Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television 3515121811, 9783515121811

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Geographie Franz Steiner Verlag

Media Geography – 5

Helen Morgan Parmett

Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television

Helen Morgan Parmett Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television

media geography at mainz Edited by Anton Escher Chris Lukinbeal Stefan Zimmermann Veronika Cummings Editorial Staff Elisabeth Sommerlad Laura Sharp Volume 5

Helen Morgan Parmett

Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television

Franz Steiner Verlag

Cover: Treme shooting a Mardi Gras day scene at Mother’s Lounge in the Treme neighborhood. © Helen Morgan Parmett Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2019 Druck: Laupp und Göbel, Nehren Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-12181-1 (Print) ISBN 978-3-515-12182-8 (E-Book)

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Though academic work can at times seem a lonely affair, it is undoubtedly a much more social process that is made possible by the guidance, care, and insights of others. Throughout this project, I have been fortunate in the generosity of many mentors, friends, and colleagues who helped to support and shape my work, for which I am humbled and exceedingly grateful. This project started as my dissertation while a graduate student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. I am grateful for the mentorship and intellectual environment the department cultivated, and I thank my committee members (Laurie Ouellette, Ron Greene, Gil Rodman, and John Archer), professors, and fellow graduate students for the many and varied ways they have contributed to this project. I am especially grateful to Laurie Ouellette, who was an exceptional dissertation advisor and mentor throughout my graduate studies, and this project is indebted to her insights on countless points. Her sharp mind helped me to hone my broad ideas into more careful arguments, guiding me to see how my seemingly dispersed thoughts fit together and the debates to which they contributed. I am also grateful to my colleagues at Western Washington University and the University of Vermont who have continued to provide support for this research, and especially to Rae Lynn Schwartz-Dupre, Michael Karlberg, and Gregory Ramos. The ideas contained in this book have benefitted from these folks along with countless others who have provided feedback, critique, and insights at various conferences and events where I’ve shared my work, including the wonderful folks involved with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Urbanism, Geography and Architecture scholarly interest group. This project would not have been possible without the help of numerous individuals in and outside of New Orleans who assisted me in gathering primary source materials and in navigating the city’s landscapes. Irene Wainright and Greg Osborne from the New Orleans Public Library City Archives provided thoughtful guidance and timely assistance, as did the archivists at the Amistad Research Center. Dave Walker from The Times Picayune was willing and ready to help, providing me with audio from the Cable Television and Marketing Summit’s Treme panel, which turned out to be exactly what I was looking for at just the right time. I am very grateful to the Treme producers, writers, and staff who were gracious and forthcoming in sharing their thoughts on their participation in the production, especially Lolis Eric Elie, Karen Livers, Virginia McCollum, Eric Overmyer, and Laura Schweigman. I am also thankful to Vicki Mayer for her helpful insights into New Orleans and its film and television industries as well as her supportive feedback on my work. The folks with the Media Geography at Mainz book series have been a pleasure to work with, and the book has benefitted greatly from their keen insights and close attention. Thanks especially to Christopher Lukinbeal, Anton Escher, Elisabeth Sommerland, and Laura Sharp for their encouragement and assistance on completing the manuscript. I also appreciate their invitation to present this work at the “New Orleans in Medial Imaginations” Symposium in March 2018 in Mainz, Germany.

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The title of the book draws from the lyrics “Down in the Tremé” from “The Tremé Song,” written by John Boutte (2003, Boutteworks) and played during Treme’s opening credits. An earlier version of Chapter 1 originally appeared as “From Frank’s Place to Treme: Race, Place and New Orleans on Television,” in the journal Television and New Media, Volume 13 / Issue 3, May / 2012 by SAGE Publications Ltd. / SAGE Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. © Copyright © 2012, SAGE Publications. Permission for reproduction does not include any 3rd party material found within the work. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Media as a Spatial Practice: Treme and the Production of the Media Neighbourhood,” in the journal Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol.28:3 pp. 286–299 (2014), published by Taylor & Francis. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Treme Tourism and Governing,” in the edited collection HBO’s Treme and Post-Katrina Catharsis: The Mediated Rebirth of New Orleans, edited by Dominique M. Gendrin, Catherine Dessinges, and Shearon Roberts, and published by Lexington Books. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared as “It’s HBO: Passionate engagement, TV branding, and Tourism in the Postbroadcast Era,” in the journal Communication and Critical / Cultural Studies Vol.13:1 pp. 3–22 (2016). Each of these is republished, in significantly revised and extended form, with permissions here. This work could not have been completed had it not been from the tremendous support and care I receive from Justin and Nakobe. I am so very grateful for their patience, thoughtful praise and constructive critique, and unwavering encouragement in all that I have endeavored to do. Thanks for following me across the country and back again.

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 11 CHAPTER 1 .......................................................................................................... 41 From Frank’s Place to Treme CHAPTER 2 .......................................................................................................... 61 Media, Cultural Policy & Urban Planning before and after Katrina CHAPTER 3 .......................................................................................................... 95 Location, Location, Location! Sites & Spatial Practices in Location Shooting CHAPTER 4 ........................................................................................................ 123 From the Screen to the Street: Treme Tourism CHAPTER 5 ........................................................................................................ 143 It’s HBO: Affective Economics of Place CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 169 Treme Episodes Referenced ................................................................................. 185 References ............................................................................................................ 187 Index..................................................................................................................... 207

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 – Tremé boundary map ............................................................................ 27 Figure 2 – Chez Helene on the map ....................................................................... 47 Figure 3a, 3b – Image of Armstrong Park fence abutting the Tremé neighborhood ......................................................................................................... 74 Figure 4a, 4b, 4c – Images of Treme shooting on location .................................. 101 Figure 5 – Tremé tour on segways....................................................................... 132

INTRODUCTION Hurricane Katrina resulted in the tragic deaths of thousands, but it was largely Black, poor, and elderly populations from New Orleans low-lying and least protected areas that were most effected. As is now well known, the storm was, to a degree, a relatively mild hurricane – a Category 3. What caused the devastating destruction was therefore not the hurricane itself, but, rather, the city’s failed levees, built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1951. The faulty levees left populations in the city’s most low-lying areas the most vulnerable. These were the areas, perhaps unsurprisingly, that tended to be occupied by the folks who had the least say in where they lived. Forced into areas most susceptible to flooding through discriminatory housing practices long before Katrina, New Orleans’ Black and poor folks were no strangers to the dangerous fusions of race, space, and class that have historically constituted the city’s cultural and material geography. These same neighborhoods had flooded during the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, and again in 1965 during Hurricane Betsy (DYSON 2006). In 1927, city officials purposefully bombed the levees in order to flood the low-lying areas and ensure the protection of the richer, whiter parts of the city, like the French Quarter, Garden District, and Uptown. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 25, 2005, I was living in Burlington, Vermont in the northeast corner of the USA, almost as far away as one can get from New Orleans while still within the contiguous landmass that makes up the continental United States. At the time, I did not have a television. One of my friends called me, saying, “have you seen what is happening in New Orleans?” I had heard about it on the radio, read some about it, and seen some photographs, but my friend made clear that I needed to see it on TV. The disaster, the destruction, the abandonment, it was something, she argued, that could only be fully grasped by seeing the moving image on TV. Having never visited New Orleans prior to Katrina, the city was in some ways merely an image for me, and seeing it on screen in the aftermath of Katrina likewise seemed unreal in the same way that images from Mardi Gras appear so different, so Other, from my life in the whitest state in the union. But perhaps most of all, I was shocked to see newscasters as horrified as myself – not just at the images of destruction, of bodies and buildings, bloated, flooding – but at the abandonment of a seemingly entire segment of the population. Although the news framing shifted to looting and criminality fairly quickly, there was a moment, an opening, in which it seemed the event was uncategorizable through traditional news framings of disasters or New Orleans (GIROUX 2006). According to GIROUX (2006), the images of abandonment following Katrina revealed what he terms a “biopolitics of disposability,” in which neoliberal U.S. policies aimed at privatization, self-responsibility, and the security state had left whole segments of the population – namely poor, Black folks – left to fend for

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themselves, to waste, to die, for the “good” and “health” of the rest of the population. GIROUX (2006, 9–10) argues, America was forced to confront these disturbing images … The Hurricane Katrina disaster … revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of two decades demonizing … the decaying black bodies floating in the waters of the Gulf Coast represented a return of face against the media and public insistence that this disaster was more about class than race, more about the shameful and growing presence of poverty … The bodies of the Katrina victims … did reveal and shatter the conservative fiction of living in a color-blind society.

Like GIROUX, many critics in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were hopeful that, out of this horrific situation, there might be the possibility for a collective social protest against the kinds of policies and practices that had maintained this racial, class, and spatial intertwining of injustice. Katrina perhaps helped to reveal that we were in fact not living in a “post-racial” America, where all one needed to do to succeed was to want it, to work hard enough, and to learn the tools and techniques of self-responsibility. So too, in the enormous failure of government to rescue people from the floodwaters, in large part due to the cut of government funding and resources for disaster preparedness in marginalized spaces and the integration of a self-responsible rationale in this context as well, it was hoped that the aftermath of Katrina would reinvigorate the need for government to care for its people and to protect its most vulnerable. But most of all, it was hoped that all of these possibilities would coalesce into a rebuilding of a more socially and spatially just New Orleans than what had come before it, one that would redress the abandonment of the Black and poor who made up the majority of its population. Yet, there was also skepticism, not only in the political possibility from this opening and the likelihood that it would be used as a land grab to further displace and marginalize the city’s Black and poor, but also in whether or not New Orleans should be rebuilt at all. If New Orleans was built on a flood plane and would only remain open to future disasters, potentially more devastating ones to boot, as global climate change contributes to the erosion of the wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico, why does it make sense to rebuild the city? Wouldn’t it be better, the skeptics argued, to abandon the project and ideal of New Orleans altogether? Wasn’t Hurricane Katrina just a reminder that this place, and these people, were in fact a drag on the economy, on the health of the nation as a whole, and wouldn’t we be better off just letting them go? The HBO series Treme (2010–2013), which is both set and filmed in postKatrina New Orleans, and is the primary subject of this book, takes up these skeptics in its pilot episode (HOLLAND 2010). Responding to a reporter who asks, “Are you saying this was a natural disaster, pure and simple?,” the Tulane University English professor, Creighton Bernette (played by John Goodman), retorts: BERNETTE:

What hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast was a natural disaster, a hurricane, pure and simple. The flooding of New Orleans was a man-made catastrophe, a federal fuck up of epic proportions, decades in the making … The flood protection system, built by the Army Corps of Engineers, AKA the Federal Government,

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failed, and we’ve been saying for the last 40 years, since Betsy that it was going to fail again unless something was done, and guess what, it was not … REPORTER:

Given that it’s all gone pear shaped, why should the American taxpayer foot the bill to fix New Orleans, it’s going to cost billions?

BERNETTE:

Well, since when don’t nations rebuild their great cities?

REPORTER:

For the sake of argument, let’s say that New Orleans was, once a great city …

BERNETTE:

Are you saying that New Orleans is not a great city, a city that lives in the imagination of the world?

REPORTER:

I suppose if you are a fan of the music, which has rather seen its day, let’s be honest, or the food, a provincial cuisine which many would say is typically American – too fat, too rich. And, of course, New Orleans has its advocates, but what about the rest of the country?

BERNETTE:

Hmm. Provincial, passe, hate the food, hate the music, hate the city. What the fuck are you doing down here, you fucking limy vulture, motherfucker. (Throws microphone into the river and grabs the camera).

This scene in many ways demonstrates the central argument put forth by Treme: Hurricane Katrina was a human-made disaster, and it is our responsibility to ensure New Orleans will be rebuilt, because, ultimately, New Orleans is a great city, and its culture, is central to the imagination of the world. Perhaps because Hurricane Katrina was for so many people, like me, spent watching at home from their TV screens, the Hurricane Katrina event has been fodder for a wealth of mediated storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. 1 But within this broader genre, Treme represents a particularly unique and interesting piece of Katrina media. Few have taken up the aftermath of the storm and the politics of rebuilding with such minute attention to detail, blending fact and fiction into what series writer Mari Kornhauser called “faction” (WALKER 2011). Treme takes up the problematizations of post-Katrina New Orleans as central provocations in its dramatic storylines, with its first season set in New Orleans three months after the storm and its final, fourth season, ending at the 2009 Mardi Gras. The series was 1

For example, numerous documentaries emerged in the aftermath of the storm, with perhaps the most well-known being Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (HBO 2005), as well as his follow up If God is Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise (HBO, 2010), and Trouble the Water (2008). There are also a number of films based on and drawn from Hurricane Katrina, including Hurricane on the Bayou (2006), Déjà vu (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Hours (2013) amongst numerous others. Various television programs, both fictional and nonfictional, as well, took up Katrina as narrative provocation. Series such as KVille (Fox 2007), Treme, and season 2 of American Crime Story (FX, 2017) focused more specifically on post-Katrina New Orleans as a central thread, but a whole host of TV series had individual, or a series of individual episodes, devoted to making sense of the storm, including Holmes on Homes (HGTV, Season 1, episode 6), Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, House MD (Fox, Season 2, episode 23), Bones (Fox, Season 1, episode 19), Boston Legal (ABC Season 3, episode 11), Criminal Minds (CBS Season 2, episode 18), Without a Trace (CBS, Season 5, episode 6).

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created and produced by David Simon and Eric Overmyer, who had worked together previously on the critically acclaimed police procedural, drawn from Simon’s book, Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993–1999). Like Baltimore in Simon’s most critically revered work, The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008), the city of New Orleans, and especially the neighborhood from which the series takes its name, serves as a character in Treme. The series details the lives of racially diverse residents extending outward from the Tremé, a historic neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter associated with the city’s jazz history and poor and working-class African American community. Treme focuses on the struggles of individuals to rebuild their homes, lives, and neighborhoods in New Orleans after Katrina. It focuses especially on the role of culture, and the distinctiveness and uniqueness of New Orleans as a hotbed of cultural vitality, as the city’s savior. In so doing, it makes a powerful argument for how and why New Orleans should be rebuilt. As the diatribe from Creighton Bernette, above, suggests, Treme is both a critique of government failure and the kinds of racial and class politics that resulted in the city’s uneven geography as well as, ultimately, a celebration of New Orleans’ culture and an argument for rebuilding the city in and through that culture. As the HBO website describes the series, What keeps the city afloat through all of this is its culture. Mardi Gras Indian chief Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) is sewing in preparation for Mardi Gras. The social aid and pleasure clubs are getting ready to hit the streets in their colorful, fast step finery. And those loveable rogues, Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) and Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce) have cooked up a new set of schemes on and off the bandstand. (HBO n.d.)

Treme aims to be distinct from the traditional parlay of New Orleans’ city branding efforts and Hollywood representations of the city by emphasizing the quotidian practices of artists and artistic practice rather than the spectacular sites of Bourbon Street tourism. The series takes an especial interest in the “real” in the ways in which it seeks to narrate, promote, and argue for the value of the city’s culture (and its musical, food, and creative cultures in particular) and the struggles of culture bearers, workers, and practitioners as they try recover from the storm. Producers of Treme stress that the series is committed to communicating a sense of New Orleans that is “authentic,” such as in the practices of Mardi Gras Indian sewing, rather than a spectacularized version of the city that has so often been the subject of previous television and film representations. Treme’s construction of an “authentic” New Orleans seems aware and self-reflexive of the city’s relationship to a commercial, touristic, and spectacular cultural history. It is, indeed, a show that still highlights the city’s ‘holy trinity’ of food, music, and architecture, but it also provides a critical look into what has traditionally been accepted into these categories and makes space for debate and struggle over them as well. Treme aims to show the cultures of those groups and individuals who had for so long before Katrina remained invisible to much of the white, middle-class, tourist population who visited the city. More so, it aims to show how this culture serves as the heart and life force for the city as a whole. The decision to title the show after the name of the historic neighborhood

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Tremé points to Treme’s investment in highlighting areas of the city not well-trodden on the tourist map, to engage (raced and classed) spaces in the city that were adversely and unequally affected by the Katrina event, as well as to celebrate the creative potentiality that is indigenous to these “authentic” spaces. However, Treme does more than merely make an argument for how the city of New Orleans should be rebuilt after Katrina. Because the show is also filmed onlocation, a result of a variety of cultural policies aimed to attract film and TV production to the city, it is a series that is positioned to do more than just represent the city – it is also more directly involved in the everyday production and navigation of city space as well. Further, because of the series’ producers’ commitment to representing “authentic” New Orleans – the “real” New Orleans – the production practices involved in this on-location filming have also become involved in the real, lived, and daily practices of places, spaces, and people in New Orleans more than virtually any TV show before it. So, while much of the discussion of post-Katrina media, including Treme, has focused on New Orleans as a kind of cultural imaginary, as a representational means of understanding the politics of the storm and its aftermath, the argument I put forth is that understanding how Treme intervenes into post-Katrina New Orleans requires going beyond the text. In the chapters that follow, I take Treme as a case study for mapping the complex relationships between the television industry, and especially its on-location production practices, and struggles over urban space and rebuilding neighborhoods in post-Katrina New Orleans. Although the series’ emphasis on struggles to return and rebuild through cultural practices do indeed get played out on screen, and the series is bound up with the cultural imaginary of the city, Treme’s engagements with the city’s culture, “authenticity,” and its residents’ identities and struggles go beyond textual representations and are also made manifest in the show’s broader relationship to the city in more materialist terms. Drawing on a discursive analysis of archival documents, Treme’s intertexts, interviews with producers, and on-set observation, I argue Treme participates directly in the rebuilding of the city through its on-location filming, local hiring, philanthropy, and tourism, and the series also enjoins viewers to participate in the rebuilding and revitalization of the city by eliciting practices of tourism, consumption, and charity. 2 Treme is therefore literally helping to drive, 2

I draw on a variety of primary sources including archival research; city planning and policy documents; institutional research, including trade publications and popular press on HBO and Treme; viewer comments and blogs; and site-based research including interviews, observation, and the gathering of primary documents related to the filming of the series, local neighborhood rebuilding, tourism, and local media organizations. Engaging in a discursive analysis that traces the rationalities that emerge in these primary documents, my research diverges from an ideological analysis of texts, which would seek the underlying meanings within these texts for the ways in which the text intervened into hegemonic power relations. As FOUCAULT (1972) suggests, discourse analysis instead asks a different set of questions, particularly “how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?” (27), “what was being said in what was said?,” and “what is this specific existence that emerges from what is said and nowhere else?” (28). Thus, by considering primary documents in terms of a discourse, I am not looking for the emergence of a language per se, but instead a set of practices that, “determine the group of relations that discourse must establish in order to speak of this or that object, in order to deal

