Black geographies in New Orleans and Salvador da Bahia, Brasil
Description
Beyond the built environment, cultural communities and their expressions create comprehensive historical narratives that reflect the ways that their embodied memory informs contemporary realities. Embedded within cultural heritage tourism exists an unequal dynamic between members of community who produce the culture, and those positioned to commodify it. To provide a comprehensive account of a place, the multiperspectivity of generations of community members, those with kinship ties, and extended networks of people with proximity due to neighborhood assemblage is required. The process of creating a historic tourist destination juxtaposes the displacement of Afro-descendant and native communities with the symbolic valorization of their traditional practices and cultural contributions. Liberatory and self-determined modes of passing on tradition not only ensure the spiritual and sociopolitical longevity of Afro-descendant communities, they also constitute the infrastructure and define the identity of a city. This thesis is a comparative study that interrogates legacies of coloniality through an analysis of noise ordinances and other state-sanctioned measures designed to interrupt and repress cultural continuities in New Orleans and Bahia, Brazil.