward for over thirty years and had himself been raised in a shotgun house in Gastonia, North Carolina, researching the Christia Adair mural led him to a new appreciation of the dynamism and power of the row house. Biggers began painting what he saw in his mind: row houses dressed like people wearing shawls and overalls, five women standing side by side on their front porches holding miniature row houses in their laps, houses lit up like lanterns to give light, washboards that served as ladders to higher planes of existence. Above all, in keeping with the Afro-diasporic concept of work in the home for community benefit as the domain of women, and inflected by Biggers’s respect for the remarkable activism of Christia Adair and women like her, his paintings about the houses focused on Third Ward women, women described by Biggers as “organized women, women who, when they voted took the whole block with them” (Wardlaw 1995, 58; Thompson 1995, 10; Tucker 1995, 64). In this way, the work carried on inside the home concerned more than the heteronormative nuclear family unit, viewing the family as part of an interdependent community collectivity. Robert Farris Thompson notes the presence of Afro-diasporic aesthetics and spirituality in the shotgun paintings of John Biggers. They foreground everyday material objects such as houses, roofs, sidewalks, washboards, and porches and imbue them with mystical powers. Tessellated patterns, jagged lines, birds in flight, and railroad tracks emphasize ruptures and connections, time, and motion. Thompson understands Biggers to have made not only art, but in the Afro-diasporic world view, also medicine. The shotgun paintings are not isolated representations to be consumed only as works of art, but rather entities designed to do meaningful work in the world, to heal and protect the community they depict (Thompson 1995, 108). Undervalued Places, Undervalued People The dwellings and their residents that Biggers portrayed as sources of strength and courage were viewed quite differently by Houston’s elected officials, administrators, mortgage lenders, developers, and planners. Residential segregation and mortgage redlining had long confined blacks to an artificially constrained housing market that required them to pay higher prices for inferior and unsafe dwellings while preventing them from accumulating assets that could appreciate in value and be passed down to future generations. Highway construction subsidizing white flight to Houston’s far flung suburban areas led to the demolition of large segments of the predominately black Fourth and Fifth Wards, exacerbating overcrowding in the Third Ward. City officials and corporate executives agreed to concentrate incinerators and waste dumps in black neighborhoods while denying those areas expenditures for basic services, amenities, and improvements. Similar to what happened in New Orleans, during the 1980 and 1990s the Third Ward in Houston suffered the cumulative consequences of cutbacks in spending on social welfare programs, capital flight, automation, and failure to enforce fair housing, fair lending, and fair hiring laws. The disintegration and destruction of entire communities that flowed from these practices and processes had systemic and structural causes. But powerful private interests encouraged politicians, pundits, and prosecutors to blame them on the individual failings that they alleged people of color to manifest, portraying them as irresponsible, drug-taking, sexually licentious, undisciplined, and unmotivated people who refused to work. Endless rounds of blaming and shaming promoted sadistic rage against the poor while hiding the plunder that generated redistribution of wealth to the rich. Elevating punishment over social provision and replacing collective responsibility with charges of individual deviance, the state and capital coordinated changes in key institutions. These measures produced the very forms of nonnormativity and dysfunction they purported to prevent. Broken windows policing, mandatory and maximum sentencing policies, overcharging, and the hidden collateral consequences of criminal convictions interrupted individual work histories, shattered community support networks, and rendered large numbers of workers ineligible for gainful employment, unable to vote, banned from living with their families in public housing and even from visiting their own children. Withholding funds from schools that reported low student test scores but subsidizing private vouchers channeled money away from educational expenditures for the students who needed them most and toward those who needed them least. Income, inheritance, and property tax relief for the rich promoted poverty among the working class and the poor by leading to increased payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and (as we have seen in Ferguson and New Orleans) to city budgets that have come to rely on a system of fines for minor offenses, a system that reproduces the social relations of debt peonage that plagued black communities in the era of Jim Crow segregation. Moreover, when the organized abandonment of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina led to mass displacement in that city, Houston became a favored site for voluntary and involuntary resettlement. This contributed to instability and further threatened social cohesion in Houston’s black neighborhoods. The hard-working, loving, and disciplined women portrayed in John Biggers’s paintings still exist in places like the Third Ward. They labor every day for low wages: cleaning buildings, cooking food, nursing the sick, caring for the elderly, repairing telephone lines, driving trucks, filing papers, keeping accounting books, and