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create, and intervene into the city that it represents. Moreover, city and cultural policy, as well as HBO branding efforts, are aimed at fostering these kinds of interactions. Treme therefore requires a consideration of the ways in which television’s production practices are implicated in a broader dispersion of discourses, encounters, actors, and sites than those normally addressed with regards to previous television and film productions about New Orleans or Hurricane Katrina. Understanding Treme requires a consideration of how television participates not only in the production of images and representations of New Orleans, but also for how it participates in implementing practices of urban planning, zoning, land use, tourism, gentrification, historic preservation, philanthropy, city and network branding, community building, and global and local activism in more direct and material ways. I thus argue for the need to consider how the series is also intertwined with a dispersion of institutions, actors, and networks rarely considered in television studies, including film commissions, urban planning experts, tourism boards, and neighborhood organizations. Working at the intersections between media, cultural studies, and social and cultural geography, this book suggests that Treme offers a particularly illuminating case of the intersecting and, at times, contradictory forces between television production, city policy, viewers, residents, and TV industry professionals. The series represents perhaps a paramount example of the contemporary phenomenon of postbroadcast, on-location television production. Specifically, Treme demonstrates how city efforts to attract film and television production collide with the television industry’s desire to create new forms of connection for increasingly distracted audiences through the production of “authentic” connections to (often neighborhoodoriented, and racialized) places, or what I refer to as “the media neighborhood” – i.e. an entrepreneurialization of neighborhoods that depends on the vernacular and local cultural practices and performance of specific, place-based identities through on-location film and television production. This book aims to highlight what is at stake in these collisions for local culture and struggles over the right to neighborhood and city space in post-Katrina New Orleans. Whereas much of the research on television and cities, and on New Orleans in particular, focuses on how programs represent place and space, the place-based political economics of television industries, or the places where audiences consume media, this book instead focuses on the cultural role of television production practices in the production of urban spatiality. Through an analytic of practice theory, I argue that television production works as a site-specific spatial practice that plays a material role in the rebuilding of New Orleans by drawing on the everyday practices of residents and viewers. Through interviews with producers, archival research, and analyses of the series with them, name them, analyze them, classify them, explain them, etc. These relations characterize not the language (langue) used by discourse, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but discourse itself as a practice” (FOUCAULT 1972, 46). I therefore consider these documents as part of a broader dispersal of governance, tracing the relationships between these discourses and the various institutions, governing bodies, organizations, and practices to which its discursive formations speak to in terms of how they pose various problems and solutions to post-Katrina governance, urban revitalization, and post-broadcast television.

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alongside urban planning and cultural policy discourses, I trace Treme’s spatial practices of production as they are implicated in on-location shooting, local hiring, charity, and tourism. I query how Treme provides a vehicle for both cultural and economic revitalization and renewal in post-Katrina New Orleans, and I ask what this means for struggles over urban space in the contemporary, post-industrial, neoliberal city – where the television industry takes up a role in the transformation and recovery of lived, material, and vernacular urban spaces in one of the world’s most iconic, and perhaps most divided, cities? I suggest Treme throws focus onto some of the trends in contemporary relationships between television production, city planning, and cultural policy along with their concomitant influences on urban space, raced and classed geographies, and creative culture in cities. On the one hand, this book offers insights into how contemporary television production practices are put to work as neoliberal expedients to urban renewal, city branding, and post-broadcast television branding. Through soliciting cultural performances of racialized neighborhood spaces and offering participation in a television production as means of rectifying racial and class exclusions, Treme to some extent abdicates governmental responsibility for the care of its citizens, and for the maintenance and building of crucial infrastructure, as such labors are offloaded onto the private sector and citizens themselves and to the charitable contributions of the television industry and its viewers. In this sense, Treme shows how television’s public service role is extended beyond its textual representations and into the realm of the physical and material. In doing so, however, politicized and collective forms of social protest, and making demands on government to fulfill its obligations and responsibilities to its citizens, are foregone in favor of the promises of getting involved in television production and representation as expedients to inclusion. Thus, the more politicized aspects of Treme’s representations, such as in the exchange between Creighton Bernette and the reporter depicted above, belie a potentially more conservative, and neoliberal, solution to the disaster that the series’ production practices help to initiate above and beyond the text. On the other hand, however, Treme also reveals how television production’s site-specific spatial practices might offer opportunities for articulating a right to the neighborhood through discourses of social justice. That is, Treme’s production practices also diverge from those of more traditional television productions, embedding themselves in the neighborhoods in which they film, attending to their histories, politics, and communities. It makes an explicit effort to include places and bodies that have historically been excluded in film and television productions in New Orleans, and, in so doing, it not only represents those places and bodies but it also works to materially network them to structures and infrastructures of power. Further, Treme situates itself as a neighbor, and, at times, it articulates a responsibility and a demand on both television producers and viewers rarely seen in the television industry. Treme therefore reveals a deep contradiction, and a kind of ambivalence, bound up with post-Katrina rationalities of rebuilding and the responsibilities and roles of the private, for-profit television industry in the current conjuncture. As the title to this book suggests, the three anchoring concepts for this broader argument are race, place, and New Orleans on television. In the remainder of this

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chapter, I therefore parse out how this book theorizes these concepts, as well as the particular arguments it forwards with regards to how Treme both draws on and contributes to understanding race, place, and New Orleans on television in the postKatrina context. NEW ORLEANS ON TELEVISION In an interview about his conception of the series, David Simon noted, “Lots of American places used to make things. […] New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments” (quoted in MASON, 2010). Whereas Simon’s work in The Wire offered a pessimistic critique of the failure of institutions and individuals’ inabilities to escape their subjectification to those institutional ideologies and materialities, Treme seems to hinge upon a hope that individuals, through their creative practices, can draw upon these moments to make something new, to transform institutions, and to transform American culture. 3 In his DVD commentary during the final episode of the series’ third season, titled “Tipitina,” Simon suggested that his focus on New Orleans was both about this particular city and its authenticity, but it was also about how New Orleans stood in for the broader condition of US society at this particular juncture. He suggested, I just keep saying it’s the real ... our point was to use New Orleans to depict, in a very basic way, the situation in which a lot of Americans, not just New Orleanians find themselves, in terms of trying to constitute their society when there is so much arrayed against them at this point. We are here in New Orleans and we see no reason not to use the real. … You have this dichotomy in Treme, about a city, and a society that doesn’t seem to be working on the most basic levels and it’s not delivering what it is supposed to deliver for citizens on an institutional or systemic level. And, yet, as a matter of individual spirit, the city reconstitutes itself around its own sense of itself and its own art. And there is something I think allegorical for the country in the New Orleans experience there. (SIMON and NOBLE 2013)

As these comments suggest, Treme provides a kind of alternative to The Wire, as Simon suggests the series offers a potential solution for how America’s cities might respond to the structural forces that had left its predominantly Black and poor citizens abandoned, increasingly criminalized and imprisoned, and continually surveilled, monitored, and problematized. Treme suggests that New Orleans and its creative culture and vitality are tools that can be used to resist these forces; culture is a potential solution for those populations who had been abandoned by the state who should have been there to protect them. 3

The main characters are all independent entrepreneurs, many of them working in a creative or knowledge industry – a chef and restaurant owner (Jeanette Desautel), musicians (Antoine Batiste, Delmond Lambreaux, Annie Talarico, Sonny, Davis McAlary), writer (Creighton Bernette), bar owner (LaDonna Batiste-Williams), civil rights lawyer (Toni Bernette). Albert Lambreaux’s character also celebrates creative practice as his story line centers around his responsibilities as Big Chief of a Mardi Gras Indian tribe.

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Thus, although Treme, like The Wire, no doubt commentates on the structural barriers and institutional struggles each of its characters face as creative practitioners in post-Katrina New Orleans, 4 Treme presents a fairly overt optimistic tone. The optimism hinges on the celebration of local, “authentic” New Orleans culture. As Jacques Morial, son of former Mayor Marc Morial, states in an episode, “The culture of New Orleans, that’s what’s at risk, if they knock out the infrastructure that sustains the infrastructure, then it is gone forever” (JONES 2010). The argument Treme ultimately makes, then, is that New Orleans must be rebuilt, and it must be rebuilt through the vitality of its “authentic” i.e. not simulated for tourists, culture. Similarly, if its neighborhoods are to come back, then it must have a culture for them to come back to. This logic is reinforced by Wendell Pierce, a native New Orleanian who stars in the show as the talented, though largely commercially unsuccessful, trombone player Antoine Batiste, who in addition to starring in the show is also engaged in a neighborhood rebuilding project in Pontchartrain Park – a middle class black neighborhood where he grew up. The neighborhood was devastated by the storm, and his Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corp. is a non-profit organization that aims to assist in rebuilding 75 homes to ensure that its residents can return home. When I asked him how rebuilding Pontchartrain Park related to his work on the show, he argued that the two were inextricably interconnected, noting The role of art is where as a community, we reflect on who we are and where we’ve been, who we hope to be, our strengths, our weaknesses, and that’s very important to have that reflection, especially during a time of crisis because then you want to know exactly what you’re fighting, for why you’re fighting for this city to come back, why you are fighting for your neighborhood to come, and that’s directly connected to the work I’m doing in Pontchartrain Park … I realized it was on us, so that was the call to action, and so that directly reflects how the people themselves are the reason for rebuilding New Orleans, the recovery, and that’s why we’re following the individuals of Treme. It’s the humanity in the individual, the humanity in the individual that

4

The series, for example, demonstrates the difficulty musicians face in getting gigs (through especially Antoine Batiste’s character), the lack of access to affordable health care and basic services for creative workers, and the structural causes and effects of post-traumatic stress (especially through Creighton Bernette’s character, who commits suicide as a result at the end of the first season), police brutality, and crime. Moreover, it depicts city government as steeped in corruption that has little regard for its city’s creative artists and is instead invested in making quick money and willing to sell entire neighborhoods to developers without consulting its residents. This latter theme is particularly emphasized in Season 2 with Jon Seda’s character, Nelson Hidalgo, a developer and venture capitalist from Dallas, and Oliver Thomas, former City Council person who was forced to resign in disgrace on corruption charges. Thomas, who plays himself in the series, makes a deal with Hidalgo to connect him to black leadership in the city (inviting him, for example, to ride on the Zulu float, which is generally populated by influential leaders in the black community, on Mardi Gras day), thus making it possible for Hidalgo to proceed to raze entire neighborhoods for the benefit and profit of outsiders looking to transform Mid-City (a historically black and poor back-a-town neighborhood) into a medical research center. This narrative makes a poignant critique of the entrenched power relations and complex interactions between race, class, and power that constitute the dominant rebuilding projects in post-Katrina New Orleans.

20

Introduction is making this city come back, in spite of the government. (Wendell Pierce, personal communication, March 17, 2011).

Like the series, Pierce expresses a lack of faith in city or federal government to do the hard work of rebuilding, and he is right to – the resources set aside to assist people in rebuilding were grossly inadequate, mismanaged, and incomprehendingly difficult for residents to access (ADAMS 2013). For Pierce, and for Treme, New Orleans’ (and American cities more broadly) potential to return and thrive in an inclusive way will depend on the agency and creative vitality of individuals and their communities. But while the City of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, and, indeed, the US Federal Government, have undoubtedly done little to adequately redress the harms of Katrina, what is particularly interesting is that its discourses of rebuilding are not so far from Pierce’s and Treme’s. Perhaps driven by the exposure of the city’s legacies of racial, class, and spatial injustices, official discourses of rebuilding, particularly those centered on post-Katrina urban planning, have also problematized preKatrina policies and their spatializations. As I detail in Chapter 2, post-Katrina city policies surrounding urban planning and cultural policy acknowledge the abandonment of the city’s primarily Black, poor, and “wet” (i.e. vulnerable to flooding) neighborhoods, and they call for an increased emphasis on inclusion and equity. Likewise, they concede that the city had long undervalued the people and places who contribute to making much of New Orleans’ culture, and they call for re-valuing these culture workers and bearers, places, and practices as the city’s primary assets. This is not to say that the city has not also undergone an intense privatization of public services and space, renewed efforts toward using the disaster as a way to “shock” the city into accepting an increasingly economically and socially conservative agenda, what Naomi KLEIN (2007) has termed “disaster capitalism,” that privileges neoliberal solutions to rebuilding. But, rather, this more social justice oriented discourse and policy making agenda sits alongside, in an odd sense of ambivalence and contradiction to, the kinds of discourses and policies that seemed to so obviously contribute to the harms of Katrina. This book aims to expose this ambivalence and contradiction, what I call a “post-Katrina rationality,” in the rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans. But my emphasis is on the role of the media, and particularly television, industry in navigating, and more importantly, helping to constitute this ambivalence. While the intensification of the policies of abandonment and neglect, that helped to make possible the human-made components of Katrina’s disaster, were taking shape, Louisiana initiated one of the most aggressive tax incentive legislation programs globally to try to diversify its economy by attracting Hollywood film and television productions to film on-location in the state (in 2002). Louisiana was not the only state doing so; more and more states and cities globally are implementing similar policies in order to bolster their cultural economies and attract film and television production on-location (CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR 2010; MCNUTT 2015; SCOTT 2004; SCOTT 2000). As Hurricane Katrina was brewing out in the ocean, the city of New Orleans had become known as “Hollywood South”. Fearful that the

Introduction

21

storm’s destruction would scare off the industry in the aftermath of Katrina, the city doubled down on the film and television industries as key components of its cultural economy and recovery. Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who was elected after former Mayor Ray Nagin was roundly criticized for his mishandling of the Katrina event, created the Mayor’s Office of the Cultural Economy. Echoing the sentiments of Treme’s producers and Wendell Pierce, above, Landrieu argued that the cultural economy, and the creative industries – like the film and TV industries (which comprised at the time, and still today, the city’s largest creative industries) – that helped to produce that economy, were key to the city’s recovery and rebuilding. Specifically, he noted that the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Economy and its attendant Cultural Economy Initiative, would support “individual artists and artisans who are active in their disciplines, cultural originators applying as small businesses, and galleries, museums, collectives and nonprofit cultural organizations” (LANDRIEU 2010). He championed the film industry tax credits, and he initiated the Cultural Products Districts Legislation, the latter of which he argued “creates hubs of cultural and economic activity and supports indigenous businesses in neighborhoods by offering smart tax incentives” (LANDRIEU 2010). Indeed, many saw Landrieu’s inauguration as Mayor as a sign that the administration would give more attention to creative culture than that which had been given in the past. Though culture has long been viewed as a key city asset, many New Orleanian politicians in particular have been chastised for their mistreatment, disinterest, and neglect of these assets. Thus elected, Landrieu promised to “be a true partner for artists,” suggesting that, “New Orleans has one of the world’s more unique and exciting cultures,” and that he, “will ensure that we invest in this precious asset through city, state and federal grants” (LANDRIEU 2010). He promised increased funding and priority especially to Film New Orleans, the city’s film commission, which is tasked with attracting film and television productions and helping them to navigate the city, demonstrating his commitment to partnering with and supporting the arts. Indeed, in the 2012 city budget, promoting the cultural economy is listed as one of his budget priorities. Yet, the only cultural economic activity highlighted is film. 5 Simultaneously, film and television producers were coming to New Orleans with promises to help rebuild the city. Planning a production in New Orleans was touted as an act of philanthropy, where both the funds assumed to funnel into the state that would be spent by the production on local materials, permits, labor, and everyday expenditures, as well as the promotional capabilities of these productions to show that ‘New Orleans was open for business’ were rationalized as a socially responsible and charitable effort to help rebuild the city (WILKINS 2015). And, going even further, the media industry seemed to take it upon themselves to rebuild the city in more direct ways as well. A number of film, TV, and music celebrities initiated rebuilding projects, such as Wendell Pierce (discussed above), Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation, and Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr., through 5

The other two budget priorities listed are business / retail development and equal business opportunity programs. The budget proposal recommends over $1 million to be accrued to the Office of Cultural Economy, an increase of almost $200,000 (The City of New Orleans 2012).

22

Introduction

their partnership with Habitat for Humanity to build the Musicians’ Village. More one-off acts of industry philanthropy were noted as well, such as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’s special “After the Storm – New Orleans” episode (ABC 2003–2005: Season 3, episode 25), This Old House’s special five episodes dedicated to New Orleans (PBS 2007: Season 29, episodes 17–23), Guiding Light’s “Hands on Katrina – Inside the Light” episode (CBS 1952–2009, 2007: episode 15108), and the HGTV series Holmes on Homes (HGTV 2000) had a special spinoff Holmes in New Orleans (HGTV 2009) devoted exclusively to detailing rebuilding projects. In the end, a whole host of television productions traveled to New Orleans to air their cast rebuilding peoples’ homes. The Walt Disney Corporation, too, seemed to take on New Orleans as a special project – setting up a faux New Orleans at Epcot Center to raise money for Katrina’s victims as well as forging relationships between its subsidiaries and city government officials in the rebuilding of public and private space (MORGAN PARMETT 2012). So, while the film and television industries were being touted as crucial to the city’s cultural economy and its rebuilding and recovery, it seemed as though New Orleans was important to these industries as well. Though there is a wide body of scholarship that focuses on film and television depictions of New Orleans in the post-Katrina context, the majority of this work primarily addresses how these mediations represent the storm and its rebuilding (see, for example, COOK 2015; DICKEL and KINDINGER 2015; EYERMAN 2015; MAROTTE and JELLENIK 2015). 6 Diane NEGRA’s (2010) collection, Old and New Media after Katrina, is a particularly relevant example of how scholars have taken up Katrina media. As it is noted in the collection’s Introduction, A consistent element in the essays that comprise this collection is the recognition that while Katrina represented an anomalous event in some respects, it has generally been made to conform very heavily to preexisting and ongoing narrative and ideological patterns. Its media presentation, for instance, adheres to an increasingly consistent U.S. regionalization of value and morality … deeply invested in staging the loss of certain cities in the process of defending/reclaiming the nation. (NEGRA 2010, 10)

Negra makes a convincing argument for scholars to consider the importance of media in the Katrina event, as so much of what the public witnessed and the effects of such a witnessing were born out on television, newspapers, radio, and the internet. A collection committed to unearthing the ideological work of various media texts 6

According to MAROTTE and JELLENIK (2015), there are effectively three waves of creative work generated by Katrina: Katrina as event, Katrina as fallout, and Katrina as springboard. With regards to the latter, texts tend to either focus on testimony and processing the storm through its traumatic and cultural effects or to center on the identity politics that were activated and complicated by the storm’s effects. EYERMAN (2015), for example, argues narratives circulating in the press, art, literature, music, film, and graphic design that present individual suffering during and after Katrina express collective trauma, pain, and loss in ways that have opened up a debate about the responsibility of the US government to care for its citizens, and, particularly, its Black and poor citizens. Similarly, DICKEL and KINDINGER’s (2015) collection focuses on Katrina media’s cultural politics, particularly in terms of how they represent and intervene into struggles over what the storm means for race and class in the U.S.

