The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage

Overview

We all take up space one way or another. Some of us can slink by relatively unnoticed during our sliver in time. Some of us can't seem to contain ourselves and are as ever present as Ignatious J. Reilly bulging from the pages of John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces. ¹ Wait a minute. Ignatious is a fictional character. He certainly doesn't take up any geographic space. Of course, I just called him "he" as if "he" were a person. A quick search of Google Scholar shows that "he" is referenced in no less than 118 scholarly articles. I have recently seen him referenced by a journalist, Andre Codrescu, ² and a geographer, Rob Shields, ³ in two very different contexts. There has even been a statue erected in his honor. Perhaps he does take up a geographic space? Of course, a statue is a hard, defined, immobile space. This is very unlike Ignatious, a bulbous train wreck of a person inciting disaster at every turn. No, this is something very different. Ignatious is fictional yet eternal. He exists not only in space but in time as part of our collective cultural identity. His cultural presence diffuses to anywhere words can appear on a page or a screen. Yet his central node, his point of creation, is New Orleans. There he is woven into the marvelous tapestry of deep time and intangible space along the threads of poets, jazz musicians, gumbo and lagniappe. It is deep time in that it influences our understanding of the present while breathing life into our past. It is intangible space filled with the sights, sounds, smells and feelings of our common culture that allows us to give meaning to the tangible spaces geographers measure with longitudes and latitudes.

Academically, the goal is to have Advanced Placement Human Geography students apply their studies of geography and culture to themselves and their community, adding interest and relevance to their learning. Additionally, students should be able to apply the AP Human Geography course concepts to other neighborhoods. To help students broaden their horizons in this manner, I will be partnering a teacher at a high school in New Orleans. We will have our students communicate with each other as they examine the heritage of their communities. Utilizing a New Orleans neighborhood as a comparative case study will reinforce my students' understanding of their own community.

According to the work of Dr. Robert Marzano, one of the best strategies for student retention is comparative study. ⁴ Perhaps, if my students can compare their own community to another and be placed in the position of defining and describing the culture of their community to others, they will leave my class with a deeper understanding of themselves and their community. By integrating classic geographic and ethnographic strategies with modern technology, I hope to give my students an authentic understanding of a sense of place.

As a teacher of not only geography, but Advanced Placement Human Geography, I am supposed to teach my students the "spatial perspective," whatever that means. I have never found an adequate definition. Our widely praised textbook, The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography by James M. Rubenstein does not include the term in its glossary. ⁵ The College Board, in its course description developed by "a group of nationally renowned subject matter experts," comes closer to understanding.

Geography looks at the world from a spatial perspective, seeking to understand the changing spatial organization and material character of Earth's surface. One of the critical advantages of a spatial perspective is the attention it focuses on how phenomena are related to one another in particular places. Students should thus learn not just to recognize and interpret patterns but to assess the nature and significance of the relationships among phenomena that occur in the same place, and to understand how tastes and values, political regulations, and economic constraints work together to create particular types of cultural landscapes. ⁶

My ninth grade students are not amused by this goal of the course. When I have them change the word phenomena to things or stuff, the dimmer switch turns brighter. When I tell them that it's what happens when two things occupy the same space to make something new like chocolate and peanut butter making a candy cup, they start to get it. Of course, then I date myself via pop culture references, and I wonder how much longer they will get it as snappy slogans give way to pop music and movie sponsorships in the advertising world. Still, it seems this idea also takes up space in our collective culture. Although such candies exist in the world, I do not have to physically produce one or even describe in much detail in order to conjure up the popular image of peanut butter wrapped in chocolate in a bright orange wrapper with yellow lettering. The branding now has intangible space in the collective consciousness with nodes of activity around most of the convenience stores, grocers and snack counters in our community.

However, my example to the students is still one of material objects and the idea of the cultural landscape is much deeper and more profound than any material object. It is the intangible space I need my students to see in order to truly appreciate the landscape of their community. However, several factors challenge this goal.

I teach at Gage Park High School in the Gage Park neighborhood located in the Southwest Side of Chicago. While its traditional boundaries are the CTA Orange Line to the north, 59 ^th Street to the south and old rail bridges to the east and west, the cultural identity of Gage Park seems perpetually tied to surrounding neighborhoods. In over ten years of experience teaching at Gage Park High School, I have heard the community lumped into categories such as West Englewood, Marquette Park, Chicago Lawn, and even Pilsen. The only time Gage Park seems to retain its identity is when the media reports on a shooting or other act of violence around the school or involving one of our students, further impeding a positive, unifying identity. Geographically, Gage Park sits at the confluence of numerous other boundaries which impedes its identity. Legislative districts at all levels of government; city wards, state representative and senatorial districts and even federal congressional districts converge here leaving the community on the fringe of political leadership. Even the organizations that serve the community such as the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, the Southwest Organizing Project and the Southwest Youth Collaborative are not exclusive to the Gage Park Community. The last institution to truly serve the traditional neighborhood was Gage Park High School; however, recent school reform and development efforts have shifted the neighborhood school boundaries to compensate for a rash of school closings and reinventions in surrounding neighborhoods. In some cases, this has led to extreme overcrowding and, more recently, under-enrollment. Additionally, the population of the neighborhood is very transient. The area was recently hard hit by the fallout of extensive predatory mortgage lending forcing numerous foreclosures and evictions. There is also a large immigrant population relatively new to the community, which either has not yet absorbed or has radically changed the intangible space defining the neighborhood. My colleague, Victor Harbison, whose students developed the Community Transformed Project, explains the need for neighborhood identity best.

