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“Not Just the Levees Broke”: JazzVernacular and the Rhetoric of theDispossessed in Spike Lee's When theLevees BrokeLisa M. Corrigan & Amanda N. EdgarPublished online: 12 Jan 2015.

To cite this article: Lisa M. Corrigan & Amanda N. Edgar (2015) “Not Just the Levees Broke”:Jazz Vernacular and the Rhetoric of the Dispossessed in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke ,Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12:1, 83-101, DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2014.995685

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“Not Just the Levees Broke”: JazzVernacular and the Rhetoric of theDispossessed in Spike Lee’s When theLevees BrokeLisa M. Corrigan & Amanda N. Edgar

This essay proposes the notion of the “jazz vernacular” as a tool specific to the Creoleculture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability bothgeographically and historically. We argue that the jazz vernacular is a discoursestructured by musical repertoire. The jazz vernacular provides a channel for thehistorical pain of the black diaspora by playing in the background, both literally andfiguratively, of communication in and about New Orleans. This essay considers SpikeLee’s documentary When The Levees Broke to understand how the jazz vernacularframes hurricane Katrina as well as how it frames Lee’s film as an intervention into“neoliberal” racial discourses. We argue that Lee’s film utilizes the jazz vernacular as ametadiscourse to reinforce the ways in which residents used jazz to restructure culturalmemory around the rhetoric of the dispossessed in New Orleans after Katrina. Whenthe Levees Broke uses testimonials and affective communication to structure thenarrative of Katrina through elements of the jazz vernacular like: displacement,embodiment, brashness, and improvisation to connect contemporary Creole NewOrleanians to a long history of structural oppression and violence. By harnessingperformative elements, Lee’s film performs a jazz intervention into neoliberaldiscourses about freedom, defense, safety, and heroism that contrasts these discourseswith the despair and the resistance of black America. Consequently, Lee’s use of thejazz vernacular relies on native musical culture to recontextualize what neoliberalismhad erased.

Keywords: Jazz; Vernacular; Katrina; New Orleans; Spike Lee

Lisa M. Corrigan is at the Department of Communication, University of Arkansas. Amanda N. Edgar is at theDepartment of Communication, University of Missouri. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewersand the editor for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Correspondence to: Lisa M. Corrigan,Department of Communication, 427 Kimpel Hall, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA. Email:lcorriga@uark.edu

Communication and Critical/Cultural StudiesVol. 12, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 83–101

ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) © 2015 National Communication Associationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2014.995685

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[J]azz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternaltom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in awhite world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joyand laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.1

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, the world watched oneof the deadliest summer storms in recorded history prompt the biggest civilengineering disaster the United States had ever seen. With a death toll of almost1,900, Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans’s parishes, destroying $81 billion worthof property. Many New Orleanians lacked the resources to evacuate, makingnarratives of their suffering ubiquitous. In particular, the images of huddled massesat the Louisiana Superdome functioned as metonymy for the storm’s destruction asthe slow federal response crowded hundreds of thousands of hurricane victims into aspace without adequate food, water, sewage disposal, medical care, and airconditioning in the blistering August heat. The Superdome provided a compellingrhetorical backdrop as mainstream media sources variously framed the tragedy asnatural disaster or catastrophic government failure.

Mainstream media frames were complicated by the fact that the majority of theresidents still in the city when Katrina hit were poor and black, a fact hip hop artistKanye West pointed out in a moment of unscripted reflection in a live Katrinatelethon. On the telethon, which aired in a media context saturated with publicimages of black residents dying in New Orleans’s streets, West famously asserted,“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” As Prajna Parasher has argued,national trauma “is never a single event but a series of transitions” moving acrosstime, unfolding through constantly changing narration.2 Katrina was a moment ofnational trauma understood initially as an act of God but, only days later, as aspectacle of human failure as black bodies littered the city waiting for federal disasterteams to mobilize.

While West’s statement was perhaps inelegant, it catalyzed the sense that thetragedy was emerging through a series of transitions that changed how many peopleperceived Katrina through the lenses of race and class. His reaction to what Girouxhas called the “politics of disposability,” a political orientation characterized byineffective public policies affecting black communities in cities like New Orleans, wasnotable because it laid the blame for the Katrina disaster at the feet of President Bush,who came to represent decades of GOP legislation that eroded the social welfare netthat helped the black poor. Giroux writes that, in the biopolitics of disposability, poorpeople of color

not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life’s tragedies but are alsosupposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicatedfrom the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, disposable,and heir to that army of socially homeless that no longer existed in color-blindAmerica.3

West’s statements highlighted the way (primarily white) governmental officials havehistorically seen the poor, black residents of New Orleans as disposable. Thissimplified condemnation foregrounds race while simultaneously submerging black

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complicity in corruption and malfeasance despite the documented corruption of NewOrleans mayor Ray Nagin.4

West’s blaming of President George W. Bush “revealed a vulnerable and destitutesegment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but hadspent the better part of two decades demonizing” while highlighting musicians’ rolein articulating racial politics.5 Within US neoliberal discourse, colorblind politicserased the suffering of whole cities of citizens where, according to Achille Mbembe,“vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status ofthe living dead.”6 The black poor have been rendered disposable in neoliberal politicsdue to their inability to either produce or consume goods and their dependency onothers to survive. Thus, the erasure of their citizenship provided a rhetorical strategydepicting residents of New Orleans as living dead. As analyses like West’sforegrounded race and class, the narrative frame of Katrina changed, and officialsdeclared martial law with nearly 65,000 military personnel assisting people referredto as “refugees” rather than “residents.”7

The competing frames pundits used to explain the civil failures following Katrinanecessitated the reappraisal of narratives about the hurricane. This was particularlytrue since the scope of the devastation allowed simplified proclamations like West’sto circulate widely, placing blame for the levee failures squarely on the government.Spike Lee’s documentary When The Levees Broke served as a tool to reappraiseblame, to narrativize the storm’s aftermath, and to highlight how federal agenciesfailed New Orleanians in a genre marked by “outlaw discourse,” John Sloop and KentOno’s term for “logics of justice” distinct from “a culture’s dominant logics ofjudgment.”8 This out-law film used testimony from New Orleanians that contextua-lized Katrina in the historical experiences of black Americans since slavery as a wayto return agency to them in the face of the Bush Administration’s disinterest in theirvoices and lives. This temporality is charted through the rhetoric of the dispossessedthat speak in the storm’s aftermath to demonstrate how the politics of disposabilityrendered them mute and invisible.