teaching the young. They hold together families and friendship networks in the face of relentless attacks, and infuse values of decency, respect, and mutuality in those around them. But in public discourse and popular culture, they are eclipsed by incessantly repeated images that portray them as welfare queens, crack-addicted mothers, domineering harpies, gold diggers, and sexual deviants. Yet while virtually absent from general public discourse, the gendered images central to Biggers’s painting constituted an alternative archive, a repository of collective memory that held in abeyance lessons from the past so that they were ready to be deployed when the opportunity structure permitted. Paintings Come Alive as a Work of Social Sculpture Project Row Houses came into existence because the memories and values enshrined in the Shotgun series painted by John Biggers flashed up in the mind of Houston artist Rick Lowe as he took a tour of the Third Ward. This event had been designed to build support for an urban renewal project intended to remove the area’s residents and replace them with affluent whites. Aiming to replicate the gentrified redevelopment that had only recently transformed the city’s previously mostly black Fourth Ward into a wealthy enclave of mostly white young urban professionals, Lowe’s guides identified the shotgun houses as impediments to development, as outdated, unsafe, and unmarketable forms of architecture that needed to be cleared to enable better housing to be constructed. Lowe did not immediately have a counter argument to that position. At first, it seemed like a reasonable stance to take. As he looked more closely at the row houses, however, he was struck by the beauty of their copper roofs shimmering in the late afternoon Houston sunshine. He thought about the dynamic uses of small spaces that he had experienced in his youth as one of twelve children in an Alabama sharecropping family. He thought about the Third Ward women painted by Biggers and how they resembled his own mother who raised twelve children largely on her own, passing on to him the importance of hard work, teaching him to have “a strong ethical component to my work and to live my life right” (Feldman 2014). With images of the Shotgun series in his mind after the Third Ward tour, Lowe contacted Biggers and engaged him in long conversations about art and the obligations of artists. In those talks, Biggers emphasized the importance of art as a dynamic social force in everyday life. He argued that good architecture is necessary for communities to survive and thrive, but that architecture by itself was not enough. Communities require vibrant cultural and artistic activity, democratic educational activities, and a secure social safety net to prevent the loss of the creativity, ability, productivity, and sociability of their most vulnerable members. Lowe perceived this expanded understanding of the role of art as the answer to a question that had been plaguing him for several years. Hosting a group of high school students in his studio in 1990, Lowe showed them pieces he had been working on—cutout sculptures and billboard-size paintings addressing social issues. One of the students questioned him about the utility to the community of these representations of its problems. Contending that people already knew what the problems are, the student asked Lowe why he couldn’t use his creativity to propose solutions to the problems. “That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio,” Lowe recalls (Kimmelman 2006). Motivated to create an art that performed meaningful work in the world, Lowe fused the ideas and commitments of John Biggers with the enlarged conception of artistic practice articulated by German artist Joseph Beuys who argues that every human action should be considered part of art. Lowe turned his attention to the shotgun houses of the Third Ward that formed the focal point of Biggers’s Shotgun series, enlisting a few artist friends to begin work on restoring and renovating dilapidated decaying and abandoned houses on Holman Street, just a few blocks from Emancipation Park. The houses then became sites for the exhibition of works of art, many by established artists, but some by entry-level artists who had no previous opportunity to have their works displayed in public. In keeping with Afro-diasporic cosmologies, the Project Row Houses artists acted on the premise that both positive and negative spirits reside in places and people. The same abandoned buildings that looked like eyesores and functioned as crack houses could be brought back to life as beautiful works of art and sites promoting new patterns of creative activity. Gradually, haltingly, and unevenly, a community of artists and allies coalesced around a shared commitment to row house renovation. People appeared from different parts of the city. Some came to work, others only to watch. They helped create not only new art objects, but new social relations of arts production as well. Lowe begin to view the “art” component of the project as larger than just the restored buildings and the installations, sculptures, paintings, and photographs displayed inside them. To him the whole process made the community into the art, a work of living sculpture that would never be finished, that changed every day as new currents of imagination and artistry flowed through it. The project proceeded through cooperation and collaboration, with more than one hundred and fifty artists creating displays of their work at the site in its first decade of existence (Kimmelman 2006). Project Row Houses performed practical work in the world. Several of the abandoned houses had been used routinely for drug deals, drug taking, and