Introduction

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in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the book largely maintains a focus on textual and representational analyses. 7 But the broader ways in which media, and particularly film and TV, have been implemented as expedients to rebuilding, both in terms of casts and productions doing that work as well as in terms of cultural policy, have remained largely unexplored. The trend of thinking about Katrina media and the role of television in understanding and making sense of post-Katrina New Orleans through a representational and textual lens has been replicated as well in emerging scholarship on Treme. There is a tendency to reduce the relevance and role of the series exclusively and primarily in terms of how it represents New Orleans textually. For example, scholars have considered how the series constructs a sense of place (GENDRIN 2017; JASMIN 2010; LEYDA 2012); narrates struggles over public and private space (MOYLAN 2012; YOUSAF 2010); constructs a sense of what it means to be at home (FUQUA 2011, 2012); and, especially, how the series’ textual representations construct a discourse of ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ New Orleans (ANDERSEN 2011; BANKS 2011; COOK, 2015; DESSINGES et al. 2012; FUQUA 2011; LEMANN 2010; RATHKE 2012; REED JR. 2011; SMITH-SHOMADE 2011; THOMAS 2012). Scholars also take up Treme’s representations of raced musical culture and multiculturalism (GEORGE 2012; GRAY 2012; JACKSON 2011; REED JR. 2011; SMITH-SHOMADE 2011); representations of racialized and place-based cultural practices, such as Mardi Gras Indians (GENDRIN 2012) and bounce music (BUCHER 2015). As well, these scholars emphasize how these representational practices and others, through the text, intervene into debates and struggles over space and rebuilding the city (CUPPLES and GLYNN 2014; CWYNAR 2011; DESSINGES et al. 2012; LEYDA 2011; REED JR. 2011; SAMUEL 2015; SMITH-SHOMADE 2011). Although a running thread of focus between this research is on space and place, few go beyond the text to consider the ways in which the series is implicated in the production of spatiality and placebased practices. Although critics are also quick to contrast Treme with David Simon’s previous work, The Wire, and their diverging ways of representing New Orleans and Baltimore, respectively (e.g. LEMANN 2010; RATHKE 2012), both The Wire and Treme do more than represent the city. 8 Whereas ETHRIDGE (2008) argues that The Wire offers no material political outlet through which viewers might direct their critique in order to forge ties of solidarity toward new alternative renderings of urban America, I suggest that this is the case for Treme only if we remain transfixed on the text 7

8

STREIBLE’s (2010) and SCHEIBLE’s (2010) essays, however, do not take up representational questions directly. STREIBLE details the life of Helen Hill, an animation artist and activist working with the production community in New Orleans who was randomly killed during a crime wave after Katrina. Her murder is a storyline in Season 2 of Treme. SCHEIBLE considers how new media technologies were put to use in the aftermath of Katrina. These two essays stand as exceptions in the collection that do not take up issues of representation. Neither, however, takes up media’s production of space in New Orleans directly, in the way that I am calling for either. The Wire can also be credited with drawing a great deal of interest and intrigue into Baltimore, and is even credited with increasing tourism despite its seemingly negative depictions (PINCKLEY 2010).

24

Introduction

and on TV as a medium of representation. 9 Though an analysis of Treme’s textual and representational practices indeed yield an important discussion of their ideological role in legitimating particular policies and actions (both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic) in the city as well as in hailing subjects to do that work, it would be remiss to only focus on the text. Indeed, perhaps what makes Treme so interesting is its work in the city that goes beyond the text: its material and on-theground investment in giving voice and vision to repressed cultural practices (such as that of the Mardi Gras Indians, 10 second-line parading, 11 the jazz funeral, the everyday lives of musicians on the streets or in the club) and its material means for providing the space and employment for these practices to take place. So too, Treme’s highlighting and material support to city spaces off the tourist map, its facilitation of viewers to move in and through those spaces, and its work in extending film and television production to marginalized neighborhoods can really only be assessed if one looks beyond the text to the series’ broader spatial practices in the city. 12 Treme invites its viewers to do more than contemplate its meanings or for its writers, workers, and producers to textualize the city on screen – it instead calls upon them to engage materially in the city. I therefore argue Treme calls for a significant departure from the ways in which media scholars in the past have addressed the importance and significance of media and its relationship to New Orleans, whose approach might best be summarized by SCHUTH (1981, 240–241) when he suggests, The image of New Orleans in a film … does not depend on location shooting … The image of the city depends on what the image maker selects to include, real or not, and how he or she chooses to present it. What matters is not how authentic the image of the city is, but how the image shapes the viewer’s total idea of what New Orleans is like.

Conversely, the location of shooting and the material practices of production within New Orleans as a location very much shapes the kind of image of the city that is represented on screen. Although what makes it on screen is undoubtedly bound up with choices made by producers, directors, and writers, Treme’s commitment to onlocation shooting and its networking and hiring of local groups, individuals, and organizations means that the local culture and space of the city also influences and 9

It might also be true for The Wire as well that a critique of its spatial practices would reveal an enacted political agenda for its viewers, but that is not the subject of this project. 10 “Mardi Gras Indians” refers to the practice of Black New Orleanians, organized into “tribes,” that dress in elaborate costumes, which they often work on throughout the year, that signify Native American and African designs who parade on Mardi Gras, St. Joseph’s Day, and “Super Sunday” (the Sunday adjacent to St. Joseph’s Day). For more on this practice see LIPSITZ 1990). 11 “Second line” refers to a practice of parading prevalent among the social aid and pleasure clubs in New Orleans where a band plays at the front and the parade-goers gather behind and dance with the parade behind the band in the “second-line” For more on this practice see REGIS 2001. 12 MAYER’s (2016, 2017) analyses of Treme are also a departure from the text to consider these broader issues. Mayer instead calls attention to the potential problems associated with Treme, as a Hollywood production, on local culture in terms of gentrification and the commodification of culture. My analysis here aims to extend her claims with specific attention to the role of Treme’s production practices in the production of urban spatiality and place.

Introduction

25

shapes these decisions. Thus, whereas in previous filmic representations of the city what was happening in the city in reality might have mattered very little, for Treme the city itself is a real material force that implicates the series’ textual representations. So too, because of its embededness in city space, Treme also participates in what is happening in the city in ways that go beyond its representational impact on lived and material reality. Moreover, the material practices of viewers – who are enjoined to visit the city as tourists, ethical consumers, and members of a diasporic community – are elicited as forms of shaping the viewer’s idea of what New Orleans is like just as much (if not more so) as the images portrayed on screen. Treme thus reflects the shifting terrain of the social and cultural geography of television production as well as changes in media’s imbrications in contemporary city space. It is in this context that I consider Treme as participating in the material production of the city, or how it works as a spatial practice. PLACE: THEORIZING TREME AS A SPATIAL PRACTICE Instead of focusing on the textual and representational work of Treme, Down in Treme considers Treme and media production more generally as a spatial practice involved in the production of place and neighborhood as locality. In so doing, it draws on the contention that media, and television in particular, is productive of spatiality. While media technologies are often heralded as space compressing or space collapsing technologies (e.g. HARVEY 1989; VIRILIO 1986), I instead theorize television as a technology and a cultural practice that is involved in reorganizing space and spatiality. This draws on the conception that media is inextricably bound up with the production of space, and is itself inherently geographical. As COULDRY and MCCARTHY (2004, 4) argue, Understanding media systems and institutions as spatial processes undercuts the infinite space of narrative that media appear to promise; it insists that our object of analysis is never just a collection of texts, but a specific and material organization of space.

Early research (e.g. BURGESS and GOLD 1985; MORLEY and ROBINS 1995) on media geography largely emphasized the geographical in representational and symbolic terms, i.e. in terms of how “media create new geographies through the travel of images that bring new sensibilities, identities, and ideas from distant places” and, as well, on how those “representations are also mediated by our situatedness in the places we consume, use, and produce media images” (MORGAN PARMETT 2018). Yet, more recently, those invested in the emergent field of media geography (see, for example, ADAMS et al. 2014; MAINS et al. 2015; LUKINBEAL and SHARP 2015), communication geography (FALKHEIMER and JANSSON, 2006), MediaSpace (COULDRY and MCCARTHY 2004), and media cities (see, for example, GEORGIOU 2013; MATTERN 2015; MCQUIRE 2008) have attended more specifically to the materiality of media in terms of its implication in the production of spatiality. This book draws from this research and seeks to add a conception of the relationship between television production practices and urban spatiality.

26

Introduction

Media scholars have long theorized television in relation to its spatializing practices, albeit those largely associated with suburbanization. For example, as WILLIAMS (1974) argues, television developed in response to problems arising from post-World War II urban industrial living, where suburbanization created a sense of longing for urban living and at the same time an idealization of the home and the private. People desired to both move and stay put. Television provided a solution to these contradictory desires by creating what WILLIAMS termed “mobile privatization,” or the ability/desire to move, to see places, but in the privacy of your own home. Television therefore developed in response to anxieties over changes in space and was also imbued with respatializing properties that were posed as a kind of solution to those anxieties. Likewise, as SPIGEL (1992) argues, televisual technology also significantly reorganized the ‘private sphere’ as well, where post-war advertisements encouraged women to organize domestic space around the television in ways that helped them to embody newly emerging gender norms. Taking the role of television in the production of ‘public’ space, MCCARTHY (2001) argues that television orchestrates public spaces, helping to direct and govern those spaces and bodies within those spaces in site-specific ways. As WILLIAMS, SPIGEL, MCCARTHY, and others have shown, television does not only represent particular places and spaces, nor collapse them across distances, but, rather, television plays a role in the production, reorganization, and governance of spatiality in ways that are both site- and context-specific. In this sense, the role of television in the production of spatiality is also tied to an idea of place. Indeed, as is argued by FLETCHALL, LUKINBEAL, and MCHUGH (2012, 13) in their book about television representation and production in Orange County, California, “television, plays a significant, yet overlooked, role in placemaking.” In her seminal work, MASSEY (1994), arguing that space is socially constructed and bound up with the construction of (gender) identity, theorized a distinction between space and place. MASSEY reserves the term space for the more general condition that is primordial, enabling, and fundamental to circumstances and conditions that give rise to possibilities, but that can also be constraining. Place, on the other hand, is the local articulation of space, it is how space is realized in the particular, at a particular moment, site, or both. Whereas space might be a point on your GPS, place is about the history, topography, population, and all of the specificity that goes along with a particular location at a particular moment in time. As CRESSWELL (2015) notes, place is both material and immaterial, bound up with material geography but also with the way in which that geography is ‘seen’ (CRESSWELL 2015, 17). Place is “space invested with meaning in the context of power” (CRESSWELL 2015, 19) and, thus, “a way of understanding the world” (CRESSWELL 2015, 18). Space can be likened to movement, whereas place can be understood as “pauses – stops along the way” CRESSWELL (2015, 15). Yet, place is constantly in a state of contingent becoming, subject to the recursive relationship between structures, agency, and practice (MASSEY 1994). Place is thus temporal, in flux, and dynamic. As such, place is bound up with what APPADURAI (1996, 178) refers to as locality, or the more relational and contextual social and cultural practices and

Introduction

27

knowledges that express themselves in “certain kinds of agency, sociality, and reproducibility”. APPADURAI (1996, 179) contends that neighborhoods are a particular kind of locality; they are “situated communities characterized by their actuality, whether spatial or virtual, and their potential for social reproduction” but their boundaries are not fixed, and therefore the locality of neighborhood is always subject to renegotiation through both more ritualized and more contingent acts of neighbors and strangers alike. Neighborhoods are thus places that both require context and are also context generative, as neighborhood “requires the continuous construction, both practical and discursive, of an ethnoscape (necessarily nonlocal) against which local practices and projects are imagined to take place” (APPADURAI 1996, 184). Titled after the historic, but little known – and largely untouristed (despite its being adjacent to the French Quarter) – neighborhood Tremé, the TV series Treme articulates itself immediately as being invested in this idea of neighborhood as locality. It is not just about any place, nor is it more generally about New Orleans. It is about a very particular place – the Tremé neighborhood – and the particular histories, sounds, sites, tastes, and smells that are associated with it.

Figure 1 (Cartography by Jessica Andel, utilizing OpenStreetMap data) Area map of Tremé neighborhood, showing its adjacent neighborhoods

The geographical boundaries of Faubourg Tremé, where Faubourg means suburb, or neighborhood, are difficult to define. As CRUTCHER (2010, 13) argues, “defining

28

Introduction

neighborhood boundaries is always a difficult project,” particularly because “boundaries determine both control of and access to resources.” He suggests that there is some consensus that Tremé includes the area between Rampart Street, Orleans avenue, Claiborne Avenue, and Esplanade Avenue, but there is also a debate about whether the area between Claiborne, Esplanade, and St. Bernard are also included. This struggle over boundaries is linked up to both the city’s complicated ward system as well as the broader history of the neighborhood and its relationship to cultural politics and identity. CRUTCHER (2010, 13) suggests that wards, which had historically been political districts and are now primarily a means for property assessment, “fostered an association between geography and social, economic, and political status.” 13 Despite the difficulty in determining strict boundaries to the neighborhood, the Tremé is a neighborhood with a rich history and a strong sense of place. It takes its name after Claude Tremé, who purchased the plantation land in the late 1700s, and subsequently sold and subdivided it. Though a significant space for African American history and culture, Tremé’s early history is also noted for its diversity as a racially mixed neighborhood (CRUTCHER 2010; ELIE et al. 2008; Greater New Orleans Community Data Center 2005; OSBEY 1990). Many of the neighborhood’s early homeowners were Black – approximately 80 % by 1841 – including Haitian immigrants and free people of color (CHINWE 2015). 14 Thus, the neighborhood has particular significance for the city’s African American population, as the oldest African American neighborhood in America and a site where free people of color were able to establish a thriving neighborhood that was the center of a number of African American struggles for justice. The neighborhood also boasts the first integrated church, St. Augustine Church, which became so largely because of the struggles of Blacks to organize around their right to worship in their neighborhood (OSBEY 1990). Tremé has since been at the center of a number of cultural and social justice struggles, including organizing Black activism during the Reconstruction period and the home of the first Black press. Much of the organizing around Homer Plessy’s resistance to segregation that resulted in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case occurred in Tremé, where Plessy also resided (ELIE et al. 2008). Moreover, Tremé is often referred to as the ‘true birthplace of jazz’ as it is believed that jazz originated out of the practices of slaves and free people of color playing the drum in Congo Square. The neighborhood has since been home to a number of jazz musicians, believed to be nurtured in the neighborhood’s vibrant second-line and brass band traditions, and it is also the site of much activism in the local jazz community. In many ways, Katrina dramatically affected Tremé, even though the floods did relatively less damage to the neighborhood than other, more low-lying areas. The 13 Because of the links wards created between politics and geography, many residents identified with wards, and it wasn’t until the late 1960s and 1970s that New Orleanians began identifying with “faubourg,” i.e. neighborhood, names (CRUTCHER 2010, 14). Residents of Tremé have historically identified with the Sixth Ward, although areas within what is currently known as Tremé extend into other wards as well. 14 During Spanish and French colonization, slaves were able to purchase their freedom, and New Orleans became the city with the largest population of free people of color (CRUTCHER 2010).