Even while Lee’s film offered both a microphone (to amplify the oppositionalvoices of Katrina’s victims) and a pedagogical lesson (on the politics of disposabilityfor film audiences) to challenge neoliberal discourses of disposability through theperspectives of New Orleans’s poor black citizens, it simultaneously simplifiedbinaries of black and white, victim and perpetrator, and mainstream and counter-hegemonic.9 The inherent complexities of Katrina complicate Lee’s importantintervention into the systemic neglect of New Orleans’s black citizens, highlightingthe ways that Lee himself ignores particular contours of the neoliberal context. Byfocusing primarily on the Ninth Ward’s black population, Lee risks obfuscating therole of dispossession in the lives of New Orleans’s non-black citizens, while reifyingthe black/white, rich/poor, and mainstream/marginal binaries that support neoliberaldiscourses of white supremacy and class inequality. Lee’s crucial intervention intocontemporary racial politics, we argue, emerged in a sea of Katrina commentary asone more imperfect discourse, though one progressive in its propensity to ignoremany of the ubiquitously foregrounded contours.

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Thus, we propose the notion of the “jazz vernacular” as a critical lens forunderstanding the ongoing racial discourses of disposability. We argue that the jazzvernacular offers a way of understanding discourses structured by musical repertoirelike those of the Creole culture in New Orleans. The jazz vernacular provides aperspective that understands and complicates the historical pain of the black diasporaby listening to the background, both literally and figuratively, of communication inand about New Orleans. This essay reads When The Levees Broke through a lens ofthe jazz vernacular to understand how Lee’s framing of Katrina both intervenes intoand reinforces binaries that contribute to neoliberal racial discourses. Introducingthis new way of reading jazz texts generally and Lee’s film specifically, we argue thatWhen the Levees Broke utilizes jazz as a metadiscourse of support for residents ofNew Orleans as they grapple with the cultural memory and rhetorics of thedispossessed after Katrina. Lee’s film connects contemporary Creole New Orleaniansto a long history of structural oppression and violence, simultaneously complicatingand reinforcing particular discourses about freedom, safety, heroism, and the historyof racial inequality in New Orleans.

The Jazz Vernacular

Humming in the background of When the Levees Broke’ rhetoric is a current of jazzvernacular, complicating and simplifying black disposability in America. While GrantFarred’s work has attempted to understand how the black vernacular functions as“the transcription of the popular (subaltern) experience into political opposition-ality,”10 we move beyond this broad theory to talk about specific vernaculardiscourses that circulate in geographically defined communities like New Orleans.We understand jazz vernacular as the repertoire of individual and collective jazzperformances that articulate personal and political investments of black urbancommunities through improvised resistance, particularly in the midst of socialtragedy.11 Because certain iterations of jazz function to produce “a politicallysymbolic artistic representation of the consequences of America’s unfinished processof identification,” the jazz vernacular has the potential to accommodate contempor-ary cultural currents.12

New Orleans jazz is rooted in and dependent upon the maintenance of spatialintegrity, drawing its meaning from the land. This rootedness in the Louisiana earthgives New Orleans jazz its distinctive richness and humanity as a musical form thatStanley Crouch notes is “based in the rocky ground and the swamp mud of elementalexperience while rising toward the stars with the intellectual determination of asequoia.”13 Thus, this form of jazz reflects the physical landscape of New Orleansthrough both the murky crawl of the “Black Bottom,” a nod to dark mud of coastalwaters, and the aural heritage symbolized in Congo Square. Infused with a loyaltyand longing for homeland, New Orleans jazz often draws upon the dispossession ofthe slave experience and black American diaspora.

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In mapping some of the ways the jazz vernacular facilitates criticism ofcontemporary political discourses, we suggest that jazz artists and intellectuals usethe jazz vernacular to interrogate power. Farred explains that the vernacularintellectual “articulates an equivocal relationship to hegemony,” where the “verna-cular is defined by its immersion in the language of the popular, the particularities,idiosyncrasies, and distinctness of vernacular speech; the vernacular is marked by itsability to empower via popular culture.”14 While such empowerment is crucial tocounterhegemonic projects, empowerment through popular culture also risksembedding hegemonic discourses within the popular. In the musical language ofthe jazz vernacular, this paradox emerges through four features: attention to blackdisplacement and its emotional affect; emphasis on bodily experience; brashness intone and timbre; and artistic improvisation.

First, jazz’s origin in the displacement of and disregard for black communitymanifests as accessibility of emotion, exposing black pain while risking discoursesthat essentialize blackness as pain. Though jazz performance can be read ascelebratory and communal, New Orleans jazz grew out of the city’s history ofdesperation and perceived disposability. Jazz historian Ted Gioia notes that late-nineteenth-century Louisiana was in a state of economic collapse, New Orleans losttwo percent of its population to yellow fever, and black infant mortality reached45 percent.15 This culture of loss propelled Louisiana’s hot jazz, even as nativistlegislation pushed New Orleans jazz musicians north to Chicago in the jazz diaspora.Indeed, this undertow of diasporic pain surfaces in the raspy voices of jazz singersand lyrical references to separation in tunes like “Chicago Bound Blues.”16 AsManning Marable argues, history is more than the past; it is “the architecture of apeople’s memory, framed by our shared rituals, traditions, and notions of commonsense.”17 In this case, diasporic pain is built into the city’s history, commemorated bymelodies that bridge contemporary and nostalgic New Orleans.

While jazz offers counterhegemonic discourses highlighting the pain of racialinequalities, pushing back against the institutions that promote a culture ofdisposability, it simultaneously risks oversimplifying historical cultural expression.The roots of jazz vernacular are complex, and though they channel the historical painof black life in ways that can work as counterhegemony, they also carry conflictedhistories of jazz. Many early Creole musicians were classically trained in Europeanmusical traditions at Paris conservatories, jazz halls in New Orleans and Chicagowere early spaces of integration for both bands and audiences, and New Orleans’sjazz is often associated with contemporary party tourism that pays little regard toracial histories.18 Thus, jazz goes beyond matters of black and white to muddy racialdistinctions of historical dominance and commodification. Though jazz’s complexracial history plays an important role in contemporary iterations, a jazz vernacularlike that of Lee’s film risks smoothing over these contours in service of celebratingblack historical perseverance in the face of hardships.