prostitution. Residents felt that there was no point in calling on the police to stop this illicit activity. They surmised either that police officers had been paid off to allow the criminal conduct to take place without interruption or that a call for intervention in this neighborhood would simply be ignored, because officers were busy protecting places with higher market values and more valuable property. Yet Project Row Houses did for the neighborhood what police officers could not or would not do. The frenzy of activity around the art work attracted a flood of cars and foot traffic, people who came from all over the city, perhaps people of influence and importance. This unnerved the vice dealers and their customers. Disturbed by their sudden visibility in the area, they left for other spots that were quieter, more secluded, and for them, safer. Like the Bone Gang and Skeletons in New Orleans, Project Row Houses found a way to police a neighborhood without using actual police officers. Discovering untapped value in undervalued places and undervalued objects led organically to discovery of untapped value in previously undervalued people. Flurries of activity at Project Row Houses attracted the interest of Third Ward folk artist Cleveland “Flower Man” Turner who had decorated his rented homes with spectacular arrangements of painted appliances and tools, discarded toys, bicycle rims, stuffed animals, clocks, plastic plants, Christmas lights, street signs, and an enormous array of flowers. Before discovering and honing his artistic talents, Turner wandered about the city, sleeping under bridges and freeway overpasses or in empty houses, getting his food from restaurant dumpsters and drinking alcohol incessantly. Near death from alcohol poisoning in a hospital charity ward, one day Turner had a vision of a house made beautiful by ingeniously positioned and juxtaposed objects. He set out to make his dream reality. Once he started making art, he stopped drinking. In rescuing seemingly valueless objects from the trash and finding beauty in them, Flower Man found value in himself, and his example became valuable to others in the neighborhood, teaching them to not give up on people, to find something left to love, even in people who may have become unlovable (Lomax 2015; The Flower Man (Gone) 2015). What began as a modest art project has become a major initiative in community development. Aided by foundation grants and gifts from supporters and sympathizers, Project Row Houses restored and reopened the El Dorado Ballroom as a community center. A corner house at a key intersection serves as a social gathering spot where people of different ages, incomes, genders, and sexualities come together to play dominoes and talk. The mission of the organization embraces a community gardening project and a catering business that trains young people for jobs as nutritionists and food service workers. Bright and lively works of art decorating bus stops pay tribute to historically significant Third Ward artists and activists including Lightnin’ Hopkins and Carl Hampton. The key innovation of the project, however, and the one that best demonstrates its fidelity to the vision of John Biggers is the Young Mothers Residential Program (YMRP). The YMRP emerged from public discussions in the community about the direction of Project Row Houses. The creative place making that transformed abandoned row houses into art exhibits contributed to both economic development and community cohesiveness in the Third Ward. But in a neighborhood, city, and region where affordable housing accessible to black people is always in short supply, the idea that the houses should include dwellings for people was bound to arise. Yet for all its impressive growth, Project Row Houses could never produce the quantity of housing needed to even begin to meet the needs of Third Ward residents. If some of the houses were to be converted into dwellings, the question was who should live in them. Through deliberative talk and discussion, it became clear that single mothers with children had the most urgent need for housing. Their experiences at the intersection of economic marginality and domestic centrality left them with limited resources but large obligations in raising children. Project Row Houses decided to offer rent-free housing to Third Ward single mothers with children attempting to finish college degrees. In that way, the women and their children could get needed support, but the community also benefitted from the credentialing and training of talented community conscious women. Underscoring the community’s commitment to the advancement of its college student single mothers with children, the project connected the free housing to the YMRP. Rather than delegating all needed domestic work to each woman on an individual basis, the YMRP promotes a collaborative and collective community ethos that includes a paid Mentor Mom who helps and advises all of the women as they balance work, school, and home responsibilities. The community benefits from the work done by the YMRP, from both the secure shelter offered to children in their formative years and from the added education and credentials that women secure in college that position them to become future leaders at the local level. Project Row Houses also encourages the women to think of themselves as artists, not just those who create objects displayed or sold as works of art, but all of them as participants in a living sculpture in which everything they do is part of the art. The art lies not in the created object, but in the creative act. As Rick Lowe explains, “I’ve thought a lot about what makes this art as opposed to urban renewal or whatever. And I guess I see it as a