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population prior to Katrina, measured in 2000, was around 8,800, whereas afterwards, in the period between 2012–2016 (as measured by the American Community Survey), the population hovered around 4,500 (Tremé/Lafitte 2018). The demographics of the population also changed, with about a 30 % decrease in the Black population and a 23 % increase in Whites (Tremé/Lafitte 2018). The area most affected has been that closest to the French Quarter, considered the ‘historic district.’ Thus, the neighborhood, as ‘place,’ tied to these histories, identities, and material geographies, is a site of struggle, and one that continues to undergo change and transition. To an extent, it is these struggles and changes that Treme takes up, where Tremé serves as something of a case study for understanding the broader changes in both New Orleans and post-industrial cities more widely. Yet, the series has also been criticized by locals and non-locals alike for deciding to title the show Tremé. In an interview, producer Eric Overmyer told me that Treme was really meant as a synecdoche, i.e. the part standing in for the whole, both for New Orleans and American cities more broadly. But, the desire to focus on the particular, the very local, and an individual neighborhood as that mechanism for getting to the whole is also telling. It demonstrates the significance of the local and of locality, place, and neighborhoods in America’s post-industrial cities’ futures. As discussed above, what Treme means, and how it intervenes into these neighborhoods, and into Tremé specifically, has largely been discussed, by Overmyer, critics, and academics alike, in terms of the text – i.e. as a symbolic intervention into place, a way of making place and neighborhood materialize through the representational. Although representations too are productive of spatiality and place in these more material terms, I am interested here in a wider-angle conception of media’s spatializing practices. I follow MORLEY’s (2007, 2008) and MOORES’ (2012) calls for a non-media centric media studies. They argue decentering ‘media’ as the main focus of study, instead situating the relationship between media and its more broadly conceived social, cultural, political, and economic relationships as well as its more specific, contextual uses, practices, and everyday instantiations. Thus, my interest in Treme, and its relationship to spatiality, is not so much in terms of trying to understand and theorize television, as it is in trying to understand what television does in a specific place, at a specific time, and how it goes about doing those things. This way of thinking about the work of television is indebted to practice theory (e.g. BOURDIEU 1977; DE CERTEAU 1984; SCHATZKI 2002), or the theories of how beings and objects negotiate between structure and agency as they make and remake their worlds. With regards to media, COULDRY (2004, 121) suggests practice theory enjoins scholars to ask, “what types of things do people do in relation to media? And what types of things do people say in relation to media?” But analyses of media as a practice, largely in sociology (COULDRY 2004) and media anthropology (BIRD 2003), tend to emphasize practices that stem from media consumption, rather than production (HOBART 2010; RODGERS 2013). COULDRY (2004, 126) suggests, “media production is … generally a rationalized work practice,” and therefore, he argues, it operates differently than media texts or consumption and does not lend itself

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to being studied as a practice. COULDRY’S statement follows what PRATT (2004) has suggested is a consumptionist bias in practice theory, where the practices of audiences engaged in consuming media texts have comprised the bulk of how we tend to understand media as a practice. As a result, media production has historically been studied from the perspective of political economy, which situates production within the wider-angle lens of the more macro political and economic forces that shape the industrial production of media texts. Yet, more recently, the emphasis on the study of media production from the political economic perspective has been reconsidered. Offering what he refers to as a “spatialized ‘production of culture’ approach” PRATT (2004, 124), argues that the “study of the material culture of production” should be on the agenda, and scholars ought to address how culture is produced within the context of particular spaces and places. Recent work in production studies takes up this call, contributing a theoretical and practical framework for how to study the media industry and production. They do so by bridging work on the cultural and political economy and cultural studies by looking specifically at how production cultures themselves work on the ground in specific spaces, places, and temporalities (CALDWELL 2006, 2008; GITLIN 1983; HAVENS et al. 2009; MAYER 2011; MAYER et al. 2009; TINIC 2005). Specifically, HAVENS et al. (2009, 237) propose a framework for critical media industry studies. They call for reinvigorating critical work on media industries that emphasizes micro level industrial practices and “midlevel fieldwork in industry analyses, which accounts for the complex interactions among cultural and economic forces.” My research on Treme draws from this midlevel fieldwork approach through interviews with Treme’s producers, writers, and other workers as well as observations made on set as a way for understanding the practical ways in which the Treme production intervenes into a particular locality. In so doing, I aim to offer a way of understanding the relationship between media production practices and urban space and spatiality. It is within the contours of a production studies informed approach of media production practices, then, that I theorize Treme as a spatial practice. Drawing on DE CERTEAU’s (1984) rendering of the term spatial practice, I am interested in the ways in which Treme inhabits place, locality, and neighborhood. DE CERTEAU attends to the possibilities opened up by a focus on practices of the everyday, and he is particularly interested in how the everyday is a decidedly “spatial practice” carried out by “ordinary practitioners” as opposed to the city planner, cartographer, or planner urbanist. These ordinary practitioners “live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk … they are walkers … whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (DE CERTEAU 1984, 93). Through these practices, which compose a story with no author and no spectator, DE CERTEAU seeks to locate the practices that present themselves as Other to the planned city: Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the “geometrical” or “geographical” space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations … and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of

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the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city. (DE CERTEAU 1984, 93)

Spatial practices produce subjectivity as well as the very spaces that they navigate; practices constitute space and place. It is in this sense, then, that I want to think of Treme not as the sole work of plans and planners, or of the space dominating culture industries, but, rather, in terms of its everyday and quotidian practices that are implicated in the tactical navigation of a particular place. However, as media industries increasingly depend on the free labor and creative production of its users (TERRANOVA 2004), it is difficult to understand DE CERTEAU’S spatial practices as embodying the kinds of resistant potentials he seemed to assume in The Practice of Everyday Life. For DE CERTEAU, spatial practices, such as those of the pedestrian, offered a form of resistance to the more tightly and rigidly controlled urban plan, as those plans could be defied, negotiated, and traversed in unexpected ways. Distinguishing spatial practices as a tactic from the strategies of the urban plan, DE CERTEAU argued that tactics are the “art of the weak … [the pedestrian] must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment” (DE CERTEAU 1984, 37). Yet, as Lev MANOVICH (2009) suggests, de Certeau’s original distinction between tactics and strategies seems to have been reversed: Strategies and tactics are now often closely linked in an interactive relationship, and often their features are reversed. This is particularly true for born-digital industries and media, such as software, computer games, web sites, and social networks. Their products are explicitly designed to be customized by users … [and] companies have developed strategies that mimic people’s tactics of bricolage, reassembly, and remix. The logic of tactics has now become the logic of strategies. (MANOVICH 2009, 323–324)

Treme shows that it is not only in the digital media industries that the logic of tactics is being used. Even in ‘old media’ like cable television, HBO and its parent company Time Warner are invested in trying to cultivate and harness the productive sociality of its viewers. Although this is often understood in terms of their engagements online, I highlight here, particularly in Chapter 5, how viewers’ more ‘grassroots’ and inventive engagements with Treme are also being harnessed through their more material interactivities with the series through their activities in place, especially in terms of tourism and charitable actions. Like the television industry, urban planning is also increasingly taking up the logic of tactics as well. Historically urban plans were the ultimate strategy – as they imagined space as something empty, where the plan – created by experts who likely did not live in the city – would impose a controlled and ordered ideal for how that space could be used, navigated, and maintained. But even in this industry, a more tactical approach is evident, particularly in participatory urban planning practices (see CALDEIRA and HOLSTON 2015) – which were used in creating the urban plans for post-Katrina New Orleans – in which the active participation of residents to plan and imagine their own neighborhoods becomes the grounds for the production of the broader city plan. This kind of ‘grassroots planning,’ initiated in part by the insistent demands of communities themselves to have a say in the direction of their neighborhoods, and seized upon

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by planners and city officials, has been described as potentially ‘transformative,’ where “residents working to create a community‐based participatory planning process might – intentionally or otherwise – parlay that sense of empowerment into a movement to create a community‐based participatory political culture that transcends the reconstruction efforts altogether” (IRAZABAL ZURITA and NEVILLE 2007, 2). The transformation of urban planning into this more participatory, grassroots production of the city suggests that the more tactical spatial practices of the pedestrian are therefore also increasingly bound up with rationalities of governing the city. As the media industry takes a central role in post-Katrina urban planning, as a key industry on which the city’s cultural economy is being built and through which its neighborhoods are imagined to be able to return and revitalize, I ask how Treme helps to bring into focus these more tactical approaches to reorganizing both television production and the city? In conceiving of these interrelationships, I am therefore also contending with how the Treme production might also be thought of as helping to constitute a particular kind of neighborhood habitus. As BOURDIEU (1977, 53) defines it, habitus is composed of systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.

Habitus is produced and negotiated through practices; habitus is the context through which structure and agency are negotiated, it is the context for the production of locality. The habitus helps to foreground the relationship between practices and a particular context whose meanings are immanently produced by the habitus itself (BOURDIEU 1984, 101). Such practices are embodied and are thus played out and performed not through conscious imitation, but through enacted practices. In other words, they are ritualized. It is not only the body through which one learns practical mastery, but it is also through structured spaces and times which perform an educative function and impose orders on bodies (BOURDIEU 1990, 76). MCROBBIE (2005) argues in her reading of the reality TV program What Not to Wear (TLC 2003–2013) that television is bound up with the production of habitus, as it engages viewers in a set of practical exercises that are aimed at practical mastery and therefore educates individuals as to how to perform within their habitus. Whereas MCROBBIE is concerned with how texts engage viewers in practical exercises, I am more invested in how Treme works in a broader sense in the city to direct, govern, and regulate the practical relations of citizens in neighborhood spaces. I therefore consider how Treme’s practices of production are also bound up with the habitus of both New Orleans and of the TV production industry. I consider how the intersection between these two fields of habitus influence the practices of the production and its writers, producers, and cultural workers, as they bring their sensibilities to bear on these interactions, with the aim of highlighting how these sensibilities align, or fail to align, with the broader aims of governing the postKatrina city.

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I contend that Treme’s spatial practices in the city work toward the aim of what ROSE (1999), drawing from FOUCAULT’s (2003) conception of governmentality, refers to as governing through freedom, where city spaces are structured and organized to promote the movements of free, self-regulating, liberal subjects. Scholars working in critical media studies who theorize media as forms of cultural technologies of governing provide a theoretical framework for thinking through these coarticulations (see, for example, BENNETT 1992, 1995, 1998; BRATICH 2008; BRATICH et al. 2003; MILLER 1993, 1998; OUELLETTE 2002; OUELLETTE and HAY 2008; PACKER 2008; PALMER 2003). This work departs from an ideological critique of media rooted in Gramscian theories of hegemony by instead drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality to understand how culture is less a site of ideological struggle and more so a site of the production of citizenship and the management of populations (BENNETT 1998; YÚDICE 2003). FOUCAULT (2003) defined governmentality, simply, as the “conduct of conduct.” He argued government is dispersed through society and operates through the further dispersion of governmental rationality. Foucault directs us not toward the broad macro-processes of state or sovereign, but, rather, to the microphysics of specific practices and techniques by which populations are made governmentalizable and brought into alignment with rationalities of governing. As BENNETT (1998) argues, culture is a key mechanism through which governmental rationality is dispersed and can therefore be theorized as a technology of governing. He suggests, culture emerges as a pluralised and dispersed field of government which … operates through, between, and across [civil society, the state, and the social formation] in inscribing cultural resources into a diversity of programs aimed at directing the conduct of individuals toward an array of different ends, for a variety of different purposes, and by a plurality of means. (BENNETT 1998, 77)

As OUELLETTE and HAY (2008, 14) argue, working within a governmentality framework suggests media can be understood as a technology of governing, or “an object of regulation, policy, and programs designed to nurture citizenship and civil society, and an instrument for educating, improving, and shaping subjects.” Considering television through an analytic of government allows for reading television not as a textual practice of ideological representations, but rather, for how it “governmentalizes by presenting individuals and populations as objects of assessment and intervention, and by soliciting their participation in the cultivation of particular habits, ethics, behaviors, and skills” (OUELLETTE and HAY 2008, 13). Considering Treme as a spatial practice, then, includes looking not only at the ways in which it tactically navigates the streets of New Orleans, or at the rituals it draws on from the TV industry and recreates within the particular context of New Orleans’ streets. It also means drawing into focus how these practices are linked up to broader governmental aims of directing the habits, ethics, behaviors, and skills of New Orleans’ residents and Treme viewers. In so doing, this book contends with the specific ways that media production is put to work to both rebuild and to govern post-Katrina New Orleans and, more specifically, to contend with how the Treme

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production becomes involved in posing governing solutions to the racial, class, and spatial injustices made manifest by Katrina. As city planners in New Orleans focus on the creative and diverse culture of local and so called authentic neighborhoods, media industries are called upon to take up a role in these spaces and places as well as agents of urban renewal. These trends that link media directly to spatial planning and production call for a need for an analysis of practices like on-location shooting, employment, television tourism, and ‘socially responsible’ production practices and philanthropy in terms that contextualize the ways in which these practices intervene materially into the places and spaces in which they are employed. So too, as the city is broadcast to near and distant viewers across the globe, viewers are also invited to participate in spatial practices within the city as well, but in ways that are directed in and through a branded global media conglomerate. Drawing on the theorizations of BOURDIEU, DE CERTEAU, and FOUCAULT above, Treme demonstrates the practical ways in which television production takes up a position in New Orleans, intervenes into, and produces city space in an everyday sense, for both residents and distant viewers. As gestured to above, a central aspect of Treme’s spatial practices take place in the context of neighborhoods, and of the rebuilding of neighborhoods, particularly those most effected by Katrina. In analyzing its particular practices of production, I ultimately theorize Treme’s spatial practices as a kind of becoming neighborly, or in a site-specific sense as taking up a place and role as a kind of neighbor, and producing what I refer to in Chapter 3 as ‘the media neighborhood’ – or, the entreprenuerialization of local, place-specific cultural practices through film and television production. As MAYOL (1998, 10–11) notes, “The neighbourhood is a dynamic notion requiring a progressive apprenticeship that grows with the repetition of the dweller’s body’s engagement in public space until it exercises a sort of appropriation of this space.” I ask, in what ways does Treme’s engagements in New Orleans’ neighborhood appropriate that space and become constitutive of the daily practices and rituals of those spaces? How does it transform, and become transformed by, the neighborhood habitus? And what are the consequences of Treme’s participation in struggles over neighborhood space, and for New Orleans’ neighborhoods especially, in the right to return? How, in turn, do television industries and brands profit from these endeavors? Treme throws focus onto the imbrication of television in the production of neighborhood and neighborhood space at the current conjuncture in post-Katrina New Orleans, and, as I argue in the book’s Conclusion, it also provides insights into how other instances of on-location production in other cities might be understood to play a role in the production of and struggle over neighborhood space as well. RACE: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE ‘POST-RACIAL’ POLITICS OF RACE As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, it is impossible to talk about New Orleans and its rebuilding without centering an intersectional politics of race. So, while I have placed ‘race’ as the last anchoring concept here, it is hopefully evident

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that it underlies both the questions of New Orleans as it appears on and in television and its production as well as in a conceptualization of their relationship to place and spatiality. While much research on television and New Orleans, as I detail in Chapter 1, emphasizes the representational dimensions of race, however, my aim here is to foreground how contemporary television practices work as technologies of racialization in a wider and broader sense as well. Moreover, I argue that Treme is implicated not just in the production of spatiality and urban renewal, but that these practices are also inherently racialized and responsive to the racial antagonisms made manifest during Katrina. Neighborhoods have played a key role in the creative cities strategy of managing the entrepreneurial skills and maximization that is required of individuals to govern themselves in a neoliberal era of self-responsibility. As BROWN (2005) suggests, neoliberalism is a kind of rationality, “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action even as the market itself remains a distinctive player” (p. 40). In his Birth of Biopolitics lectures at the Collège de France, FOUCAULT (2008) details the emergence of American neoliberalism, which he argues draws on but also marks a break from liberal governmentality. American neoliberalism is distinct from classical liberalism in that it shifts the theory of human capital by extending its currently existing domains into new domains. In so doing, neoliberalism revives the theory of homo oeconomicus, or economic man, and produces a theory of an active economic subject who is an entrepreneur of herself (FOUCAULT 2008, 225). American neoliberalism thus generalizes the economic form of market throughout the whole social body and social system. Consequently, economic rationality functions as a “principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior” (FOUCAULT 2008, 243). The economic grid of intelligibility can also be applied to government and to its success or failure – “it involves anchoring and justifying a permanent political criticism of political and governmental action” (FOUCAULT 2008, 246) as “a sort of permanent economic tribunal confronting government” (FOUCAULT 2008, 247). Consequently, neoliberal governmentality emphasizes the freedom of choice; its conduct of conduct orchestrates subjects who are instructed as to how to manage and govern themselves free from government intervention (NADESAN 2008, 30). I detail this extensive definition of neoliberalism here in order to highlight the ways in which it serves to undergird both the forces that helped to engender the harms of Katrina as well as serves as the backdrop of the various solutions applied to those harms. Specifically, as noted earlier in this chapter, Katrina made visible how neoliberal policies and practices deemed whole populations ‘failures’ in their efforts to self-maximize and take responsibilities for themselves, as it rendered visible how these policies and practices legitimated and created the material conditions in which whole populations were left to fend themselves. This was made possible because neoliberalism is inherently racialized. Furthering this argument, GIROUX (2004, 67) suggests, neoliberal racism is about the privatization of racial discourse … Neoliberal racism asserts the insignificance of race as a social force and aggressively roots out any vestige of race as a category at odds with an individualistic embrace of formal legal rights. Focusing on individuals

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Introduction rather than on groups, neoliberal racism either dismisses the concept of institutional racism or maintains that it has no merit. In this context, racism is primarily defined as a form of individual prejudice while appeals to equality are dismissed outright.

Solutions to racial ‘problems’ in neoliberalism therefore eschew state-based welfare solutions and instead promote individual, entrepreneurial freedoms as a means of redressing economic and cultural exclusion. According to GOLDBERG (2009) these shifts promote a discourse that centers on race rather than racism, eschewing broader structural critiques or antagonisms. In media culture, neoliberal racism manifests itself in discourses of the ‘post-racial,’ where television tends to celebrate racial and ethnic difference as forms of consumable lifestyles in ways that largely erase or elide the history of struggle that might contribute to seeing these identities in more political terms (BANET-WEISER 2007). Both before and after Katrina, New Orleans neighborhoods were called upon to self-maximize and enterprise not only as a means for economic development, but as a means of gaining political validation and empowerment for marginalized cultures. In so doing, neighborhood communities were encouraged to see race and culture as expedients to gaining access to nexuses of power, where being able to entrepreneurialize one’s specific racial and vernacular cultural practices are posed as potential solutions to practices of racism and injustice (COMAROFF and COMAROFF 2009; DÁVILA 2004a, 2004b, 2012; YÚDICE 2003). Urban renewal schemes thus increasingly focus on ‘empowering’ marginalized communities, bringing into being new networks and practices at the neighborhood level that can transform neighborhood community into a site of government (OSBORNE and ROSE 1999). Yet, neighborhoods are also tied to historical struggles, identities, memories, and vernacular cultural practices, and the call to entrepreneurialize and render expedient those practices is significantly complex. Many of New Orleans’ historically Black neighborhoods, in particular, might be associated with what BELL HOOKS (1990, 47) has termed “homeplace.” In defining homeplace, she suggests, Throughout our history, African-Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not directly encounter white racist aggression. Whatever the shape and direction of black liberation struggle … domestic space has been a crucial site for organizing, for forming political solidarity. Homeplace has been a site of resistance.

The Tremé neighborhood seems to fit this understanding of homeplace, as the historic home to Congo Square where slaves gathered to play the drum and to dance, formulating the ‘birthplace’ of jazz. It was also the space in which political organizing during the reconstruction and civil rights eras emerged, and it remains a vital center for the production of musical culture and practices that play a key role in the cultural memory of the city’s African American population (CRUTCHER 2010). Yet, in an era in which diverse cultural practices at the level of the neighborhood have come to play a central role in cities’ broader plans for economic development as well as toward the aims of resolving social ‘problems,’ what different struggles around the production of ‘neighborhood’ emerge?

