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Reviews
| New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City. By J. Mark Souther. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xi + 303 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth).
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With the decline of manufacturing and other traditional "rust belt" industries and the rise of suburbia after World War II, U.S. policy makers and business leaders in many cities have sought ways to staunch the outflow of residents and capital and to attract new residents and investors. In global economic centers such as New York, steep losses in manufacturing and port employment have been offset by increases in producer- and financial-services jobs and the accompanying economic activity, including tourism. In less well-integrated cities, however, policy makers have tried to stem economic decline by promoting their cities' perceived cultural uniqueness or by developing some contrived set of attractions or both. |
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In New Orleans on Parade, J. Mark Souther traces the attempts of local elites to maintain the city's viability. Although Souther covers some material from before 1945, the bulk of this book explores the later twentieth century, when prominent New Orleanians charted a course that made New Orleans a kind of exemplar of tourism-led urban redevelopment that prefigured later developments in other American cities. In an apt metaphor, he likens its preserved historic core, the French Quarter, to a Pittsburgh steel mill or a Detroit automobile plant as an engine of economic development that produces not steel or cars but tourist experiences. |
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Souther's purpose is to examine "the role of race and class in shaping the rise of urban tourism, as well as the role of tourism in shaping public responses to urban decline" (p. 10). He accomplishes this by focusing on key aspects of New Orleans's culture and its tourism industry: the French Quarter and the city's historic preservation movement, jazz, racial segregation and the desegregation movement, and Mardi Gras. This is as much a history of post–World War II economic development in New Orleans as it is a history of tourism, because tourism promotion has figured so prominently in the city's economic development since the 1950s and especially since the 1980s oil bust. As Souther shows, the importance of tourism in local economic planning has risen from almost an afterthought to being the only show in town, to the extent that by the 1980s it was seen by the city's politicians as the "only hope of fighting urban decay" (p. 185). |
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With some exceptions, I found New Orleans on Parade more an elite than a people's history of tourism. Souther clearly describes how real estate interests and the city's dominant social and political groups have controlled this industry. He describes how white elites have exploited African American residents for economic gain, not only through a crass—and at times racist—(mis)appropriation of African American and Afro-Creole cultures, but also through low-paying service-sector jobs. Considering the focus of this book, however, Souther could have described more extensively how working-class minorities have responded to elite dominance. It is surprising, for example, that he is not more attentive to New Orleans's labor history and attempts to unionize hotels and other tourism-related businesses. The short shrift paid to Huey Long, Louisiana's popular governor of the 1930s, is also surprising, since Long's administration was responsible for many of the roads and other infrastructural projects that first made mass tourism possible. |
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Overall, this is a welcome addition to the literature on New Orleans and the growing scholarship on the history of tourism. Although the focus is New Orleans, the story of its rise to prominence as a major tourist center resonates with the histories of cities as diverse as Savannah, Charleston, Baltimore, and San Francisco. In charting the transformation of New Orleans into a "Creole Disneyland," Souther sheds considerable light not only on recent local history, but also on the transition of many cities worldwide from centers devoted to the manufacture of goods to sites of consumption whose primary production is tourist experience.
David L. Gladstone
University of New Orleans
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