The emotional manifestations of urban hardship in jazz create its raw authenticity,and this occasionally oversimplified framing of jazz vernacular as an essentially blackspace emerges in Lee’s When the Levees Broke. By asking residents of New Orleans’s

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Ninth Ward to testify to the horror of Katrina’s aftermath, Lee rehumanizes citizensdisposable to the federal government. The wail of New Orleans’s jazz soundunderscores the despair of dispossession, abandonment, and poverty, amplifyingvoices silenced by the government’s deafening rhetoric of disposability. Accordingly,Lee urges Katrina’s victims to do what jazz players do through music: “Tell the story,tell it with style and resonance, tell it all, or nearly all … tell it in your own way, inyour own voice.”19 In championing these voices, though, Lee often overshadows boththe poor white suffering at the hands of government failure and the complicity of anyblack actors in the disaster’s trajectory. By juxtaposing testimonial and jazz’shistorical pain, Lee’s film offers a mouthpiece for generational suffering to buildthe melodic underscore that narrates a new wave of black pain, isolation, and anger,often by simplifying the city’s racial complexity.

Second, jazz vernacular’s affective power is often expressed as a manifestation ofmovement, sexuality, and bodily experience. This is best evidenced by the discoursesdividing classical music from jazz. The dichotomy between classical music and jazz isriddled with racist undertones, particularly within the context of musical affect. AsPhilip Tagg decries, the categories of “white music” and “black music” always havebeen essentialized categories, with “white music” linked to the classical cognitivedomain and “black music” associated with the physical, sexualized, and subhumandomains of the slave experience.20 Acknowledging this racist binary is important tounraveling discourses that essentialize blackness as corporeality and whiteness asintellect, but, paradoxically, such an acknowledgement also risks reinforcing the verybinary it aims to dismantle. As a tool for interrogating the conflicted space ofracialized culture, the jazz vernacular both highlights the importance of the body,particularly in contexts like Katrina’s immense destruction, and recirculatesdehumanizing discourses of black corporeality.

The conflicted ground of black bodily discourses is integral to both the style andstructure of Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Just as jazz conjures an affective response,the broken black bodies on the screen elicit corporeal repulsion, fear, and rage. Onthe other hand, Lee’s visual framing privileges suffering black bodies and dominatingwhite bodies, reifying racial binaries through montages of sweat, blood, and blackrotting flesh, implying a corporeality of blackness alongside its protests of NewOrleans’s black citizens’ dehumanization. In short, we suggest that Lee’s jazzvernacular builds upon racialized links between jazz and the body to bothtransformative and regressive ends.

Third, New Orleans jazz is known for the brashness of its brass instrumentation,layering bawdy timbre onto rhythmic syncopation. Though the form’s purposefulimperfection gives the appearance of authenticity, LeRoi Jones argues that jazz’scultural context catalyzed its aesthetic.21 Once the human context for jazz’sdevelopment is built back into the critical musical discourse, Jones asserts, jazzbecomes a musical rhetoric of resistance; for example, bebop pushed back against thegrowing dominance of white swing, and the black origins of jazz resisted whiteindustry ownership.22 Jones’s potential oversimplification of the form’s racial rootsaside, brashness as protest may invite a conflicted response. By using black aesthetics

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to deny the white supremacist systems of exploitative labor, jazz foregrounds blackvisibility in urban centers. Such a characterization is simultaneously risky andunstable, though, as it denies the secondary role of white sympathizers throughoutjazz history and may function as evidence of the “primitive” nature of black culture.23

Still, Lee’s use of the brash timbre of New Orleans jazz translates to a bold, criticalstance on the government’s handling of Katrina while the syncopated beat manifestsin the fragmented narrative of victimized black bodies. Lee thus applies anestablished aesthetic of resistant syncopation to imagery of displacement, transform-ing Katrina’s visual politics into oppositional resistance. In doing so, Lee’s filmconsolidates blame after Katrina and places it squarely on the federal government’smismanagement of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). However,in doing so, Lee’s film potentially elides the role of black complicity in themalfeasance precipitating much of the disaster after Katrina made landfall,particularly in Mayor Nagin’s office. The decision to embrace the brash timbre ofNew Orleans jazz has consequences for critical readers of Katrina, since thesimplification of agency paints all black participants as unwitting victims and allwhite agents as duplicitous villains. Taking a page from Kanye West, Lee’s filmsimplifies agency through brash timbre to center the analysis of Katrina on the city’shistorical racial inequalities.

Finally, the improvisation of individual jazz players in conversation with thecollective band represents diasporic isolation set against a longing for community.Jazz is a communicative space within which “performance and musicians providevarious models for African American intellectuals to think through the making ofracialized, gendered, and American identities. Jazz helps … construct histories, creatediscourses, and build communities.”24 Jazz functions constitutively to help commu-nities narrate selfhood and group identity through improvised vernacular and oftenracial idioms, while offering a space that has historically been more open toproductive conversations about race.25 It is important to note that, for jazz musicians,improvisation requires dedication to the original tune. Though the improvisationalbreak offers an opportunity for individuals to renegotiate melody and rhythm, it alsomust connect with the musical original. Understood in this light, improvisationallows an individual to carve out identity as one-among-many, a move that hassupported identity exploration throughout jazz history.

In When the Levees Broke, Lee uses jazz’s improvisational conversation betweenindividual and community to underscore Katrina’s isolating aftermath in the context ofNewOrleans’s rich history. By documenting the improvisations of NinthWard citizensto save themselves and their neighbors in the absence of timely federal disaster relief,Lee showcases the way that, as Albert Murray describes, improvisational culture“conditions people to cope with disjuncture and change but also provides them with abasic survival technique that is commensurate with and suitable to the rootlessness andthe discontinuity so characteristic of human existence in the contemporary world.”26

We argue that the film improvises on themes of pain, disposability, and resistance thathave characterized New Orleans’s jazz community for generations to “inspiredemocratic symbolic actions” that function as “models for remaking American

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society” from black perspectives marked by abjection and pain.27 Though Lee’stechniques include aural, narrative, and visual approaches, we focus primarily on thefirst two of these as a way of pushing back against a culture that understands visual asdominant to aural.28 By emphasizing Lee’s aural and narrative techniques, we aim toilluminate the ways sound-based discourses like the jazz vernacular offer productive, ifimperfect, models for racial resistance, particularly as white listeners and viewersexperience some pleasure from embedded sounds of black abjection.