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In her work on New York’s East Harlem, DÁVILA (2004a, 2004b) suggests that shifts in rationalities of multiculturalism increasingly position Latino neighborhoods as a desirable space in cities. She argues that struggles over neighborhood space reveal that cultural politics play a central role in the structuring of space, where neighborhood culture “is increasingly an instrument in the entrepreneurial strategies of government and businesses, serving both as a means of selling, framing and structuring space and as a medium for contesting such practices to reclaim space and advance alternative meanings” (DÁVILA 2004a, 97). Yet, these aims are not always easily separable or distinguishable, as culture is deployed both as a form of “marketable ethnicity” as well as more politicized manifestations in ways that can overlap and blur into one another. She thus suggests that struggles over space implicated in neighborhood advertising and art mediums is “less a contest over the signification of outdoor surfaces or of East Harlem’s public identity as a Latin neighborhood, and more one over who is involved in its definition, and for what ends” (DÁVILA 2004a, 97). As a result, public debates over the uses of ethnic culture in urban neighborhood renewal projects need to be analyzed not on the basis of whether or not it necessarily commodifies culture, but, rather, in terms of its imbrication in a particular material and rhetorical context. Like DÁVILA, then, a particular concern I have with Treme is how it intervenes in the production of and struggle over racialized, particularly Black, neighborhood space in post-Katrina New Orleans in the context of creative cities cultural policy making and racial neoliberalism. Like those struggles over outdoor space in East Harlem, Treme is not easily parsed out as either constituting dominant appropriations of space by the culture industry or as a form of politicized resistance to reclaim the right to the city. Instead, Treme highlights how what is typically understood as resistance and domination are increasingly blurred in the neoliberal city. Whereas much of the work to date that tackles these questions largely considers media in representational terms, my work does not specifically attend to how the show represents race in the city. I am therefore less interested in what race ‘is,’ counterhegemonic representations of race, how watching Treme impacts one’s racial identity, or how New Orleans as a sense of place in the series constructs identifications of Blackness. Instead, I am interested in the more material practices of the show as technologies of governing racialized neighborhood space and citizenship in the context of the problematizations of Katrina and the marriage of “culture-as-vernacular practices, notions of community, and economic development” (YÚDICE 2003).

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS In what follows, I draw on these conceptions of race, place, and the significance of New Orleans on television to try to untangle the complex ways in which the Treme production intervenes into the production of urban spatiality. Chapter 1, “From Frank’s Place to Treme,” lays out the ground work for how Treme precipitates a

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new set of questions to attend to with regards to the role of television in the production of racialized space in contemporary cities. I detail the historical context of Katrina in which Treme emerged, highlighting the significance of the growth of onlocation television production. Specifically, I compare Treme to the television series Frank’s Place (CBS 1981–1982) to argue for why a new approach to theorizing television’s relationship to race and place differs in the contemporary era. Both Treme and Frank’s Place are set in Tremé and represent struggles over race and place in New Orleans, yet Treme was filmed on-location whereas Frank’s Place was filmed in a Hollywood studio. This chapter takes note of the significance of the rise of neoliberal forms of cultural policy, the emergence of the post-broadcast television industry, and discourses of post-racialism that precipitate a need for a new approach to understanding race, place, and New Orleans on television. Chapter 2, “Media, Cultural Policy & Urban Planning Before and After Katrina,” draws on archival research to historicize New Orleans’ cultural policy as a way of understanding how Hurricane Katrina made manifest racial and class inequalities in ways that influenced contemporary cultural policy and urban planning. Specifically, this chapter argues that post-Katrina New Orleans was a testing ground for the production of a new discourse of cultural policy and urban planning that inflected discourses of the ‘creative city’ with a conception of a local neighborhood articulated to both discourses of social justice and neoliberalism. Here, I argue, that post-Katrina New Orleans cultural policy constructed a new discourse of television production as an expedient to the production of local, neighborhood, place-based identities that could be put to work in the service of urban renewal. I suggest these policies helped to make possible a production like Treme. This, then, serves as the context for Chapter 3, “Location, Location, Location! Sites & Spatial Practices in Location Shooting,” where I turn to consider how Treme was not only made possible by these urban planning agendas, but that it also helped to implement the governing aims embodied in these plans as well. Specifically, this chapter examines on-location shooting and local hiring practices in Treme. I argue Treme’s on-going shooting schedule and its aim to film in every neighborhood established the production as a regular inscription on the landscape. On-location shooting affected the ways bodies moved in space, constituting and cultivating the neighborhood habitus and producing what I refer to as ‘the media neighborhood.’ I also detail Treme’s efforts to hire local labor for both above the line and below the line positions. In so doing, Treme worked as a technology for entrepreneurializing vernacular cultural practices already embedded in neighborhood culture, networking them to structures of power, and harnessing the neighborhood as an economic and social space of potential value. Treme’s local hiring captured the living labor embodied in neighborhood space by entrepreneurializing it, composing bodies and everyday practices in the neighborhood as mediatizable, and enabling creative potential to be transformed into value for the television industry, and real estate investors. The following two chapters turn to considering the ways in which Treme’s production practices are implicated in directing the spatial practices of viewers. In Chapter 4, I look specifically at Treme’s relationship to practices of tourism, and

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especially at the rise of Treme-inspired and themed tours as well as the broader, intertextual discourses of Treme’s producers with regards to the show’s involvement in touristic practices. I argue that these touristic practices demonstrate how Treme intervenes directly into struggles over city space and the right to return, particularly as it becomes implicated in debates over gentrification. Chapter 5, “It’s HBO: Affective Economics of Place,” also looks at practices of tourism, as well as charity, but it does so through the lens of how HBO stands to gain from these practices as well. Whereas the earlier chapters attempt to parse out what is at stake for New Orleans in Treme’s uptake of the city, this chapter instead attempts to theorize how and why the place of New Orleans has created new stakes for the television industry and for television production in the context of HBO. I argue Treme engendered HBO’s post-broadcast brand mutation by producing ‘passionate engagement,’ where viewers were invited to interact with the show by touring and giving back to (through various forms of charity) New Orleans, thus adding place to online interactivity and multi-screen engagement as a means of constructing an ‘authentic’ brand identity. The desire for viewers to connect to New Orleans’ culture was thus transformed into a vehicle for profit making for HBO and an assurance to shareholders that the brand still holds value. As the network struggles to maintain its relevance and prominence in an era in which more and more cable networks and streaming platforms are beginning to look a lot less like ‘TV’ as it has been traditionally conceived, Treme helps to position the HBO brand as a new kind of authentic, as it not only enables the creative auteur and quality content, but it also produces civically engaged citizens who are connected to a material place. Treme therefore points to the innovative ways in which media brands increasingly direct the engaged, material practices of viewers. It invites its viewers not to consume a simulated space, but to immerse themselves in New Orleans and to make connections with its marginalized neighborhoods and residents. As a result, Treme presents a complicated set of stakes regarding vernacular and resistive practices of neighborhood spaces and the way in which these become bound up with aims of city branding and promotion when they are taken up by a global media conglomerate. It is precisely these complications and contradictions that this book seeks to parse out. Therefore, in the conclusion, I reflect on the lasting significance of Treme for the production of urban space and the rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans now that the production has wrapped, as well as argue for how the Treme case and theorizing television production as a spatial practice can be utilized as a lens for understanding other examples of television production.

CHAPTER 1 From Frank’s Place to Treme Built by free people of color in the early 1800s, New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood has long been associated as a key site for the city’s Black culture, history, music, and traditions. Treme pays tribute to these practices as well as the spaces from which they emerge. In the series premiere (HOLLAND 2010), the episode ends with a depiction of the first memorial jazz funeral after Hurricane Katrina. The jazz funeral was held for a notable figure associated with Tremé’s history and culture, Austin Leslie, chef of the once famous restaurant Chez Helene located in the Tremé. Leslie and his restaurant gained national and international notoriety after Chez Helene was used as the model for the short-lived but critically acclaimed series Frank’s Place (CBS 1987–1988), for which Leslie also served as an adviser. This detail makes the closing scene of Treme’s first episode significant not only for what it reveals about post-Katrina New Orleans and how it pays tribute to the city’s culture, music, and history, but also for the ways in which it speaks to and pays tribute to television’s history as well. 1 Yet, despite this brief intersection between these two texts, much has changed since the days of Frank’s Place. In this chapter, I contrast Treme to this earlier television series that was also set in New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood. I turn to an analysis of Frank’s Place as a point of comparison to Treme to suggest that in the years since Frank’s Place, changes in media culture, urban renewal and planning policies, and the role of cultural and creative industries in these practices have changed the role that television productions play in cities, and especially in New Orleans. Whereas for media scholars who critiqued Frank’s Place, the space of New Orleans was only tangentially figured (e.g. GRAY 1991, 1995; NEWCOMB 1990; WHITE 1991), media scholars today are enjoined to figure the city space itself as a central actor in the workings of Treme. What is at stake in the comparison of Frank’s Place to Treme is a question of the tools needed to do critical media studies of television in today’s changing cultural economy in cities. Specifically, I call for a need to move beyond analyses that center on how cities are represented on screen and to take into account the broader ways in which media participates in the production of material space in the city. Given the relative paucity of Blackness on television at the time and the long trend of stereotypical representations of Blackness before then (BOGLE 2001), it is 1

The series pays tribute to Frank’s Place on other occasions as well. Tim Reid, who produced and starred in Frank’s Place as Frank, makes a cameo appearance in season 1 of Treme as a judge. Treme also held two annual benefits where they screened episodes from Frank’s Place to benefit the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, a high school in New Orleans devoted to the arts which a number of Treme’s actors, writers, musicians, and other crew attended (WALKER 2010).

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unsurprising that the politics of representation figured centrally as the pressing political struggle in Frank’s Place. Whereas the post-war era of the 1950s and 1960s produced a ghettoized Black population through the engineering of new zoning policies and real-estate practices that explicitly problematized Black bodies as a threat to property values (HIRSCH 2000), in the 1980s and 1990s public policy aimed to cordon off what was represented as a dangerous and pathological Black culture (DAVIS 2006; HAYMES 1995; WILSON 2007). Rather than being explicitly racialized, this latter era worked in code through inferential and colorblind discourses of race. It represented a shift in struggles over the dismantling of Black public space to one over the re-signification of Black public space and the disarticulation of it from sites of memory and practices of Black vernacular culture and history. Though practices of representation played a role in the previous era, during the 1980s and 1990s this was the primary terrain through which relations between race and space were engineered. These trends are particularly evident in the history of New Orleans and the Tremè neighborhood, particularly in terms of how racialized, cultural practices were figured in discourses of urban development and renewal. In the current era, however, relations between race and urban space have been altered. With these changes, the role of television’s relationship to these spaces has been altered as well. While new urban renewal strategies in the last decade aim toward the ‘empowerment’ of neighborhoods and spaces associated with racial Otherness, television culture is increasingly marked by ‘post-racialism,’ where (often commodified) forms of racial difference appear as prolific and varied across a fragmented television landscape. Further, New Orleans, as well as other (especially post-industrial) cities across the United States, has shifted from not just a city that gets represented on screen, but increasingly as the place in which television is produced as well. These changes call into question whether media scholarship that posits television as a site of struggle over hegemonic productions of identity has the same purchase as it did during Frank’s Place. In this chapter, I analyze the kinds of scholarly debates that surrounded Frank’s Place and argue that the conditions under which Treme was produced call for new ways of understanding the interarticulations between race, place, and New Orleans on television. Specifically, I argue that shifts in television toward the ‘post-broadcast’ era – beginning, roughly, around 2005 where television is increasingly streamed, downloaded, mobile, do-it-yourself, and consumer co-created (HARTLEY 2009) – coincide with the proliferation of discourses of the ‘post-racial,’ changes in the cultural policy and urban renewal strategies of cities, and the cultural economic and policy goals of New Orleans and the Tremé neighborhood. These shifts require scholars to go beyond the text. Treme calls for a different set of questions than those that were asked of Frank’s Place. Scholars today are enjoined to query how Treme is productive of material, spatial practices that are played out at various levels of cultural policy, hiring and employment practices, and broader strategies of city and network branding that intervene into the current conjuncture where racial difference is figured in market terms as a provisionally included and marketable identity.

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FRANK’S PLACE Frank’s Place dealt with the daily struggles of African Americans in New Orleans as they were played out in a neighborhood restaurant – the fictional Chez Louisiane based on the real restaurant Chez Helene in the Tremé neighborhood. The show detailed the daily life of a Brown University professor, Frank (played by Tim Reid), who inherited a Creole-style restaurant in New Orleans from his estranged father. The series was noted for the lack of a laugh track and its sophisticated weaving of comedy and drama into a new genre – the dramedy – that featured compelling plots that were politically and socially relevant to the time. Popular and scholarly critics alike anticipated Frank’s Place as an important example of the future of Blackness on TV in the post-Cosby era. Critics in the popular press heralded Frank’s Place for breaking TV’s color-line with non-stereotypical representations of Blackness (SANOFF and THORTON 1987). Frank’s Place received a number of awards, including nine Emmy nominations in 1988 (HANAUER 1988) of which it won three, including Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series (Internet Movie Database n.d.). The popular and scholarly debates that emerged around Frank’s Place primarily emphasized the show’s representational cultural politics, which constituted the concerns and assumptions of critical media scholars of television in the 1980s. In these debates, race and place figured into scholarly analyses as primarily concerns about representation and identity. Although the questions scholars asked of the show were necessary at the time, Treme requires a different framework for critique, as it intervenes into both television and New Orleans at a distinct moment. In the popular press, critics overwhelmingly embraced Frank’s Place for its realistic depiction of non-stereotypical Blackness and daily struggles of Black life, which was part of a conscious effort of the producers to present more positive and respectful images of Blackness on television. As one television critic put it, in Frank’s Place, There are no belly laughs. No guffaws. No howls. It’s not shooting for those, which is why the laugh track would never have worked. It’s just a nice show that makes you smile some and care about its characters a lot … A show whose characters are eccentrics, yes, but not cartoons. A departure – though a subtle one, not a bold one. (SONSKY 1987)

As Tim Reid, who played Frank in the show and was one of the show’s producers, explains, the lack of stereotypes in the show was part of a conscious effort of the production and writing team to present more positive and respectful images of Blackness. He states, We made a pact to do what we’d always wanted to do – to show a segment of American culture in a way it had not been done. It’s Black, Southern. But the Blacks are not woe-is-me, downtrodden Black people, and the Whites are not racist, hang-’em-type White guys. It’s a show that’s respectful to both cultures. I think we’re setting groundwork in television, showing Black people in a more respectful, positive way … We’re dealing with a middle ground of people – not pimps and hookers and superBlacks. And there’s respect for older people … The cast is different – not everyone is a blue-eyed blond. We're getting out of that New York-L.A. mentality. Everybody doesn’t have to look like they just came off the cover of Vogue or GQ. (quoted in HILL 1987)

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As this quote illustrates, the makers of Frank’s Place were primarily invested in practices of representation – in trying to break TV’s glass ceiling of Blackness by providing realistic characters, and getting out of the “New York-L.A. mentality” and into a mentality that stemmed from New Orleans was a central mechanism for doing so. Some critics lauded the show’s lack of stereotypical Black characters as a triumph of a kind of “colorblind” TV, suggesting, “Is it a ‘Black show?’ No, it’s a people show. And a place show” (SHALES 1987). This suggests the show’s setting in New Orleans made it more than a ‘positive’ image of Blackness – its setting in a specific place of Black culture, community, and history enabled its text to challenge dominant representations. Some critics argued that it was Frank’s Place’s relationship to place that made it a show about Blackness. As a consultant to The Cosby Show argued, it was Frank’s Place’s “regional authenticity” that provided its serious rendering of culture. Though network executives had wanted the show to focus on a Cajun restaurant because of the ‘craze’ for Cajun cooking at that time, producers secretly designed Chez Louisiane around the Afro-Creole restaurant Chez Helene, decidedly off the tourist map, in order to make it more ‘authentic’ (GOLDMAN 1987; PATE 1988; WATERS and HUCK 1988). The producers thus banked on the network executives being unable to tell the difference but also on the assumption that some of their audiences would recognize and appreciate the distinction. As one article noted of the show, Realism ran rampant. The restaurant on the series is based on a real New Orleans restaurant, copied floor plan to kitchen. Real New Orleans cooking is done on the show, and many of the lines are based on encounters Reid and Wilson had in New Orleans. (NIEDT 1987)

Chez Helene’s owner and chef, Austin Leslie, was soon asked to come to Los Angeles as a consultant for the show in order to procure this sense of the ‘authentic’ (SEVERSON 2005). Although critics in the popular press largely embraced the show, Frank’s Place stirred a significant debate in media studies, most notably between WHITE (1991) and GRAY (1991, 1995) as well as NEWCOMB (1990), about the racial politics and ideology of the show as it relates to place and New Orleans. Like those in the popular press, however, media scholars who took up Frank’s Place also overwhelmingly addressed the show in representational terms, particularly when considering the relevance of the show being set in New Orleans. GRAY (1995) noted that the opening title sequence of the show – which was the result of pictorial and video footage taken during producers’ visits to the city and set to Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” – placed, the viewer aurally and visually into the experience of black New Orleans. In representing this space and place, the producers foregrounded African American New Orleans, thereby situating the program’s location and identity within a particular African American formation. Frank’s Place is not just Anywhere, USA, populated by anonymous folk, but black New Orleans, with its own particular history and story. (GRAY 1995, 120–121)

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For GRAY, the power of New Orleans for Frank’s Place was therefore in its ability to represent – to symbolize and call forth structures of feeling 2 that could interpellate its viewers into a particular racial formation that was responsive to racial and class struggles. New Orleans had a productive power that made possible, through its coded visual and aural images, counter-hegemonic readings and subject positions that had the potential to resonate through feeling and affect, rather than with an explicit ideology or set of meanings, with the viewer. Likewise, WHITE (1991) and NEWCOMB (1990) also took up Frank’s Place as an object of criticism, and they too understood New Orleans as a place of representation in the series that called forth racialized subject positions. WHITE (1991) argued the claim that Frank’s Place challenged television’s norms failed to account for the power that television’s commercially driven formulas have on constructing the genre’s potential. She suggested, The initial otherness of New Orleans is quickly recast as warm familiarity and familiality … It is not really different at all, but provides the title character with surroundings where he can finally secure his [Frank’s] identity in a proto-familial structure. This contrasts sharply with his life in Boston. (WHITE 1991, 88)

Rather than acting as a signifier to structure a feeling of memory and reminiscence of Black culture and community, WHITE argued that New Orleans figured in Frank’s Place as a contained and subdued foil to the Northeast (as represented by Frank’s position at a northeastern Ivy League school, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island). NEWCOMB (1990), conversely, argued that the sense of place engendered by the setting in New Orleans was essential to Frank’s Place. Arguing for a distinction between location (as material space made necessary for production) and place (as a set of meanings tied to location that is necessary for narrative), NEWCOMB (1990, 32) suggested that Frank’s Place existed as “a set of cultural meanings constructed by the intersection of existing codes of place and individualized characters who inhabit that place.” For Newcomb, then, the ‘place’ of Frank’s Place was not about its space as material location of production (which was L.A.), but, rather, it was produced through its narrative construction of a particular sense of place. This sense of place was made possible by a complex weaving of codes that were both familiar and unfamiliar. They were familiar in that they relied on the audiences’ understanding of New Orleans and of the south, yet they were also unfamiliar in that they drew the viewer into neighborhood specificity (33). By learning these unfamiliar codes, NEWCOMB argued, viewers are instructed about what it means to 2

Gray is drawing on RAYMOND WILLIAMS’ (1977, 132) use of the phrase “structures of feeling,” or “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable) … We are talking about … affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought … We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet, we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis … has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies.”