I had a student who didn't believe that Dr. King had marched in our community. When asked why, he just said "Well, if it was true, there would be a sign or something." That was the inspiration for this civics project. Someone who had lived their whole life in this community didn't know what had happened here. ⁷

In the above example, the memory of deep time and intangible heritage was almost lost. Memory plays an essential role in how we define the intangible space, which in turn helps us define our hard semiotic spaces.

During a discussion of the idea of memory at the Yale National Initiative seminar, The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage, I recalled an article, "Remembering the Forgetting of New Orleans" by sociologist Daina Cheyenne Harvey, that eloquently describes the impact of spaces on our collective memory. She refers to the spaces of amnesia "that we are socialized to ignore" being extra vulnerable following traumas like Katrina.

President Bush standing in front of Jackson Square "waiting for life and hope to return" surely constrains the memory of the space as a site where slaves were hanged intentionally for civil disobedience. Spaces such as these are spaces of forgetting. Either by intentionally removing objects in the space or the space itself from the collective memory. ⁸

However, sometimes the amnesia still takes hold. Along our tour of the city, Dave Cash reported to me that sometimes he and his friends will see a new development and be unable to remember what was there before. ¹¹

Harvey continues her sociological study of New Orleans geography with a discussion of spaces of anamnesis where intentionally removed objects instead enhance the memory of the space. For example, millions of people a day passed by a view of the World Trade Center without a second thought. Now, nearly a decade after its destruction, that building is firmly planted in the national consciousness soon to be memorialized in hard space by a design titled "Reflecting Absence." Harvey continues by applying this anamnesis to New Orleans.

If the Ninth Ward and other everyday, unmarked black spaces are not rebuilt, whatever replaces them will certainly be located in a space of anamnesis. The void or whatever replaces the original will serve as a "mnemonic prompt" Places such as Madame John's Legacy, which survived the citywide fire of 1794, making it the second-oldest building in the Mississippi Valley, lead us to reflect on their surroundings and prompt us to both remember and wonder what has been removed in the city through previous disasters. ¹²

The mixture of these developments seems to intensify the memory of those who were there before and alert new observers to what once was. During our journey, Dave Cash showed me the former location of a close friend's house now gone and described in detail how another brick home located directly behind the London Avenue Canal Levee breach had been pushed off of its foundation and spun around into the street. ¹³

And finally, Harvey addresses asemiotic spaces. This I believe may be the very essence of intangible space. In contrast to the signs, symbols and hard objects of three dimensional physical space or the roads, signs and symbols that define our two-dimensional maps, asemiotic memory expands the liminal breezeways between the intangible spaces of our consciousness, breathing life into our multi-dimensional maps of desire.

The sticky smell of pralines, the sounds of Mardi Gras, the omnipresent jazz, the sights of crawfish, the warm breeze coming off of the Mississippi, and the bricolage style of its architecture all reference New Orleans and yet do not signify any particular space. ¹⁴

Although the asemiotic space is difficult to express in a photograph, there is no more obvious example of this than Bourbon Street in New Orleans' French Quarter. I quickly discovered that getting lost in the French Quarter would be very difficult. If you close your eyes and listen, you can hear the din of this iconic space and follow your ears, or run the other way depending upon your mood. The mixed blare of various genres of music, the rattle of beads, the raucous shouts of drunken tourists and the stench of stale beer immediately alert anyone with their senses intact that Bourbon Street is nigh.

Although there are also plenty of things one may also see on Bourbon Street that will be unlikely in any other part of New Orleans.

This is the level of understanding I need my students to obtain about their own neighborhood. Whether it is by the transience of Gage Park's population or the whims of public policy or the shifting of two-dimensional boundaries or other yet to be discovered forces, the intangible heritage and thereby the intangible space of its common neighborhood culture is at risk.

Despite these obstacles, there is a vibrant diversity in this colorful community. Participation with community organizations seems to be on the rise, and there is now a marker honoring the community's connection to Dr. Martin Luther King. For the past three years, students of Gage Park High School have been engaged in the development of a museum-quality touch-screen kiosk full of historical source documents, photographs and oral histories that has spent the last year on tour to various public forums including the DuSable Museum of African American History during Black History Month. The next phase of this project, to which my students will contribute the results of their study of intangible space in the community, will be to make this wealth of material available online allowing the heritage of the community to diffuse outward rather than constrict inward. Furthermore, despite the ethno-centric nature of a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, both African-American and Latino students embraced and participated in the project. The Gage Park neighborhood itself is increasingly Hispanic; however, the high school population, though relatively balanced between the two, is seeing an increase in its African-American population. Two of Chicago's richest cultures fuse together here in what should be a powerful block of common interest. It is my hope, that the positive exploration of intangible space by my students will fulfill the broader goal of this unit to further unify and empower their diverse, underserved community through its deep time, intangible heritage. Deep time, rather than historical record is an important distinction. To quote Jill Lane, "Deep time does not obviate social time or social action: the concept of deep time allows us to see sociality against the relief of other temporal scales." ¹⁵