Jazz Vernacular in When the Levees Broke

When viewed through the lens of the jazz vernacular, we argue, Lee’s filmdemonstrates both the progressive potential of sonic resistance and the imperfectand often conflicted nature of jazz as bedrock for contemporary protest. As a strategyfor managing the complex identities at odds in Creole New Orleans, Lee builds ondiscourses of displacement, embodiment, brashness, and improvisation to maintaincommunity identity in the face of structural repression. This section examines eachof these features of the jazz vernacular in the film to understand how the film craftsan imperfect, though significant, discourse of resistance to neoliberal discourses ofwhite citizenship.

Displacement

Lee’s film highlights the importance of Congo Square as the birthplace of jazz and asa location central to the public slave culture in New Orleans. Thus, in our estimation,the jazz vernacular provides Lee with a compelling framework to explore communityand identity before and after the deadly hurricane. Invoking the notion of therequiem as a song mourning the dead, Prajna Parasher uses a visual lens to arguethat Lee’s film highlights the poor and black citizens stranded in New Orleans:“Every image, right from the red paint on the cover of the video, contains the echoingcry of the slave, still unanswered in a 150 years of asking.”29 However, Parasher’sanalysis, like that of other scholars, fails to note the jazz vernacular’s aurality as astructure in Lee’s film. In exposing how the film frames Katrina as a racializedtrauma through the use of music, sound, montages, and testimonials, we suggestLee’s film highlights traumatic memory to link racial oppression across time tocombat the invisibility of black narratives in news coverage of Katrina.

Lee’s panegyric documents the historical, psychosocial, economic, and musicalnodal points in the New Orleans community most affected by Katrina by using thememories of survivors to reframe the hurricane in terms of loss. Parasher explainsthat “[f]or Lee, as an African American anywhere, to lose New Orleans is to lose partof himself in a highly personal way.”30 Joseph Roach explains that survivors oftragedy are often called to enhance their performances, which “constitute rites ofmemory in honor of the artificially superannuated.”31 For Lee, the jazz vernacularseems to propel the enhanced performances that dramatize the storm’s trauma and

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his interlocutors demonstrate the “psychological obligations of double consciousness,the self-reflexive interaction between identity and role.”32 This double consciousness“governs the functions of cultural transition in the service of institutional memory.”33

As a dirge, the film’s testimonials function as a metaphoric second-line for particularvictims and documents 150 years of black abjection in the city.

As the New Orleans funeral music weeps behind images of bloated dead bodies,suffering dispossessed masses, and the hopelessness of a community destroyed, Lee’sjazz vernacular reminds the viewer that, like jazz itself, New Orleans’s blackcommunity is no longer valued by mainstream American culture. The powers ofjazz and its people have been objectified and consumed by white America, renderingthem disposable. After Katrina, the city’s displaced residents, particularly the poor,black New Orleanians in the Ninth Ward, “watched as their historically rootedanxieties played out in real time during Katrina. After they were evacuated, armedtroops would not allow them to return to their homes to search through thewaterlogged remains of their shattered lives.”34 In this reading, the film’s blackinterlocutors seem to be positioned as marooned slaves, linking them to a history ofcolonization and exile. Thus, Lee uses the jazz vernacular as the frame forunderstanding how race and space intersected during Katrina. Residents explainwhy so many stayed in the city, despite the strength of Katrina, emphasizing theirlove of and loyalty to New Orleans. For example, cultural activist Fred Johnsonexplains that he descends from generations of New Orleanians, saying: “I ain’t forthat leavin. I’m a stay right here.” In Lee’s film, testimonials from people refusing toleave New Orleans make them ideal proto-slaves because their loyalty to this systemof dispossession is so thorough. Residents cite the costs of evacuating, the lack oftransportation, the fact that they had never evacuated before, and the fact that theyhad survived the last Category 5 Hurricane, Betsy, in 1965.

Lee uses weather center footage of meteorologists as the transition between eachtemporal moment in the trajectory of the hurricane suggesting the magnitude of thedisplacement of residents and echoing the brash timbre of New Orleans jazz.Visually, the hurricane gets larger and closer as residents prepare for Katrina’slandfall as Lee’s narrators speak explicitly about the role of memory leading up toKatrina. The best example is when Henry “Jr.” Rodriguez recalls telling his wife totake the long way through St. Bernard Parrish on their way to the Superdomebecause “all you’ll have is memories of this place.” Rodriguez’s comment suggests theimportance of memorializing New Orleans as residents prepared for the city’sinevitable transformation.

The major contentions of the film involve government duplicity and lack ofpreparedness. Memories of Hurricane Betsy collide with Katrina, highlighting thedeep distrust of the government held by black residents, who suspect that cityofficials intentionally blew the levies after Katrina to force the poor out of town. In1965, Gina Montana explains, “there was an intentional dynamite of the levies andthat caused the Lower Ninth Ward to flood … They dynamited the levies andflooded the Lower Ninth Ward in order to save some of the more expensive propertyin the lakefront area.” Likewise, the camera turns to Sylvester Francis, curator of the

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Backstreet Cultural Museum, who says, “I think the levy cracked and they helpedit the rest of the way. They had a bomb. They bombed that sucka.” He suggests thatthe only concern of city officials was saving the French Quarter. In his words: “If theFrench Quarter go, everything go.” In chronicling governmental ineptitude andthe disposability of black residents, Lee’s interlocutors focus on visceral experiences,from the sound of the wind and the driving rain to the booms that appeared to bebombs to the noise of the hurricane stripping off the roofs of homes across the cityand the Superdome. Residents describe their fears of being swept away in the floodafter a levy breach, echoing the fears of generations facing hurricanes like Betsy andsuggesting an awareness of the inevitability of their displacement. They also point toblack distrust of city officials, clearly suggesting the class warfare connected to racialinequalities in New Orleans.

Thus, the relationship between affect and testimonial is complex and constantlyshifting because we are encouraged to see Lee’s interlocutors as both victims andagents, as individuals and as an aggrieved collective. The affect is structured tofundamentally connect an affective response to the pain of the dispossessed with thestructural reasons for that pain. Roach explains that in calamities, “selective memoryrequires public enactments of forgetting, either to blur the obvious discontinuities,misalliances, and ruptures, or, more desperately, to exaggerate them in order tomystify a previous Golden Age, now lapsed.”35 Lee’s film stands in opposition to theofficial (and by extension, white) memory of Katrina, which ignores the negligence ofthe Army Corps of Engineers in finishing the levees as well as federal culpability inrefusing money to complete this vital public works project. Rather, it confronts thisselective forgetting by weaving a tapestry of auditory, rhetoric, and visual stimuli thatdemand a narrative of accountability connecting Katrina’s horrors to the structuralinequality that has always characterized black life in New Orleans and thatguarantees it, especially after the hurricane.

Additionally, the film explicitly addresses the role of memory across time in theopening credits, which reads, against the backdrop of African congo beats (anauditory reference to Congo Square): “This document is in remembrance of all theHurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans and in the Gulf states of Louisiana,Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.”36 The credits suggest that Katrina did not have abeginning or an end. Rather, “Today, the people living along the Gulf Coast continuein their struggle to rebuild, revive, and renew in these United States.”37 Just as KanyeWest’s denunciation of Bush reasserted a political memory that blamed whiteofficials like Bush for their historical role in structural inequality, we suggest that so,too, does Lee’s film assert that Katrina should not be read as a natural disaster but asa consequence of neoliberalism’s divestment from civil rights. The film’s DVD caseshowcases a quotation from Lee that reads: “Most people think that it was Katrinathat brought about the devastation to New Orleans. But it was a breaching of thelevees that put 80 percent of the city under water. It was not the hurricane.”38

Lee’s enthymeme here suggests that Katrina’s devastation was manmade andprovides a clue about how When the Levees Broke utilized counter-memory andcounter-narrative “to reveal the government’s role in fostering the dire conditions of

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largely poor African Americans, who were bearing the hardships incurred by the fullwrath of the indifference and violence at work in the racist, neoliberal state.”39 This isa profoundly political act in New Orleans, where the commodification of peoplefound its most profound expression through slavery.

In naming and charting the jazz vernacular as Lee’s framework, we are able to seehow Lee uses testimony from participants to explicitly connect the failures of theBush Administration after Katrina to the slave economy, shifting from the victim-blaming of mainstream news to a political perspective that positions black speakersas agents. Gina Montana recalls her evacuation from New Orleans as stirring “anancient memory” of being enslaved. Fred Johnson, a labor organizer in New Orleans,believes that Katrina was the culmination of centuries of anger built up among thespirits of those African slaves that died in the Middle Passage and were watching thesame kind of conditions that characterized Jim Crow in modern New Orleans. Infact, slavery, displacement, and black suffering haunt Lee’s film and permeate itslandscape through the idiomatic New Orleans jazz vernacular.

Lee’s film extends its critique of racialized displacement in New Orleans’s historywhile it also examines this displacement into residents’ future, a move lost in otherreadings of the film. This displacement is linked to the sounds of jazz vernacularthroughout the film, particularly through the story of New Orleans’s Hot 8 Dixielandband. As Act 3 opens, the band plays on the top tier of a New York City tour bus asmanager Lee Arnold laments, “the guys are everywhere,” emphasizing the diasporicmovement caused by forcibly relocating New Orleanians. But the scattering of Hot 8band members is not unique; Lee’s footage of Mayor Nagin recalls that mostresidents were issued “one-way tickets” away from their homes and, as F. RhanRamey laments, “a lot of the people that made this city will never ever come backbecause … they can’t afford to come back.” Interspersed throughout these interviewsis the film’s weeping jazz soundtrack. The Hot 8 play with a skeleton crew ofmusicians and Lee often includes makeshift Second Lines of only a few horn players,emphasizing the loneliness of Lee’s jazz vernacular over the cultural and economicdevastation wrought by displacement and governmental neglect.

The Body

Through the jazz vernacular’s bodily focus, Lee enacts subversive rhetoric thatimplores viewers to remember the lost and suffering bodies of New Orleans’sdispossessed and to physically act upon that memory, if only to express outrage andgrief. As we argue here, jazz rhetoric is a racial institution, drawing from the pain andanger of slavery and elevating the black experience with an understandable disregardfor white presence in the form’s vernacular. As Susan McClary and Robert Walserargue, the black body has been used as the barrier between “refinement” in whitecultural forms and, somewhat ironically, “freedom” of movement in black culturalforms.40 We read Lee’s film as a reversal of this problematic notion that endorses andlegitimates black culture as rhetoric while, at times, essentializing blackness as

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corporeality. Ultimately, Lee reframes the notion of body-centric jazz to harnessaudience affect, mediating Katrina’s devastating effects through heard and seenblack bodies.

Using the jazz vernacular as a theoretical tool helps us unpack Lee’s linkagesbetween jazz and movement starting with the opening montage, reinforcing theconcept of jazz as a music of the body. Underscored by Louis Armstrong crooning,“Do You Know What It Means,” Lee’s opening visuals emphasize movement:sweeping flood waters, Katrina’s pounding horizontal rain, and bustling traffic in1950s New Orleans. Technically, each successive image alternates between movementto the left and right, creating a feeling of being moved by waves of (perhaps flood)water. This Eisensteinian montage uses brief unresolved sequences as enthymemes,requiring the viewer to improvise and complete the image and inviting audiences toproject their own emotionally charged associations onto the screen.41 We are left toimagine what might become of the slew of bodies packed outside the Superdome, anelderly wheelchair-bound man being pushed through a flooded street, and familiesstranded atop a submerged home. We are left, in Eisenstein’s words, to manufacture“emotion (from the Latin root motio = movement) … out of the performance of aseries of incidents.”42 Lee’s opening sequence thus demonstrates the first tenet of thejazz vernacular by linking bodies, movement, and jazz to the emotional power of anincomplete story.

The theme of embodied jazz resonates throughout the film as a nod to blackdiaspora, highlighting the importance of the jazz vernacular as a nuanced, historicalvocabulary. The film’s primary musical theme, “Do You Know What It Means,” nodsto this diaspora by referencing the historical flight of black jazz musicians from NewOrleans to Chicago as a means of escaping Jim Crow legislation. This musicunderscores testimonials about the exodus of poor evacuees scattered around thecountry after FEMA’s response. By drawing from jazz’s musical structure, we see Leelinking together a cultural understanding of historical abjection with a challengingand unsettling scene. In other words, Lee positions his audience “in a circuit offeeling and response, rather than opposition to others.”43 Lee’s film uses affect tofacilitate a connection across time and space, linking HBO’s privileged audience tothe onscreen dispossessed, resisting, in Manning’s terms, the “deliberate distancing ofwhites from the common hidden history they actually share with black people.”44

Without the jazz vernacular as a lens, this relationship established between viewerand auteur would be lost.