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live “here” (35). Ultimately, however, Newcomb’s point is that this sense of place is invoked as a backdrop and metaphor for the real question – which is Frank’s, the character’s, ‘place.’ That is, NEWCOMB argued that the show is ultimately about Frank coming to terms with his own place in the world, his identity, and his struggle over Blackness, and the place of New Orleans is invoked as a signifier to establish this identity. Though NEWCOMB, GRAY, and WHITE present differing interpretations of Frank’s Place, each invokes ‘place’ in representational terms, where the city provides for the show a set of coded signifiers that are significant for the identifications and ideologies called forth in the audience and, especially, in how these relate to racial identity. Thus, media scholars who took up Frank’s Place were largely interested in how representations of New Orleans enabled a particular kind of representation of Blackness. The city and its geography were read as primarily symbolic signifiers, which could indeed be subject to debate, but there was little material engagement with the city itself. What I want to argue, in contrast, is that media studies’ investment in New Orleans as a “sense of place” (NEWCOMB 1990) is complicated by today’s cultural economy of television. Whereas in the 1980s, the majority of television series, and particularly dramas, were filmed on a Hollywood backlot, television production has become increasingly mobile and dispersed, especially since the rise of state-based tax incentive programs to lure film and television production. In 1987, 87.5 % of television production took place in California (JOHNSON-YALE 2017). In 2015, that number was closer to 45 % (Film L.A. Inc. 2015). Thus, in Treme, the space of location for production is collapsed with the sense of place in the narrative construction. Treme’s practices of production on the ground are constitutive of and help to shape its narrative of place. This alters the set of questions media scholars might ask about the role of place for the series. To some extent, then, it is what is absent in the debates around Frank’s Place that I want to draw attention to in relation to Treme. Although there was some discussion of the way in which particular configurations of race in New Orleans played out in Frank’s Place, 3 debates around the show were not particularly invested in how the show related to the culture and geography of New Orleans. The city and its geography were, again, primarily symbolic signifiers for a broader question of Black identity. Though NEWCOMB (1990) noted how unfamiliarity of place was invoked in the show through neighborhood specificity, none of the articles I read during the show’s airing in both local and national presses or scholarly articles mentioned the fact that Chez Helene was in the Tremé neighborhood. It was not even mentioned that it was in the Sixth Ward, the more common name by which the area was referenced during that time. 3

The particularities of New Orleans’ racial hierarchies, for example, were discussed in an episode where Frank was asked to attend an exclusive club of light-skinned Blacks as the token member whose skin was “darker than a paper bag,” which referenced the city’s infamous paper bag parties where Blacks were denied entry if their skin was darker than a paper bag. For further discussion on “paper bag parties” see DYSON 2006.

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Figure 2 (Cartography by Jessica Andel, utilizing OpenStreetMap data) Location of the restaurant Chez Helene on North Robertson St., which was used as the model for the TV show Frank’s Place’s Chez Louisiane restaurant

References to Chez Helene’s material place in the city in the press either suggested it was a “plain-looking restaurant in a Black section of town where Blacks and Whites mingle over reasonably priced, delicious Creole-soul food” (MAUSHARD 1987) or a “Creole-soul food restaurant in the middle of a New Orleans ghetto” (SONSKY 1988). Numerous references were made in the press at the time to the increased tourist business the restaurant received as a result of the show, especially among Whites. A number of articles also detailed various potential tourist itineraries, especially culinary ones, in which Chez Helene had been made into a definitive, though very lonely, stop, as the only notable stop in the neighborhood on the map (LIND 1987; PATE 1988). Clearly, if there was only one place go to, actually naming the neighborhood seemed to be unnecessary, or worse yet, would serve to detract tourists through the neighborhood’s association with drugs, crime, and other incendiary activity. Thus, even the discussion of the show’s relationship to tourism was limited – it centered almost exclusively on Chez Helene and in neither the discourse of the city nor of the show’s producers or executives did this tourism seem to figure into any kind of broader strategy of attracting tourists to Tremé or other cultural spaces of Blackness in the city.

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Debates around Frank’s Place also showed no discussion of broader questions of cultural policy or the city’s relationship to cultural production. Although producers visited the area to get a feel for the show and to ensure its authenticity, the show was filmed on set in Los Angeles rather than on location. Hence, the specific political struggles going on in the city at the time did not play a role in either affecting the show’s narrative or its production practices. Though Frank’s Place was committed to maintaining a Black crew, filming in L.A. meant that there was no commitment to a local New Orleans based crew. There was therefore no discussion of Frank’s Place in relation to television production and its significance for the New Orleans labor base and economy. Moreover, neither scholars nor critics writing in the popular press seemed particularly interested in the debates and struggles over urban renewal projects that had been initiated by the city and local community organizations concurrently with the running of the series. These struggles included the long-running controversy over the Interstate Ten and the Claiborne Avenue overpass, built in the 1960s, which ran directly through the neighborhood and resulted in the destruction of primarily Black homes and businesses in a once thriving community, as well as more immediate controversies over the fence in Armstrong Park which blocked off the neighborhood from the public park. These are debates that would have affected the fictional Frank’s Place in its real-life material form. Though one article referencing these renewal efforts notes that Chez Helene had brought tourism to the area, such a note was not brought into any kind of meaningful dialogue with the other efforts to beautify the area through planting, park benches, and other anti-blight amenities (MARCUS 1988). It is clear that there was no framework for seeing this kind of media, i.e. a television show, as a force of renewal and an anti-blight amenity in itself. The same cannot be said for the discourse surrounding Treme. These urban renewal histories, as well as their current manifestations, are front and center in Treme’s narrative and, as I argue in later chapters, in how it navigates its production practices as well. Likewise, scholarly debates in the 1980s brought up no link between Frank’s Place and the particular struggles of musicians at the time. Though Frank’s Place was heralded by GRAY (1995) and REEVES and CAMPBELL (1989) for its commitment to authentically Black music, and New Orleans’ music in particular, in such a way that it helped to both promote these genres and to engender an aesthetic structure of feeling of Blackness, neither these scholars nor the show directly engaged with the ongoing struggle of New Orleans’ musicians to find work and a paycheck. In an article published during Frank’s Place’s airing, Dr. John expressed his mixed feelings about having to play ‘jingles’ for commercials in order to pay for his kids’ education. As the lead-in to the article states, The media tell us we’re in the midst of a huge Louisiana love affair, a mainstream revival of New Orleans’ music and culture. Movies gave us The Big Easy, TV has Frank’s Place and the music industry is swamped with the insinuating rhythms of zydeco. Yet Dr. John, the personification of voodoo charm – heck, the rightful heir to legendary brothel pianist Professor Longhair – hasn’t been able to cash in. (MACINNIS 1988)

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Thus, Dr. John was forced to ‘sell out’ his music for a commercial cash-in through writing advertising jingles. This run-in between the commercial and vernacular New Orleans culture seems very different to me than that which Treme provides – both offer a commercial value to a cultural practice through mainstream media, but the former is a sale through a commercial advertiser and the latter is a chance for Dr. John to play himself on an HBO production. While both shows represent an increased interest in New Orleans culture at a particular conjuncture, they each represent divergent mechanisms through which that culture is engaged and practiced within the media industry. Although it could be argued these are issues that could have been taken up by media and television studies at the time, it is also the case that to take up these as central issues to understanding Frank’s Place would not have made that much sense. Given that Frank’s Place aired before the landmark 2002 tax incentive legislation that helped establish New Orleans as ‘Hollywood-South,’ questions about local hiring, city policies, urban renewal and so forth would not have helped scholars to understand the significance of the series for the city. Or, at the very least, the entrance into these issues would have necessarily taken place through the text and not through the broader spatial practices of the series. This differs significantly for Treme, however, where the show not only commentates on urban renewal efforts after Katrina through its text but is also heralded by the city as a component of that very same revitalization by stimulating the economy through TV production. These practices seep into the narrative, as the show’s ability to hire and contract out local performers, extras, and personalities help to create what producers hope is an ‘authentic’ representation of everyday life in postKatrina New Orleans. Therefore, I argue that there are differences between the kinds of questions that are required of media scholars today than of the past, and what stands between them includes two decades of changes in policies, culture, and economics in both cities and in media that distinguish Treme from its predecessor. I suggest there are two significant factors that have intervened between Frank’s Place and Treme: 1) the emergence of post-broadcast television and ‘post-racial’ media culture, and 2) cultural economic policy in New Orleans in the post-Katrina context. BETWEEN FRANK’S PLACE AND TREME: WHAT’S CHANGED? Post-broadcast & Post-racial Television Television is a medium in transition, and though HBO has long sought to distinguish itself from other television and cable networks, it too continues to experience a great deal of pressure and uncertainty due to these changes. Referred to as the ‘post-broadcast’ era (LOTZ 2014; TURNER and TAY 2009), shifts in new media technologies such as iPods and iPads, multiple screens, time-shifting technologies, online streaming, the DVR, viewer interactivity and binge watching, media policy changes, and so forth have taken their toll on the medium, leading some scholars to

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prognosticate “the end of TV” or at least “the end of TV as we know it” (LOTZ 2014). Although television is not dead and is indeed still a dominant medium, it has been forever altered by new media (TURNER and TAY 2009, 3). We remain in a kind of uncertain moment for television, or in what SPIGEL and OLSSON (2004) refer to in their collection Television after TV, as the era of television that comes after TV. As SPIGEL (2004, 2) notes, The demise of the three-network system in the United States, the increasing commercialization of public service / state-run systems, the rise of multichannel cable and global satellite delivery, multinational conglomerates, Internet convergence, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, the advent of HDTV, technological changes in screen design, the innovation of digital television systems like TiVo, and new forms of media competition all contribute to transformations in the practice we call watching TV. Indeed, if TV refers to the technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking that were associated with the medium in its classical public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television – the phase that comes after “TV”.

Given the convergence of these varied forces, TURNER and TAY (2009) note that television has moved beyond broadcasting, where it is no longer tied to domestic space and addressed to a national audience articulated to a democratic state through a universally available communications infrastructure. Instead, it has become a post-broadcast medium, where it has escaped domestic space, proliferated across multiple platforms, and become a spectacle of urban public space itself (TURNER and TAY, 2009, 1). And, indeed, the spatiality of post-broadcast television calls into question the linking of television not only to the domestic, in the context of viewing, but also to its more traditional spatialities of producing – the studio. In the post-broadcast era, television is increasingly produced on-location, and the traditional anchors of Hollywood or New York are similarly called into question. Instead, television production takes place across an diverse and dispersed set of sites, producing what CURTIN (2004, 271) has referred to as new “media capitals,” or new patterns of media flows that “emanate from particular cities that have become centers for the finance, production, and distribution of television programs.” And, indeed, New Orleans, as ‘Hollywood South,’ has become a significant media capital in the post-broadcast television industry, rivaling Hollywood, New York, and Vancouver in overall expenditures of film and television production (MAYER 2016). Moreover, rather than anchored to a particular city, television production is increasingly marked by “mobile production,” or, in other words, by an impetus to go wherever its production costs can be cheapest (MCNUTT 2015). Its daily practices of production, from conception to implementation and filming, must therefore account for the mobility of the industry. Again, these contexts position Treme in a significantly different way when it comes to the kinds of forces at work in its production than did Frank’s Place, and, similarly, enjoin us to ask a different set of questions about its relationship to place, as ‘place’ takes on new valences as production space collapses with narrative place. So too, post-broadcast television defies the kind of ‘medium specific’ analysis indicative of Frank’s Place era theorizing, which largely addressed the specific role

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of television as a visual and representational medium bound up with the signification of Blackness in the 1980s. Treme instead calls for thinking of media practice more broadly to incorporate a wider understanding of its social and spatial practices. In part, this is due to the particular conjuncture of post-broadcast television, where industry discourse increasingly promotes the rationality that it is almost impossible to think of television as an independent medium or technology. As JENKINS (2006, 2) theorizes, media has entered into an era of convergence, defined as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences.” This is certainly not the case for all television viewers and users – for television production, consumption, and distribution continues to be marked by a digital divide that reifies racial, class, and gender divisions in terms of access to and skills in using technologies of convergence. As JOHNSON (2010, 108) notes, “Digitalization also compresses and accelerates the historic and ongoing reality of selective rather than universal market cultivation and the unevenness that is structured in to communication technology institutionally, in regulatory and cultural / symbolic terms.” Still, the television industry, HBO included, is steeped in anxieties around discourses of convergence and digitization, as these are posed as threatening the stability of the medium in the future. As a result, a rationality of convergence pervades post-broadcast industry practices and discourses at the contemporary conjuncture. Treme, in particular, demonstrates the social forces of convergence in that it is a cable television show about music culture that also calls forth a variety of web-based audience interactivities, as well as materialized spatial practices. Moreover, the show, as an HBO original program, is part of HBO’s post-Soprano’s business and marketing strategy and HBO’s attempt to remain culturally relevant in the wake of shifting terrains between media production and consumption in an era of post-broadcast convergence. This is markedly different from the televisual conjuncture of Frank’s Place. Though the series was credited with inventing a new genre – ‘the dramedy’ – as well as with featuring New Orleans based music in its soundtrack (most notably, Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” over the opening titles), it intervened into television culture at a time when networks were still largely invested in the accumulation of mass, rather than niche, audiences. Though this was the beginning of what LOTZ (2014) refers to as the “multi-channel transition,” where an increasing number of channels meant that networks had to compete for audience eyeballs, major networks still garnered the majority of audiences but were less likely to take risks on novel content. The kinds of industry pressures that Frank’s Place producers were likely to endure were therefore significantly different than those of Treme’s producers.

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The shift to television as a post-broadcast medium has also played a central role in the production of discourses that espouse television as part of a ‘post-racial’ 4 media culture, where representations of racial difference help to constitute a network’s brand as edgy and hip. Blackness, in particular, helps to constitute this site of difference, especially as it is bound up with practices of television branding and the production of market niches (GRAY 2005). The focus on ‘diversity’ as a form of cultural capital has become centered on a proliferation of difference in terms of “‘hip,’ ‘urban,’ and ‘cool’”, ‘postracial’ style that draws on signifiers of Blackness (BANET-WEISER 2007, 214). As opposed to much televisual representation of nonWhites in the 1980s, contemporary representations of ethnic and racial differences are in large part ‘positive’ representations across a wide array of diverse media sites (GRAY 2005). These practices of including people of color in the mediascape, however, tend to elide historical struggles over racial justice and instead posit racial identity as a commodified and consumable lifestyle (BANET-WEISER 2007; GRAY 2005; HASINOFF 2008; MUKHERJEE 2006; NILSEN and TURNER 2014; SQUIRES 2014). Indeed, as YÚDICE (2003) argues, racial and ethnic Others are increasingly called upon to see their difference as a cultural and economic expedient rather than as a barrier to entry into the market. And cable television, particularly in the post-broadcast era, has poised itself to capitalize on these differences as a way to market their brand to new, niche audiences (FULLER 2010; GRAY 2013; NG 2013; SMITHSHOMADE 2008). Thus, whereas CBS network’s cancellation of Frank’s Place left the series with nowhere to go since producers saw cable networks as unable to support the series’ high cost of production, Treme’s on-location filming and cinematic quality of production are the hallmark of the HBO brand. Treme is marked by its relationship to the HBO brand and identified with ‘edgy,’ ‘quality’ programming and an attentiveness to the cultural creativity of its auteurs. Being further articulated to the David Simon brand that was solidified in his critically-acclaimed series The Wire (HBO 2002–2008), Treme is associated with HBO’s market for politically charged social commentary, often associated with issues of race, aimed at an educated liberal audience (FULLER 2010). This is, after all, the network that produced Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (HBO 2006) that critiqued governmental failure in the Katrina crisis. Essentially, there is now a potential ‘market’ for a show like Frank’s Place. According to FULLER (2010, 287), cable television networks, and especially HBO, have used Blackness as a way to 4

Post-racial discourses promote the idea that America has overcome racism, and people of color are enjoined to enter into the marketplace on supposedly equal footing. In the media, there is an increasing proliferation of representations of racial difference and a rampant discourse that the U.S. has overcome its racist history (see, for example, MUKHERJEE 2006; NILSEN and TURNER, 2014; SQUIRES 2014). In part, the proliferation of racial difference in media is a result of the struggles of people of color in the 1980s, such as those evidenced in debates around Frank’s Place, over the invisibility and stereotypical representations of minority identities in the media. But it is also the result of economic shifts in the industry, where the rise of cable networks, brand culture, and lifestyle marketing renders racial and ethnic difference a marketable commodity in global television (BANET-WEISER 2007; GRAY 2005).

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cultivate a brand identity that could appeal to niche audiences and differentiate them from broadcast networks. These practices are bound up with shifts in neoliberalism, where cultural difference is considered a resource that is governed by a market logic. As BANET-WEISER and GRAY (2009, 17–18) suggest, media operates as a primary site where the defining logics is the proliferation of difference, a proliferation that operates at the level of markets, niches, identities, and experience and that functions to celebrate and encourage difference as a way of expressing one’s unique position in the cultural world.

This proliferation and marketization of difference, however, rests as well on a kind of privatization of racial struggle, where the politics of visibility and recognition depend on individual forms of self-actualization rather than the collectivization of political struggle. As GRAY (2013, 783–784) notes, [m]edia generate (and promise to satisfy) the desire for visibility and recognition, where the entanglement of freedom and subjection promotes conceptions of social justice as visibility and recognition, and where the alliance of difference and identity, marketization and privatization takes form in practices of self-crafting and the disregard for pluralization and multiplicity.