program that encourages in the women who come here a state of mind, a way of thinking about how to live, which you could call the work of art.” Like the play of Mardi Gras Indian tribes and Bone Gangs in New Orleans, the work of Project Row Houses does not seem overtly religious by the standards of Euro-American secularism. The project does not conduct religious services in buildings designated as houses of worship. It entails collaboration and cooperation between believers and nonbelievers. Yet in its commitment to create sacred space in the degraded present to foreshadow freedom in the future, it evidences the enduring influence of Afro-diasporic spirituality. Like the street parades and performances in New Orleans, row house renovation in Houston is a collective and collaborative activity that calls a community into being through creative action. The ever-changing ambition and openness to improvisation of a work of living sculpture resists ideological and narrative closure by redefining the present as a site of infinite possibility. In New Orleans, Mardi Gras Indians reconfigure the image of the bloodthirsty “savage” of Wild West shows and Hollywood films into heroic warriors protecting their people from genocidal violence. The Bone Gangs use images of death to promote appreciation of life and seek to transform the community’s most feared brutes into its most fervent protectors. Similarly, in Houston, the activities of Project Row Houses revolve around real estate that has no apparent exchange value, enriching it not through speculation or investment but by deepening its use value. Perhaps most important, the private space of the home becomes a female-dominated locus for meaningful public and collective work. SACRED SPACES IN NEW ORLEANS AND HOUSTON Although rooted in specific local conditions and traditions, New Orleans street parades and performances and row house renovation in Houston have generalizable significance for religion in one additional respect. Secular society treats the place, time, and subjectivity of the market as if it were sacred. Declarations about the love of God may prevail in houses of worship on designated days, but in everyday practice individuals and institutions pursue the love of gain. Michael Apple describes the elevation of the market over all other spheres of endeavor as “a desocializing sensibility” (Apple 2010, 89, 91). Desires for individual gain stand at the center of this social world, eclipsing all consciousness of collective responsibilities and obligations for social justice. Because they elevate use value over exchange value, street parades and performances in New Orleans and row house renovation in Houston defy the logics of this neoliberal free market fundamentalism. Neoliberal subjects are expected to be first and foremost market subjects, guided by the imperatives of commodification, competition, and consumption. In New Orleans and Houston, however, black people advance a spatial imaginary in which public purposes are more important than private profits, collective advancement trumps individual advantage, and obligations to continuity with the past outweigh appeals for economic growth in the future. To the neoliberal policy makers, the market is a superhuman force that operates for the good of all. For black residents of New Orleans and Houston, however, devalued places can become sacred spaces. From their perspective, fealty to the market would entail a kind of idolatry that elevates the interests of property over the wellbeing of people. As humans whose ancestors had been designated as little more than property, black artists and activists have been especially sensitive to the elevation of property rights over human rights. Their enslaved ancestors slipped away at night to brush arbors in obscure parts of plantations where they danced the ring shout and prayed together in the African way by overturning a metal pot and singing sacred chants. After emancipation, aspects of slave religion survived in small and seemingly shabby storefront churches where ecstatic praise, impassioned singing, and speaking in tongues created spaces where the spatial relations and social hierarchies of this world temporarily gave way to a sense of world-transcending citizenship and inclusive social membership. After emancipation, exponents of the black prophetic tradition constantly warned against the temptation to define happiness in material terms. Imbuing secular sites with religious and moral meanings in New Orleans and Houston today draws directly on these Afro-diasporic religious practices. Parades in New Orleans and row house renovation in Houston identify urban underscapes as sacred places where the wisdom of the ancestors can be summoned to solve problems in the present. They spring up in sites of historical displacement and dispossession—places where urban renewal, freeway construction, and disinvestment dashed the community’s hopes and diminished its dignity. Yet in those very sites, they deploy decision, commitment, engagement, and action to render the victory of evil incomplete, temporary, and reversible. They cultivate capacities for a parallel vision that imagines multiple uses and functions for seemingly singular places and things. They reveal value in undervalued places and undervalued people. 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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Conjuring Sacred Space in Gulf Coast Cities
JF - Journal of the American Academy of Religion
DO - 10.1093/jaarel/lfx087
DA - 2018-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/conjuring-sacred-space-in-gulf-coast-cities-QXc5DbZaIK
SP - 1
EP - 525
VL - Advance Article
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -