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By Aurélie Godet, Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université de Paris. She is currently working on the history of New Orleans through the prism of festivities.

This is also to avoid a heavier toll than what had been paid locally: 700 victims from just the Orleans parish, of which a number of representatives of the local festive and musical arts such as Ronald Lewis, Director of The House of Dance and Feathers Museum, Sylvester Francis, Director of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, Ellis Marsalis, pianist and partriarch of one of the biggest neo-orleans musical families and several members of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club. 

Anticipating (and more often, encouraging) the measures taken by mayor LaToya Cantrell, the carnival organizations (krewes) have, for several months now, thought about new types of festivities, compatible with the health measures recommended nationally. That's why the 2021 year could give birth to a new carnivalistic tradition: transforming houses into floats by people themselves (with, sometimes, the help of local artists). The result, in turn satirical, nostalgic or poetic, has been displayed since January 6 to residents and tourists who go on the main roads of the city, but also on social media (@House Float, #housefloat), or in quickly printed books whose proceeds are partially given to actors from the arts sector, particularly affected. The model even has imitators beyond Louisiana since the map of house floats published on the Krewe of House Floats' website has cities as diverse as Portland, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Anchorage, Londres, Perth and Abu Dhabi.

As for other major players on the local festivities scene, such as Barry Kern, Director of the Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World amusement park and John Georges, owner of the news sites Nola.com and TheAdvocate.com, they have promoted a virtual carnival (Mardi Gras For Y’All) loaded with concerts, media reports, interviews and archive images, the content having been released in three parts on February 12, 13 and 14. The main goal of the initiative, widely supported by the New Orleans town hall, the tourism sector and the leaders of the largest carnival organizations, was to take care of the city's branding in the United States and abroad. 

The energy deployed to animate this type of "carnival", as well as the carnivalistic organizations, in such a difficult situation is impressive, and confirms the tight intertwining between festivities and civic identity in New Orleans. Already in 1857, Jesse Milton Emerson said that:

"Amusements form a leading feature of life in New Orleans, and, perhaps, are as much overdone there as they are neglected or undervalued in New Haven, and in most New England towns. […] There is visible in the population a sort of reckless gayety, and a passion for amusement, and a disregard of death, quite surprising to a cautious man". Jesse Milton Emerson, "Up the Mississippi", Emerson’s Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly 5: 40, octobre 1857, pp. 433–56, 443.

For many, it gives definitive proof that the carnival never really dies (as Emily Perkins and Katherine Dunn of the Historic New Orleans Collection recently reminded us, it has survived fourteen cancellations between 1857 and 2021), that "bad years inspire grand carnivals"[1] and that New Orleans, a fragile city in many ways, is not down yet (or submerged). This resilience speech, largely broadcasted in the media, reminds us a lot of the one that took place in 2006 after hurricane Katrina passed through.

This overflow of creativity also confirms a tendency started in the beginning of the 1990s: after decades of exponential growth via the "super-krewes", of advertisement and touristification left and right, some residents expressed the wish to return to a more "human" carnival, more participatory, more satirical also, and especially centered in different districts of the city, rather than just on St. Charles avenue[2].

So, if the 2021 edition of the New Orleans carnival does not merit the epithet of "atonic", it still raises many questions within the various local festivities organizations:

• How can we honor this tradition while not denying the gravity of the situation, or losing sight of the striking inequalities that the epidemic and successive lockdowns have revealed or aggravated?
• Doesn't the success of the house floats show the need to come back to a more local carnival, less focused on the tourists ("a party people give themselves" said Goethe) and also more ecological (this last criterion being increasingly put forward by the festivities organizations)?
• Where is the fine line between public health prevention and the economic needs of people working in the arts?
• Is it not time to diversify the local economy after decades of consolidating only tourist and oil industries?
• Can local initiatives, no matter how creative or effective they may be, replace a decent healthcare system?

Though these questions have been asked elsewhere of course (which can be seen in the growing number of conferences and publications on the topic of parties during crisis periods[3]), they are particularly poignant for New Orleans where festivities have been an indicator and an observatory of social relationships for a long time. We will therefore need to follow closely the decisions that will be taken in the years to come in order to recognize the signs of a potential "festive decline" of the city and a more global transformation of the local economy.

[1] Christopher Benfey, Degas in New Orleans, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999, p. 173.

[2] Read on this topic Robin Roberts, Leslie A. Wade et Frank de Caro, Downtown Carnival: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans, Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 2019.

[3] We can cite in particular the upcoming symposium at Charles University in Prague, "Ritualising in Corona Times" (19-20 juin 2021) and Emmanuelle Lallement's article, "From Bal Masques to Masked Balls: Festivity in the Era of Social Distancing", Journal of Festive Studies 2 (2020), pp. 32-40.