This kind of marketization and privatization of race within media culture is constitutive of neoliberal racism, which “asserts the insignificance of race as a social force and aggressively roots out any vestige of race as a category at odds with an individualistic embrace of formal rights” (GIROUX 2004, 67; see also GOLDBERG 2009). This new ‘market’ is bound up with shifts in the discourse of diversity and its unhinging from the politics of racial justice to a politics that is more bound up with discourses of corporate social responsibility and the marketing of culture as a means of profit. In today’s deregulated media landscape, diversity is defined not in relation to an ethics of racial or sexual justice, but, rather, through a managerial discourse that posits diversity in terms of its potential for producing profit (AMAYA 2010). Such a discourse of diversity is made possible in an era of deregulation where compliance with anti-discrimination and Civil Rights legislation is made dependent not on what are perceived in mainstream culture as ‘coercive’ standards of compliance, but, rather, on voluntary acts of socially responsible corporations. As AMAYA (2010, 813–814) details in his work on Ugly Betty (ABC 2006–2010), television industry discourses value diversity in terms of profit rather than social justice, Legal remedies enacted during the civil rights movement were meant to change the way industries, including media, reconstituted themselves and had the goal of avoiding conscious discriminatory labor practices. But something was lost in translation between civil rights law and corporate structures. Beginning in the 1980s, the Reagan era of neoliberal policies and the language of diversity management transformed the discourse of diversity from one connoting racial justice to one connoting profit. Following the logic of this discourse, media corporations have created many diversity initiatives, all with the goal of fitting the legal environment of compliance with EEO/AA 5 prescriptions, but only when this compliance can be translated into economic success.

5

Equal Employment Opportunity / Affirmative Action.

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In order to be compliant with existing Civil Rights legislation, media corporations need only show they are making ‘good faith’ efforts at improving diversity. As a result, diversity is defined by corporations in broad terms – from race to dress style – and is utilized in visible marketing efforts to show that its media content is diverse. This, however, is all circumscribed by a discourse of profit – diversity is utilized as a marketing strategy that aims toward reaching a wider market for its products. As such, diversity is not posed in the media as a racial justice effort, as it was for Frank’s Place, but as the voluntary efforts of well-meaning corporations in search of more successful and more profitable media content in a global media economy. Hence, it is not at all clear that Treme’s and the broader television industry’s increasing visibility of diverse programming has become more conducive to counter-hegemonic representations or that ‘post-racial’ and post-broadcast media culture is a victory for racial justice. Instead, what it suggests is that the stakes of the debate have changed. Media scholarship that posits television as a site of struggle over hegemonic productions of identity may not have the same purchase as it did during Frank’s Place. Instead, critique might attend to how proliferations of racial difference on television are put to work as technologies of power that are productive of citizenship and practices of governing in broader terms. Part of these broader terms is the relationship of media production and industries to city spaces and the scaffolding of cultural policy and urban planning that makes these interconnections possible. Cultural Policy & Urban Planning in the Neoliberal City There is a close link between post-racial and post-broadcast media culture, which have produced a proliferation of consumable sites of difference and new televisual production and branding practices, and changes in city policy that have shifted urban renewal priorities to areas that had hitherto been cordoned off as excluded and ghettoized spaces. As LEITNER et al. (2007) argue, the neoliberal city is expected to be an entrepreneur of itself and to cultivate entrepreneurial skills of its inhabitants. As the economy increasingly turns to one of service rather than industry, labor and production must be flexible and customized. Similar to the ways in which individuals are expected to use media to construct their own self-brands to compete in the market, cities are expected to compete with each other on a global scale to attract investment and tourism to maintain their labor base. For New Orleans, this has manifested in a shift from oil-based industry to tourism as well as in branding the city with the promise that New Orleans can provide a memorable and meaningful experience, especially with regards to its holy trinity of food, music, and architecture. Moreover, as cities compete for investment, tourism, and the production of a viable labor pool in the ‘new’ economy, they have turned to urban branding campaigns and urban renewal projects that focus on the revitalization and promotion of local culture at the level of the neighborhood. As SASSEN (2006) argues, globaliza-

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tion has made the subnational sphere the most significant site of economic production and activity because business and financial centers are located at the city level, and household, community, and neighborhood have re-emerged as key sites of economic activity. FLORIDA’s (2005) work on the creative class has been highly influential in policy and planning circles toward these aims to maximize the productive potentiality of local neighborhood spaces. Many city planners have embraced Florida’s thesis and utilize branding techniques that promote their city’s local culture, and in order to do so, much of the focus has been on revitalizing particular neighborhoods through creative cultural practices. As DÁVILA (2004b) and YÚDICE (2003) argue, these forms of renewal call upon neighborhoods to mobilize not only for economic reasons – i.e. to be an economic regenerator for the city or for their own communities – but also for cultural and social reasons. That is, neighborhood cultures and communities are called upon to self-maximize and enterprise their creative capacities as a means of gaining political validation and empowerment for marginalized cultures in a way that is understood to resolve racism and injustice. Further, involvement in the media and the creative industries has become an especially high priority for entrepreneurializing marginalized populations and their neighborhoods, where vernacular local practices become expedients to a higher guaranteed return on investment through connecting them to more commodifiable industries (DÁVILA 2012). Given these changes, the representations of local and vernacular cultures and neighborhoods on television have different stakes today than they did during Frank’s Place. These changes point to a complex imbrication of culture and economy that complicates questions media scholars might ask regarding the potential for representational practices of vernacular culture to produce counter-hegemonic aesthetics and challenge dominant ideology, as they become bound up with market logics and governing rationalities in the neoliberal city. This makes it difficult to understand Treme’s representations on-screen outside of its broader relation to these cultural policy changes in cities, and, especially, to the cultural economic and policy dynamics within New Orleans. These sorts of questions have increasing urgency especially in the post-Katrina era, where the city of New Orleans has put the creative economy, and especially media and cultural production, at the forefront of its revival strategy. Prior to Katrina, New Orleans had started to enact specific policies that would help to stimulate its cultural economy, including the promotion of the film and television industry. But it was not until the implementation of sweeping tax incentives that came as a result of the landmark 2002 Louisiana Motion Picture Tax Incentive Act that the production industry really took off in New Orleans. Perhaps this helps to explain why Frank’s Place was not ultimately filmed in New Orleans – there lacked this kind of economic incentive and the infrastructure for promoting on-location filming in the city was in its infancy. The 2002 legislation granted up to a fully transferable 30 % investor tax credit based upon the total in-state expenditures of a motion picture production and an additional 5 % labor tax credit for the hiring of Louisiana residents. After this legislation was passed, film production really took off in Lou-

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isiana and in New Orleans in particular. 6 In order to receive the tax credit, productions must spend at least $300,000 of their budget in the State of Louisiana. Cultural economic policies like tax incentives play a significant role in determining location choices, even when the location plays no role in the narrative (CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR 2010, 338). 7 When cities began to implement tax incentives for film and television production, The rationale behind these incentives was to promote business development in general and tourism business in particular: they wanted to have scenes from their region appear in films and television shows and to be identified in the credits, as an instrument of civic pride and a promotional device to attract visitors and conventions. (CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR 2010, 339)

This dual purpose behind the incentives – civic pride and tourism promotion – is evident in New Orleans’ tax incentive legislation. For the city, offering the 5 % labor credit helps to filter in money, training, support, and infrastructure for building up a local film production community that it sees as essential for the city’s economic and entrepreneurial future. Simultaneously, these technical structures of support toward creating a local production culture also help to resolve various social ills; they bring youth ‘off the street’ and into meaningful and gainful employment, and they produce the city as a creative space full of people from the creative class that will help to draw in investors and other creatives by creating a vital culture. As CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR (2010, 336) suggest, the film and television industry are particularly attractive to cities because they are perceived as “creating ‘clean,’ knowledge-intensive jobs and bringing additional benefits to the economy in the form of multiplier effects, audio-visual trade and spin-off benefits in terms of tourism and image.” City policies, public / private partnerships, and incentives aim to spur education and employment in the film and TV industries as well as the building of infrastructures for pre- and post- production services (BLUMENFELD 2007; WHITE 2008). Since the enactment of these policies, there has been much debate as to their efficacy and criticism of the tax incentives’ ability to produce a local, home grown film and TV sector, to provide meaningful employment, and to 6

7

The State of Louisiana’s tax incentive program also generates critical concerns over runaway production. Though Louisiana’s and other state’s incentive programs don’t officially fit within the context of a runaway production because they are still produced in the United States, its tax incentive legislation nonetheless draws many of the same criticisms of those of runaways who set up shop outside of the filming capitals of Hollywood and New York. Namely, these include criticisms that such practices run the risk of the exploitation of cheap labor and have adverse effects on local culture and production. The practices constitute a “new international division of cultural labor, where off shore and off-Hollywood shooting takes advantage of cheap and exploitative labor conditions” (T. MILLER and LEGER, 2001). As a right to work state, Louisiana does not require that productions go through labor unions, therefore garnering much concern over the potential exploitation of cheap local labor (CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR 2010; MAYER and GOLDMAN 2010). See also the Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research Year 2005 Production Report (CEIDR 2006, 1), where they conclude, “the proliferation of production subsidies around the globe has been one of the most significant factors affecting the choice of production venues for a significant volume of production.”

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produce an economic return for the city, especially in a post-Katrina context (CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR 2010; MAYER and GOLDMAN 2010). Regardless of the efficacy of the tax incentive strategy, however, the cultural economy, and particularly the creative and cultural industries that support film and television production, have led New Orleans to become known as ‘Hollywood South,’ and film and television production has become even more of a guiding rationality and strategy of revitalization since Hurricane Katrina. But, as I argue in subsequent chapters, one difference the Katrina event made is in the role to be played by marginalized forms of culture and neighborhood spaces. Cultural economic policy documents after the storm, in contrast to those before, put neighborhood spaces and diverse creative and culturally vernacular practices at the forefront of the city’s cultural economic strategies – as the key sites in which the city’s cultural and economic future will be staked. 8 This is likely due to how Katrina problematized the deathly consequences of the city’s racial, class, and spatial politics of exclusion. 9 These changes also reflect the enormous upsurge of neighborhood organizations in the city following Katrina, especially in marginalized areas, and the efforts of city government to incorporate these neighborhood organizations into a system of governance. 10 The city’s new Master Plan, which I discuss in more detail in the following chapter, poses a strategy for revitalization of the city that banks New Orleans’ future on the film and TV industries. The film and TV industries are called forth to work as a revitalization strategy in conjunction with the activation of creative and entrepreneurial spaces in the city’s most marginalized and historically Black neighborhoods, including the Tremé. It is not surprising, then, that whereas Frank’s Place made no mention of the particular neighborhood that served as its setting, Treme takes its namesake from that very same neighborhood. Such a shift speaks to how television in the current era is imagined as both a potential for the celebration of local and vernacular culture and as an economic generator for these spaces.

8

Whereas documents detailing the cultural economic agenda for the city before the storm make scant mention of the role of particular neighborhoods other than the French Quarter, Garden District, and Uptown and include perhaps a paragraph or two about the need to incorporate African American cultural and creative practices into the city’s cultural economic agenda, policy documents after the storm clearly forefront these as the key sites on which the city’s cultural and economic future will be staked (City Planning Commission 2010; TOWNSEND 2007; Transition New Orleans Task Force 2010). 9 The city’s change in policy also likely stems from the debates about which neighborhoods to rebuild and the widespread uproar that emerged when former Mayor Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission returned with large circles over the city’s predominantly and historically Black neighborhoods (OLSHANSKY et al. 2010). See Chapter 2. 10 The City passed a resolution to establish a system for Neighborhood participation after Katrina (The Neighborhood Participation Program 2010) that provides training and funding to organizations that undergo a process of being “recognized.” See Chapter 2.

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TREME Given these shifts, the stakes of television’s uptake of New Orleans has changed, and the questions that critical media scholars need to bring to Treme are different than those that Gray, White, and others brought to Frank’s Place. Treme’s title foregrounds the fact that this place is not just any city in America, nor is it just any Black neighborhood in New Orleans; it is the Tremé neighborhood – a historic neighborhood that is little known to much of White America but that has much significance for the city’s, as well as the broader nation’s, African American struggles for racial justice (CRUTCHER 2010). While it is possible to analyze this relationship between the show and the Tremé neighborhood in terms of GRAY’s (1995) African American “structure of feeling,” the fact that Treme is filmed on-location means that the city has a relationship to the show that goes beyond what it provides aesthetically and ideologically. Instead, Treme takes an active role in rebuilding efforts, and city policies are directly aimed at trying to solicit and promote these practices through tax incentives, city planning, and other forms of cultural policy addressed throughout this book. Treme becomes an active agent, working on the ground, to literally, not just symbolically, produce and plan city space in ways that have implications for the racialized constitutions of city space. It is in this sense that I refer to Treme as a spatialized, material practice. In Treme, race, and Blackness in particular, does not figure primarily as an identity struggled over through the construction of a sense of place (GRAY 1991, 1995; NEWCOMB 1990) in the show’s narration. Rather, racial difference is presented as a set of cultural practices that are marketable resources that can be put to work toward the aims of city renewal and citizen empowerment through the show’s material practices of production and through viewer interactivity. Treme’s utilization of marginalized and vernacular signifiers of racial identity and history are put to work in more material terms to promote and manage the entrepreneurial and creative capacities of New Orleans’ citizens. In other words, Black cultural practice is drawn upon to make possible both the production of an ‘authentic’ show as well to enable the renewal and rebuilding of the city and, especially, the Tremé neighborhood. In the remainder of this book, I emphasize how Treme’s relationship to racialized city space in its practices of tourism, on-location shooting, employment and hiring, and social responsibility and philanthropy offer different objects and methodologies for thinking through contemporary television and its relationship to race and place. Ultimately, in the chapters that follow, I aim to throw focus onto Treme’s participation in city space. I hoped to have shown in this chapter that Treme’s relationship to city space is quite different from that of Frank’s Place, and it reflects significant changes in the role of cultural policy and creative industries in both New Orleans and in the Tremé neighborhood. As such, it calls upon media scholars to consider Treme not only as a practice of representation but also as a spatialized, material practice whose off-screen practices are just as, if not more so, important than its material on screen. Critical media scholarship needs to take seriously how the show is bound up with the production of city space through hiring practices, filming practices, on-location shooting, tourism, practices of branding, corporate-

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social responsibility, charity, viewer interactivity, and other spatially materialist concerns. As such, I argue for viewing Treme as a set of spatial practices bound up with the material production of city space as well as its citizen-subjects, in historically contextual terms at this neoliberal moment, where vernacular, cultural practices meet global media production in the neighborhood. It is to these specific concerns that I now turn, where in the next chapter I discuss pre- and post-Katrina urban planning, renewal, and cultural policy and the ways in which these have paved the way for a production like Treme.

CHAPTER 2 Media, Cultural Policy & Urban Planning before and after Katrina During the 1988 Republican National Convention held in New Orleans, a group of Republicans took some Soviet friends to the restaurant Chez Helene, the model for Frank’s Place’s fictionalized restaurant Chez Louisiane. Mistakenly thinking the Soviets had seen Frank’s Place on Soviet television 1, one of the Republicans concluded the trip was still worthwhile, stating, It's a wonderful juxtaposition … When people usually come here from other countries they just see the plush. Here, they see another kind of neighborhood … the little people. Where they live, where they come for entertainment. And until we get the little people involved, the world won't change. (SONSKY 1988, emphasis in original)

But there is more going on here than the potential gumbo-fying of Americans and Soviets over a plate of fried chicken with persillade (Chez Helene’s specialty). The conventioneer foreshadows the neoliberal agenda in which cities have had to take responsibility for themselves in the global market to brand themselves as unique and creative to attract global business, investment, and tourism. 2 What has changed since the days of Frank’s Place, and what we are now experiencing with Treme, has indeed been the solidification of the rationality put forth by the conventioneer – that the solution to global problems are not global answers, but, rather, they are found at the table of the so-called “little people,” or, in other words, in culturally diverse and vernacular neighborhoods like Tremé and in the neighborly practices of neighbors. In today’s neoliberal cities (HACKWORTH 2007), where cities are positioned to compete with each other on a global scale for funding, and tourism, New Urbanist theories of neighborhoods as the building blocks of community (LECCESE and MCCORMICK 2000) and creative city urban renewal strategies (FLORIDA 2005; LANDRY 2000, 2004; LANDRY and BIANCHINI 1995) increasingly influence urban planning efforts to focus on cultivating and entrepreneurializing potentially creative neighborhoods (DÁVILA 2012). Media industries also play a particularly important part of this creative cities strategy, both in terms of their capacity to market cities as unique and cultural to potential tourists, investors, and laborers as well as in 1 2

The Soviets would not have seen Frank’s Place on TV at the time because of censorship and content restrictions put in place by the Soviet government during the Cold War. For a discussion of the competitive and entrepreneurial expectations of cities in the neoliberal and global economy see, for example, BRENNER and THEODORE 2002; HACKWORTH 2007; HALL and HUBBARD 1998; SASSEN 2000. For a discussion on how practices of branding relate to the entrepreneurialization of cities, see, for example, DONALD et al. 2009; GREENBERG 2008; MORGAN et al. 2007.