Nonetheless, the affective engagement of Lee’s film comes most notably throughabject stillness. After its movement-based opening, the film suddenly silences andhalts its onscreen bodies, introducing affect through brash immobility. Lauren Berlantunderstands optimism as a mechanism of mediation, allowing humans to process andunderstand life situations, and she argues that optimism becomes cruel when it islinked to institutions that block future possibilities.45 The promise of movement Leebuilds in the beginning of his film represents an optimism that can never be realized.Testimonies like “people were just lined up like a parade” waiting to enter theSuperdome, visually paired with masses of hot, sweaty, uncomfortable black citizens,

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emphasize the dramatic shift in the film’s rhetoric of movement, juxtaposing theenergetic movement of Mardi Gras jazz and the slow, plodding movement of sorrow,desperation, and dispossession. This powerfully seductive audiovisual message is aresidue of jazz’s roots in a cruel optimism of hope since, when understood through thejazz vernacular’s historical scope, the film superimposes New Orleanians’ feelings ofdread and horror onto the film’s viewer.

The stalled movement of the evacuees in the Superdome is echoed in Lee’s dark jazzvernacular framing of Katrina’s bloated, forgotten victims. In one of the film’s mostchilling sequences, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien discovers the partially covered deadbody of a victim, reacting first with disgust, and subsequently, upon finding the bodystill lying there several days later, with anger. Underscored only by silence, this sceneillustrates Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism; in the halt of a body’s movement, andindeed the halt of an entire community’s movement, is the threat of “losing thebinding that fantasy itself has allowed to what’s potentially there in the risky domainsof the yet untested and unlived life.”46 In other words, the jazz vernacular frameworkreveals how Lee’s film narrates the shocking government abandonment that costthousands of people their lives by layering movement, and a sudden halt in movement,onto the historical tie between jazz and the physical movement of the body.

The affective power of Lee’s film to champion the disregarded voices of Katrina’sdispossessed is complicated by the jazz vernacular lens since Lee’s adherence to thejazz vernacular may obfuscate contemporary complexities of race in a neoliberalcontext. Lee’s project of paralleling the diasporic movements of slavery with FEMA’sdispersal of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward citizens is important, but it also risksoversimplifying the way that poverty, like slavery, has historically limited themovement of bodies in ways that isolate poor people of all races. Such attention toclass as a racially linked but not racially isolated factor is important in Lee’s film, sinceas Lisa Duggan notes, moves to privatize public services like FEMA spring fromneoliberalism’s valuation of bodies according to their role in the economy; the fact thatthe levees were not completed or fortified despite warnings about their susceptibility toa Category 4 or 5 hurricane demonstrates this devaluation of black and brown bodiesin the current political climate.47 Duggan is clear to point to the shrinking role ofgovernment, the privatization of public services, the normalization of profit motive ascivil religion, the mobilization of competition and inequality as naturalized phenom-ena, and public austerity coupled with “law and order” discourse as indicators of thisnew liberalism, all of which motivate critique in Lee’s film.48 The example of O’Brien’smoving display of disgust, for example, not only builds a sense of urgency and physicalrevulsion into the film, but also draws a racial binary between the victimized bodiesLee generally frames as black and O’Brien’s lighter complexion. In doing so, Lee’sapplication of the jazz vernacular works to highlight racial inequalities, but itsimultaneously submerges important lines of class inquiry that, like the film’s jazzvernacular, structure particular narratives of Katrina’s context of suffering anddemonstrate how “the interests of business can not really be abstracted from race orgender relations” while exposing how neoliberalism obscures the deployment of race,in particular, as a tool undermining urban life.49

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Brashness

When the Levees Broke’s jazz soundtrack not only underscores the heritage of NewOrleans, but also emphasizes jazz’s history as protest music, punctuated by thegenre’s brash, syncopated sounds. The jazz vernacular, with its bold timbre andunsettling rhythmic patterns, is ideal for the film, given Lee’s background as afilmmaker intent on foregrounding black social issues. Here, the jazz vernacularfocuses the critic’s attention on how Lee’s use of jazz elements encourage uprising.Themes of rhythmic, tonal, and structural brashness arise throughout Lee’sapplication of the jazz vernacular as he alternates between the comforting flow ofsmooth jazz and the upswing of unsettling testimonials, sounds, and images. Lee’sbelief that “people have forgotten what happened in New Orleans” drives the use ofthe jazz vernacular, forcefully calling for his audience’s attention and action.50 Weargue that jazz’s history as a music of black social protest bubbles beneath the surfaceof the documentary’s commentary on government failure and the response of angrycitizens, a perspective only visible through the lens of the jazz vernacular.

Using the jazz vernacular, we can see how the linkage of sound to emotion in thefilm is one of the defining elements of Lee’s rhetoric that facilitates sonic andaffective identification between his audience and the onscreen dispossessed. Lee’s filmis underscored by the consistently returning motif of a slow trumpet dirge, andthough the visual imagery projects pain and abandonment upon this music, the songitself is fluid, soothing, and familiar; in short, it is a jazz standard. This kind ofsoundtrack, Berlant argues,

tells you that you are really most at home in yourself when you are bathed byemotions you can always recognize, and that whatever dissonance you sense is notthe real, but an accident that you have to clean up after, which will be morepleasant if you whistle while you work.51

In other words, Lee implements an affective security by repeating the soothing motifthroughout the film. As the jazz vernacular demonstrates, Lee comforts his audienceby repeating an easily recognizable jazz message, offering a safe haven through NewOrleans’s destruction.

Though the trumpet dirge motif communicates the sorrowful timbre of the film,Lee’s framing goes beyond this use, breaking the audience expectations to injectsurprising and unsettling brashness in the fabric of the film’s soundtrack. Wrenchingthe audience loose from jazz’s aural comfort, Lee frames the storm in terms of itssound. Testimonies such as “around nine o’clock, we heard a big boom noise—BOOM—and it was loud, loud, loud,” and “It was just incredible—the sound … youcan’t even hear yourself think after a while” layer the hurricane’s relentless brashnessover the familiar trumpet tune, replicating the experience of Katrina’s invasion intoaural familiarity. Even as the optimistic repetition of the trumpet dirge urges theaudience, to borrow Berlant’s phrase, “to return to the scene of fantasy,” thepounding rhythm of the storm drowns out the comforting sonic fantasy.52 This effectis increased by the footage of the storm, which both aurally and visually documentsthe intense volume of Katrina’s pelting rain for those citizens trapped in the

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Superdome. Just as free jazz musicians layered sounds in unexpected and confusingways in order to distance the audience from the corrupted style of white Europeanjazz, Lee layers Katrina’s voice over the trumpet dirge to rhetorically invite audiencediscomfort, a technique that speaks to the jazz vernacular’s inherent brashness.

