All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival

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Description

With this colorful study, Reid Mitchell takes us to Mardi Gras–to a every year ritual that sweeps the richly multicultural city of New Orleans into a frenzy of parades, pageantry, dance, drunkenness, music, sexual display, and social and political bombast. In All on a Mardi Gras Day Mitchell tells us probably the most most intriguing stories of Carnival since 1804. Woven into his narrative are observations of the meaning and messages of Mardi Gras–themes of unity, exclusion, and elitism course through these tales as they do in the course of the Crescent City.

Moving in the course of the decades, Mitchell describes the city’s diverse cultures coming together to compete in Carnival performances. We observe powerful social clubs, or krewes, designing their elaborate parade displays and extravagant parties; Creoles and Americans in conflict over whose dances belong within the ballroom; enslaved Africans and African Americans preserving a sense in their heritage in processions and dances; white supremacists battling Reconstruction; working-class blacks creating the fancy Krewe of Zulu; the birth and reign of jazz; the gay community holding lavish balls; and naturally tourists purchasing an authentic experience in line with the dictates of our commercial culture. Interracial friction, nativism, Jim Crow separatism, the hippie movement–Mitchell illuminates the expression of these and other American themes in events ranging from the 1901 formation of the anti-prohibitionist Carrie Nation Club to the controversial 1991 ordinance desegregating Carnival parade krewes.

Through the conflicts, Mitchell asserts, “I see in Mardi Gras much what I hear in a in reality good jazz band: a model for the just society, the joyous community, the heavenly city…A model for community where individual expression is the foundation for social harmony and where continuity is the foundation for creativity.” All on a Mardi Gras Day journeys into a world where hope persists for a rare balance between diversity and unity.

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