As the film surveys New Orleans’s devastation, Lee boldly showcases the angerof Lower Ninth Ward citizens, which are brash in both language and timbre.Nowhere is this brashness more apparent than in Lee’s many interviews with PhyllisMontana-Leblanc, who confirms the heroes and villains necessary to counter officialgovernmental reports after Katrina made landfall. Recounting her survival throughthe hurricane and the aftermath of government incompetence, Montana-Leblancemphatically recalls telling an airport security guard that she was “that angry where Ijust want to take you where nobody else can see you, fuck you up, and go on aboutmy business.” Throughout the film, Montana-Leblanc’s testimonies carry a similarsense of desperation, underscored by her nasal vocal timbre and clear New Orleaniandialect. Phrases like, “I dialed 911, 911, 911 … and finally I said, ‘what do you meanthey’re not taking any calls? I’m fucking dying,’” punch out a high-pitched,syncopated plea, demonstrating the screaming demands of jazz resistance. Throughthe lens of the jazz vernacular, testimonials like Montana-Leblanc’s emerge as thevocal equivalent of a brash jazz trumpet and highlight the angry voices of particularNew Orleans citizens.

The unsettling rhythm of Lee’s jazz vernacular expands beyond the brash timbre ofhis testimonials, breaking the refuge of his trumpet dirge through eerily still silence.Act four opens with an overview of the devastation that lingered months after Katrina,focusing on the Lower Ninth Ward as a site of death marked by bloated, inanimatebodies. Having situated his audience within the comforting motif of the trumpet dirgefor three prior acts, Lee contrasts the familiar tune with a stark silence, rhetoricallyinviting a reading of discomfort as he pans the devastation. Lee replaces this musicalbackdrop with silence as he moves to stories of those searching for family members.Inanimate bodies are coupled with rhetorical silence, illustrating the power of linkingbodies with sound and illuminating the way these bodies were betrayed by agovernment that refused to acknowledge the importance of their souls. The techniqueof injecting the unexpected into a performance, common in jazz improvisation,amplifies Lee’s rhetorical silence, as he documents New Orleanians’ abandonment.

The jazz vernacular reveals the interaction of New Orleans’s rich history and Lee’scontemporary film, inviting the audience into the comforts of familiar genre beforewrenching away the comforting flow of this music. At the same time, Lee creates anundercurrent of protest through jazz’s historical association with Black Power thatcarries potential risk in the contemporary cultural climate. In the case ofinterlocutors like Montana-Leblanc, for example, there is risk in choosing speakersbrimming with rage and disappointment, since they may be read as caricatures. Still,the brashness of the testimony offered by these speakers emphasizes the tie betweenrace and jazz, clearly linking the film to New Orleans’s history of black jazzexpression. In doing so, Lee stakes out a place where brashness and improvisation

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intersect to help create continuity in the film just as these features also markhistorical continuity in Creole New Orleans.

Improvisation

Two levels of improvisation function to resist the dominant discourses about Katrinain the film; however, only with the application of the jazz vernacular as a critical lensdo they become legible, since the jazz vernacular highlights the relationship betweensound, language, and images. First is the tradition of New Orleans black jazzexpression, which functions as resistance because it is situated within a structuredmusical tradition. Jazz is knowable precisely because its auditors understand the rulesbeing broken. Repetition, revision, and intertextuality are fluid strategies ofimprovisation visible through the jazz vernacular, giving jazz its ability to disruptculture as an oppositional discourse.

Second, the residents of New Orleans improvised their statements about Katrina tocritique political officials and to make arguments connecting their plight to those oftheir ancestors. As Ralph Ellison has eloquently explained, “True jazz is an art ofindividual assertion within and against the group” where each “improvisationrepresents … a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivityand as a link in the chain of tradition.”53 Thus, Lee’s narrative strategy is a rhetoricalinstantiation of the jazz vernacular as speakers improvise in expressing theirperspectives about the lack of federal response after the storm. Residents cry, curse,shout, denounce, and assign blame in improvised vignettes meant to increase theaffective investment of the viewer. The fact that many of the interlocutors in the filmconnect their experiences in Katrina to the slave experience suggests that the jazzvernacular is strongest when its intertextual dimensions highlight structural oppression.

These instantiations of improvisation demonstrate how the rigid dialectic betweenindividual and community emerges in the film. As residents confronted an inept andunwilling federal government, an ill-equipped state government, and massive damageand trauma, their testimonies of suffering function like solos against the vernacularbase of the jazz tradition. Their solos focused on government duplicity, structuralinequality, and a love of their city; together, these emphases connect Creole NewOrleanians to a history of slavery that resonates within the jazz vernacular. WhileNew Orleanians interviewed on camera improvised answers to unscripted questionsregarding Katrina, the larger model for improvisation can be found in Lee’scompilation and recontextualization of the film’s myriad texts. Lee’s use of the jazzvernacular to arrange testimonials, musical interludes, and stock news footage is hisimprovisational intervention into generic conventions of documentary film.

Conclusion

In this essay, we proposed the jazz vernacular as a discursive structure that channelshistorical geographies of black jazz forms, highlighting new communicative elements.

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Jazz vernacular surfaces through rhetorics in and about New Orleans and emphasizesjazz’s structural links to black oppression. These elements, which include displace-ment and diaspora, bodily epistemologies, brashness and resistance, and improvisa-tion, intervene into discourses that erase and ignore black suffering. As Todd Boyd hasnoted, the best black auteurs are “like the best jazz improvisers on the bandstand,”utilizing black oral and aural traditions along with their “knowledge of the tradition toinform the masses…”54 Here, Spike Lee’sWhen the Levees Broke challenges particularmedia discourses about Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath using jazz’s emotionalaccessibility, bodily affect, brashness, and improvisatory nature to remind viewers ofgovernmental neglect of New Orleans’s poor black citizens. By harnessing jazzvernacular’s historical power, Lee offers a powerful intervention into institutionallycirculated discourses, challenging the neoliberal framework that allowed the Bushadministration to push an agenda of economic disposability. Instead, Lee’s jazzvernacular invokes the history of black suffering in New Orleans, reminding viewersthat the government’s neglect of black citizens was neither unique nor justified.

As a rhetoric of oppressed classes, jazz vernacular offers an intervention intomainstream discourse on three levels: the textual level, the theoretical level, and thecultural level. First, the jazz vernacular is a structure that emphasizes the soundsof the forgotten or disenfranchised, offering a potentially transformative mode oftextual and aesthetic intervention working both within and against the grain ofinstitutional cultural expression. Lee’s documentary is in many ways a traditionallystructured documentary. However, as we have argued, Lee’s film represents anintervention into the normative discourses about New Orleans, Katrina’s poor blackvictims, and the government’s responsibility to city residents. For Lee, the jazzvernacular straddles the institutionally sanctioned and the counter-cultural narrativeof resistance as he combines HBO’s institutional voices with the vernacular voices ofNew Orleans’s jazz memories.

Second, we believe that the concept of the jazz vernacular offers a discursive modelable to reach beyond New Orleans. Though this jazz vernacular is built specificallyfrom the form and canon of black Creole jazz performance, a model of vernacularrhetoric built around cultural entertainment reaches beyond New Orleans. Culturalmusical forms are deeply embedded in identity performances. An understanding ofdiscourse that uncovers and acknowledges how musical forms underscore politicalargumentation offers a lens for the examination of protest rhetorics nationally,internationally, and transnationally. For example, just as the jazz vernacularilluminates Lee’s argumentative style, a Ranchera vernacular may offer a usefulframework for understanding rhetorics of Mexican immigrants in response togovernmental delays in immigration reform. In this example, just as in Lee’s film, ageographically linked music binds cultural memory to political rhetoric through itsomnipresence during the formation of individual and cultural identity. Since nearlyevery cultural identity includes a canon of communally shared music, our theoreticalunderstanding of the jazz vernacular may allow similar study beyond New Orleans.

Finally, Lee’s use of the jazz vernacular offers important cultural implications forNew Orleanians. Despite the ubiquity of media surrounding Katrina’s effects, many

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of the stories recounted in Lee’s film remained hidden. The cultural disposability ofthese narratives illustrates the privileging of certain storytellers over others,particularly in a neoliberal political environment. By showcasing the untold storiesof New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, Lee reminds us to dig deeper, demonstrating theimportance of situated knowledge in understanding Katrina. As a site, New Orleansoverdetermines how we understand Katrina, and, consequently, a theoreticalperspective that centralizes New Orleans’s geography, history, and culture is crucialin understanding rhetoric about the disaster. By uncovering the deeply rootedconnection between the city and its music, we argue that Lee’s film functions as adirge for New Orleans and its residents, building on the historical disposability,abjection, rejection, and displacement that surface through the city’s jazz vernacular.

Notes

[1] Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation (1926): 693.[2] Prajna Parasher, “Specters and Images: When the Levees Broke—A Requiem in Four Acts,”

International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 8, issue 2 (2011): 162–63.[3] Henry Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposab-

ility,” College Literature 33, issue 3 (Summer 2006): 175.[4] Matt Smith and Deanna Hackney, “Ex-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Guilty after

Courtroom Belly-Flop,” CNN.com, February 14, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/justice/louisiana-nagin-convicted/.

[5] Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina,” 173–74.[6] Achillle Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, issue 1

(2003): 40.[7] Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina,” 177.[8] John M. Sloop and Kent A. Ono, “Out-law Discourse: The Critical Politics of Material

Judgment,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 30, issue 1 (1997): 50–69.[9] Cutlural studies critic bell hooks points to the pedagogical function of outlaw discourses. See

bell hooks, Outlaw Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), 1–8.[10] Grant Farred, What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7.[11] Walton M. Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisa-

tion, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 82.[12] Ibid., 84.[13] Stanley Crouch, “Blues to Be Constitutional: A Long Look at the Wild Wherefores of Our

Democratic Lives as Symbolized in the Making of Rhythm and Tune,” in The Jazz Cadenceof American Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 161.

[14] Farred, Black Vernacular Intellectuals, 12.[15] Tedd Gioia, The History of Jazz (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).[16] For a discussion of lyrical nods to black women’s pain in jazz lyrics, see: Hazel V. Carby, “It

Just Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” The Jazz Cadence ofAmerican Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 469–82.

[17] Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past CanRemake America’s Racial Future (New York, NY: Basic Civitas, 2006), 1.

[18] Tedd Gioia, “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth,” The Musical Quarterly 73, issue 1 (1989); LewisA. Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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[19] Robert G. O’Mealy, “Introduction to Part 5: Tell the Story: Jazz, History, Memory,” The JazzCadence of American Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 390.

[20] Philip Tagg, “Open Letter: ‘Black Music,’ ‘Afro-American Music’ and ‘European Music,’”Popular Music 8, issue 3 (1989): 285–98.

[21] LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka, Black Music: AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series (NewYork, NY: Akashic Books, 2010), 20; originally published in Down Beat, 1963.

[22] Gioia, “Jazz and the Primitivst Myth.”[23] Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act, 57.[24] Ibid., 18.[25] Ibid., 19.[26] Albert Murray, “Improvisation and the Creative Process,” in The Jazz Cadence of American

Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 111–13.[27] Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act, 30.[28] Michele Hilmes, “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?,”

American Quarterly 57 (2005): 249–59.[29] Parasher, “Specters and Images,” 164.[30] Ibid., 171.[31] Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, NY: Columbia

University Press, 1996), 1.[32] Ibid.[33] Ibid.[34] Ari Kelman, “Even Paranoids Have Enemies: Rumors of Levee Sabotage in New Orlean’s 9th

Ward,” Journal of Urban History 35, issue 5 (2009): 630.[35] Roach, Cities of the Dead, 3.[36] When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Directed by Spike Lee. Los Angeles, CA:

HBO, 2006.[37] Ibid.[38] Ibid.[39] Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina,” 188.[40] Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “Theorizing the Body in African-American Music,” Black

Music Research Journal 14 (1994): 75–84.[41] Sergei Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, trans. Michael Glenny, ed. Michael Glenny

and Richard Taylor (London, UK: BFI Publishing, 1991).[42] Ibid., 145, emphasis original.[43] Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural

Studies 19 (2005): 548–67.[44] Marable, Living Black History, 3.[45] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).[46] Ibid., 48.[47] Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on

Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004).[48] Ibid., x–xvi.[49] Ibid., xvi.[50] In Jay S. Jacobs, “Spike Lee Knows What It Means to Miss New Orleans,” Pop

Entertainment.com, December 18, 2006, http://www.popentertainment.com/spikelee.htm.[51] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 34.[52] Ibid., 2.[53] Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, NY: Random House, 1964), 234.[54] Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You? Popular Culture from the ‘Hood and Beyond

(Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 15–16.

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