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terms of the media industry’s role as a creative industry in itself. Both of these aims for media industries have come into play in New Orleans’ post-Katrina rebuilding plans. Indeed, since federal and state funding for rebuilding after Katrina was both grossly inadequate and misspent, in many ways the city is banking its future on the cultural economy, and film and television production are slated as the potential industries that can help render the cultural practices of the city’s most marginalized both a worthy and profitable investment. This chapter draws on archival research in order to historicize and contextualize New Orleans cultural policy and urban planning before and after the storm. Here, I aim to throw focus onto how a production like Treme was largely made possible in and through the historically specific context of post-Katrina New Orleans and the way in which its cultural policies and urban plans shifted to address the racial, class, and spatial antagonisms made manifest during Katrina. Specifically, I argue that post-Katrina New Orleans cultural policy constructed a new discourse that enabled television production to be promoted as an expedient to the production of vernacular cultural practices tied to marginalized neighborhoods that could be put to work in the service of urban renewal. This discourse builds on previous discourses generated out of neoliberal urban planning efforts that put neighborhoods at the center of the creative city, but I contend that the urban planning and rebuilding discourses coming out of New Orleans are also marked by what I call a “post-Katrina rationality” of rebuilding. This post-Katrina rationality draws on the racial, class, and spatial struggles made manifest during the Katrina event by placing marginalized, Black neighborhoods and their vernacular creative culture as key sites of entrepreneurialization within the creative industries. Whereas earlier urban planning efforts in the city had marked these spaces’ cultures as problems that needed disciplining, post-Katrina urban planning re-values these cultural spaces by tying them to discourses of creative placemaking, neighborhood culture, and equity in such a way that makes an argument for the right for every neighborhood to return and rebuild (a kind of social justice oriented rhetoric), and it puts their creative cultures at the center of those efforts. Crucially, the media industry is centered as a significant vehicle for entrepreneurializing those creative neighborhood spaces, as a privatized vehicle for enabling that return. In what follows, I first chart out a broader history of the ways in which neighborhood space has played an increasingly important role in the cultural economy and urban planning efforts in New Orleans since the 1980s. I pay particular attention to the role of culture in urban renewal efforts, and their racialized contexts, as well as the increasing role of the media industry as a vehicle for cultural and creative urban development pre-Katrina. This research reveals the increasing significance of culture to the city’s urban revitalization and governing strategy. Prior to Katrina, however, the Tremé neighborhood remained marginalized in New Orleans’ cultural economic policies. It was understood as primarily a problem space, infected with Black criminality, concentrated poverty, and blight, making it subject to various interventions to either gentrify or rehabilitate its populations. I then turn to the post-Katrina context where I analyze the city’s new Master Plan, The Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030 (City Planning Commission

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2010), as a means of situating the rationales of post-Katrina cultural policy and urban planning to contextualize how the storm altered the discourses by which neighborhoods like Tremé, especially, were targeted. While the Master Plan by no means represents the totality of discourses of post-Katrina urban planning, because of the breadth of its focus (both in terms of voices who contributed to the planning process and in terms of the areas of rebuilding and development it seeks to address) as well as its emphasis on long term vision, the Master Plan represents an important vehicle for assessing some of the broader discourses that influence the post-Katrina rebuilding process. Comparing the post-Katrina Master Plan to its 1992 predecessor, I focus on how the current Master Plan is productive of a distinctly post-Katrina discourse of neighborhood, equity, and entrepreneurial culture and media, or a postKatrina rationality. I suggest the goals of the Master Plan’s various spatial policies aim to create the potential for media productions that can represent the city not as a disembodied caricature of the French Quarter and romanticized Creole culture, but, rather, they are aimed at materially pointing media productions to represent those ethnic identities and cultural heritages that are ‘off the beaten path,’ such as the Tremé. This post-Katrina rebuilding rationality therefore presents both an economic strategy – i.e. one that carves out the rationalities of space and culture that will transform the city into an economically viable space for investment, tourism, and labor – as well as a social strategy aimed at rectifying the racial, class, and spatial antagonisms made manifest during the Katrina event. I suggest these policies helped to make possible a production like Treme. Specifically, the media industry (and film and television in particular) is positioned as an expedient that can reap a return on investment of the vernacular performances of neighborhood spaces, where participation in practices of television production is situated as a means of urban renewal via the entrepreneurialization of culture. NEIGHBORHOOD CULTURE & URBAN PLANNING BEFORE KATRINA Although most prevalent in the last thirty years, the focus on local neighborhood culture in American city planning has a much longer history. OSBORNE and ROSE (1999) suggest the concept of neighborhood emerged at the end of the 19th century, when there emerged a whole network of practices and bodies whose aim was to ensure the proper administration of city space and functioning. Through these practices, it was understood that the appropriate social character of place could emerge in order to produce happiness. Neighborhood emerged as a distinct concept and space within this broader context (OSBORNE and ROSE 1999, 749). The neighborhood was a product of the zoned city, and it was figured as a space that needed close monitoring to ensure that the proper moral and social character could be cultivated and maintained. The focus on local culture and the desire to cultivate neighborhoods with a particular social character can therefore be traced to a variety of historical urban planning efforts. These efforts include the City Beautiful and Garden City movements

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at the turn of the 20th Century, cultural zonation plans in the early to mid 20th Century, and flagship city plans in the 1960s and 1970s (FREESTONE and GIBSON 2006). In each of these urban planning efforts, culture was utilized and targeted as a mechanism for revitalizing particular neighborhoods within the city while also serving as a way to govern spaces and populations. These modernist urban plans were also undergirded by a racialized conception of space, which, Conceptualized social norms … through the creation of architectural forms that regimented and optimized human bodies in biopolitical terms. Modern urbanism, then, emerged as a science of urban planning intent on the production of a national race; race, in this case, being a collective social body shaped through life experiences in architecturally engineered disciplinary spaces. (BARRIOS 2010, 593–594) 3

Modern urban planning aimed to produce particular kinds of subjects and behaviors through architectural design and engineering city space, and these aims have long been racialized and organized around the production of Whiteness. Spaces of nonwhiteness have often been conceived of as running counter to the needs of the collective social body, begetting more punitive forms of disciplinary treatment or, more often, demolition, so as to preserve the ‘health’ of the social body of surrounding neighborhoods and the city as a whole. Though there is also a longer history of urban planning and renewal that speaks to the historic role of culture in struggles over city and neighborhood space, it was not until the 1980s that culture, and media especially, began to take such a prominent role in the discourses and rationalities of urban planning and renewal. The 1980s were a time of wide-scale economic recession, a solidification of a shift to a post-Fordist global service economy dependent upon what HARVEY (1989) refers to as flexible accumulation, and the influence of neoliberal rationalities of governing. Cities, especially formerly industrial cities like New Orleans, which had relied on its trade port and oil production as a key economic base, found themselves faced with further economic difficulties that only exacerbated the city’s problematizations following post-war suburbanization and so-called White flight. Characterized by a rationality of what BRENNER and THEODORE (2002) term “roll back neoliberalism,” public support for the arts and culture was increasingly viewed as a form of welfare (for the rich), begetting widespread federal and state cuts intended to entrepreneurialize the arts and artists to become more economically self-responsible. As ZUKIN (1995, 2) contends, it was primarily during this era that cities became in the business of culture. Cities, who were also left to fend for themselves in a globally competitive market for investment, tourism, and labor, turned to public-private partnerships with culture and the arts in an effort to distinguish their cities as unique and interesting. In the 1980s and 1990s, then, culture, both high and low, began to be seen in light of its potentially productive qualities (SCOTT 2000, 14), particularly its eco-

3

For further discussion on the racialized dimensions of biopolitics see FOUCAULT 2003c; GIROUX 2006; STOLER 2002; WEHELIYE 2014. On the relationship between governing, cities, and race see also BOYER 1983; HAYMES 1995; SHABAZZ 2015; WILKINS 2007; WILSON 2007.

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nomically productive qualities, and cities aimed to harness their potential in a combined consumption, production, and image strategy (FREESTONE and GIBSON 2006). This marked a shift in the discourses of culture in cities, which had previously foregrounded art and culture under a patrician or publicly funded program that rationalized art as a social and cultural good, to one that was framed within an economic and entrepreneurial neoliberal rationality (EDENSOR et al. 2010; MILLER and YÚDICE 2002). These collective forces helped to spur a development and urban renewal strategy that JOHN HANNIGAN (1998) calls Fantasy City, where new solutions were posed to revitalize downtown neighborhood districts into a space for fun. Disinvestment from the city was accelerating, and the central city was figured as an area of decay and danger associated with discourses that pathlogized Blackness (HAYMES 1995; WILSON 2007). What was needed, it was theorized, was for the city to be able to offer entertaining and pleasurable spaces that were not available in the suburbs that would not be seen as overly dangerous. As a solution, city planners and developers forged public-private partnerships to build urban entertainment destinations. These were fundamentally urban renewal efforts aimed at specific neighborhoods, usually within the downtown center, with a goal of transforming business and industrial spaces into places where consumers could go to shop, be entertained, and cultivate experiences. 4 Media industries played a crucial role in promoting and transforming industrialized city space into spaces of fun to market to tourists and potential investors. Cities’ tourism boards during this time made public / private partnerships with media industries in an effort to market these new distinctive cultural quarters. As GREENBERG (2008, 28) notes, new partnerships formed between media, marketing, and tourism industries, where, [i]n addition to lobbying for tax breaks and the elimination of rent control, they were busy planning media campaigns to market a post-industrial “fun city” and mounting surveillance cameras to encircle new tourist and business districts. In the crush of the global marketplace, and in the face of local opposition, new media and marketing tactics, and the culture workers who devised them, were understood as essential to the growth and governance of the neoliberal city.

Moreover, cities increasingly entered into public / private partnerships with media companies to more directly theme and brand public space, such as in the case of Disney’s partnership with New York City in the redevelopment of Times Square (COMELLA 2002; DAVIS 1999; GOTTDIENER 2001; SORKIN 1992). 5 4

5

A clear example of these efforts is Frank Ghery’s building of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain, where city policymakers brought in a famous architect to design a museum to be a cultural center, or hub, with the aim of rebranding and revitalizing the entire area (EVANS 2003; GUASCH and ZULAIKA 2005). This strategy has since been replicated in a variety of cities globally. These efforts had both economic and cultural aims – on the one hand, they aimed to revitalize the area by bringing in a familiar brand that could help attract investment and tourism; but, on the other hand, this revitalization also depended upon imposing the media brand’s image on public space in order to resignify its meanings, cleanse it of ‘problem’ elements, and reconstitute it into an experiential place of consumption (COMELLA 2002).

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Such policies were only possible, however, by ensuring that these spaces of fun could be cordoned off from potentially problem populations and neighborhoods. Thus, the renewal projects of this era cannot be understood outside of the complementary processes of what DAVIS (2006) terms the “Fortress City.” While the postwar period might be thought of as the dismantling of Black public space through practices of slum clearance associated with the 1949 Housing Policy Act (HAYMES 1995; HIRSCH 2000; HOFFMAN 2000), the 1980’s and 1990’s might be understood as an era of re-signifying Black public space. That is, during this period, those in power sought to disarticulate city space from its ties to the history of Black struggle and identity and to re-signify Black space as abject and criminal. In so doing, Black vernacular practices and memories were reconstituted through the lens of the invisible White norm. DAVIS (2006) suggests that this process was brought about through a new semiotics of space that merged architecture with the police state, leading to new forms of privatized public space that enabled a greater degree of policing and hypersurveillance to cordon off the Black population from spaces of entertainment and consumption in the city center. Today, cities are undergoing a kind of new revival, and more and more affluent Whites are fleeing the suburbs and moving back into the city, and pushing people of color out of their neighborhoods (KOLKO 2016). It is primarily through cities that global capital circulates, producing what SASSEN (2006) has termed the global city. Given the shift toward a global economy and the emergence of new networks and institutions of globalization, the erosion of the salience of the nation-state’s influence has been coupled with the emergence of renewed and reinvigorated emphasis on the role of local governance at the subnational scale (SASSEN 2000). Whereas the previous decades were marked more by the “roll-back” of governmental services and increasing privatization, the current era accelerates privatization in more of a “roll-out” format, where cities are expected to be fully entrepreneurialized and cultivate the entrepreneurial skills of their inhabitants to constitute the city as fully self-maximized and self-responsible (BRENNER and THEODORE 2002). The neoliberal city is one that can harness the forces that are immanent to urban life itself toward the aim of self-government and self-responsibility (OSBORNE and ROSE 1999). In this rationality of the neoliberal city, culture is increasingly seen as a kind of resource, an expedient, through which various social aims of governing can be carried out in the marketplace. As YÚDICE (2003, 19) argues, “Culturalization … is also based on the mobilization and management of populations, particularly the ‘life-enhancing’ marginal populations who nourish the innovation of the ‘creators.’ This means a marriage of culture-as-vernacular practices, notions of community, and economic development.” Thus, the culture of the marginalized, especially racialized and ethnic culture, has played an increasingly salient role in the neoliberal city (DÁVILA 2012). This ‘inclusion’ and ‘empowerment’ of the marginalized and of marginalized space and culture is a central feature of neoliberalism. Termed the “creative cities” approach to urban planning and renewal, art and culture, particularly art and culture associated with multiculturalism and diversity, are today fully integrated into cities’ economic revitalization strategies, where arts,

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culture, and entertainment are viewed as instruments of spatial planning (ABBAS 2004; FLORIDA 2002, 2005; LANDRY 2000; LANDRY and BIANCHINI 1995). FLORIDA’s (2002, 2005) creative class thesis has been particularly influential in urban planning and policy discourses. He argues that in order to compete and attract business investment in the current era, cities must be attractive to the creative class who desire diverse and ‘authentic’ neighborhoods. Creative cities strategies therefore aim to stimulate the cultural creativity of unique and diverse neighborhoods that will, in turn, attract the ‘hip’ creative class. Often, creating neighborhood clusters (PORTER 2004) around creative industries such as art, digital media, or fashion are utilized as strategies for cultivating creative neighborhood spaces. In the creative city, media is firmly solidified in city branding efforts to represent the city’s creative assets (GREENBERG 2008), but it is also valued for its own creative capacities as well, as a special kind of creative industry that is deemed particularly valuable, especially in terms of the financial and social returns of television and film production. As CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR (2010) note, the solicitation of media industries (film, television, and digital media) constitutes an overarching strategy in cultivating the creative city through aggressive cultural policies aimed to attract these industries. 6 And, indeed, New Orleans has been at the forefront of this strategy, as it has implemented aggressive cultural policies, such as tax incentives, in an effort to attract film and television production. New Orleans has shown an increasing emphasis on the creativity of neighborhood culture in its city promotions, branding, and cultural policy since the late 1970s, and the city roughly follows the trends discussed above. It was during the late 1970s and early 1980s that the marketing of New Orleans began to broaden beyond the French Quarter, Garden District, and Uptown – which had become solidified as the main distinctive cultural neighborhoods marketed to tourists – and began to expand to other neighborhoods with culture as a prominent discourse and rationale for urban renewal efforts. Completed in 1976, urban renewal efforts expanded into the Warehouse District, where the city aimed to transform the run-down area into an artistic and cultural center through the building of the Contemporary Arts Center. Through various tax incentives and subsidies, the city hoped that the 6

There is widespread debate over both the potential possibilities as well as the problems created by the creative industries as a creative cities strategy of urban renewal and city branding. On the one hand, creative cities strategies provide resources, networks, and connections to neighborhoods that had hitherto largely been excluded from or bulldozed in favor of earlier forms of urban renewal projects. Local neighborhood and grassroots organizations are given greater resources and access to political power and voice in new ways that give marginalized and disempowered communities new opportunities for claiming their rights to the city and to citizenship. However, the creative cities approach is also subject to a number of critiques, including the indictment that it presents a cookie-cutter approach to urban renewal that results in the homogenization of cities and propogates a middle-class ideology that excludes the creative practices of the working class (EDENSOR et al. 2010); commodifies cultural practices (COMAROFF and COMAROFF 2009); contributes to practices of gentrification (ZUKIN, 2010a); and functions as a kind of “dividing practice” (MCROBBIE 2016) that produces new hierarchies of creativity as well as marginalization and exclusion of the so called uncreative class and neighborhood (DÁVILA 2012; EDENSOR et al. 2010; NADESAN 2008).

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Arts Center would help to transform the neighborhood by attracting artists and other cultural workers to set up shops and galleries in the area. The neighborhood has since been renamed to the Arts District (BROOKS and YOUNG 1993), though it is still regularly referred to as the Warehouse District. These efforts were furthered in preparation for the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, which brought with it “smaller scale developments and adaptive re-use of existing warehouses” that helped to transform the neighborhood for commercial and residential use (BROOKS and YOUNG 1993, 263). These projects “left in its wake condominiums and hotels in place of what had formerly been flophouses and abandoned warehouses” (GLADSTONE and PRÉAU 2008). Gentrification continues to be a major concern in the area. During this time, other urban renewal efforts more aligned with Fantasy City and Disneyfication strategies were deployed in New Orleans as well, with aims to transform the urban center into a space for fun, leisure, and experience. Disneyfication refers to how public space, public life, and social objects and experiences are transformed into a Disney experience – how they are sanitized, homogenized, and made to simulate a nostalgic experience (BRYMAN 2004). 7 For example, New Orleans undertook two festival marketplace-style urban renewal efforts indicative of Disneyfication: Riverwalk and the transformation of the French Market. The French Market has a longer and more complex history, as it began as a trading space for Native Americans and, later, various immigrant populations. It was seen primarily as a market that catered to locals. During Maurice “Moon” Landrieu’s Mayoral administration in the late 1970s, urban renewal efforts aimed to ‘clean up’ the Market, which was characterized as ‘falling into disrepair.’ These efforts transformed the French Market into a festival marketplace and tourist destination with mostly enclosed shops that sold primarily clothing and souvenirs (REEVES n.d.; SOUTHER 2007). Riverwalk Marketplace, which was built for the 1984 World’s Fair, is a shopping and entertainment destination along the Mississippi River in the Central Business District. A number of other tourist oriented amusement venues opened up along the riverfront in conjunction with Riverwalk as well, including Jax Brewery, Canal Place, Aquarium of the Americas, and Harrah’s Casino (SOUTHER 2007). These urban renewal efforts centered largely on promoting cultural spaces and practices associated with Whiteness. Although cultural practices of Blackness were often a part of these efforts – such as jazz bands and second-lining practices – performers were generally brought in from other neighborhoods to perform in the city center (REGIS 1999). So, while the cultural practices associated with marginalized neighborhoods did indeed play a role in urban renewal and city branding efforts,

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Bryman (2004) explains, “Disneyfication is typically associated with a statement about the cultural products of the Disney company. To disneyfy means to translate or transform an object into something superficial and even simplistic ... a process of sanitizing culture or history … rendering the material world being worked upon … into a standardized format that is almost instantly recognizable as being from the Disney stable” (p. 5). For more on Disneyfication and city and public space see COMELLA 2002; DAVIS 1999; GIROUX 1999; GOTTDIENER 2001; SORKIN 1992; WARREN 1994. For further discussion of the Disneyfication of postKatrina New Orleans, see Morgan PARMETT 2012; SOUTHER 2007.

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they were not put to work or entrepreneurialized with the aim of renewing the predominantly Black neighborhoods those practices were associated with, such as the Tremé. Instead, Black cultural practices were used to add distinction, culture, and ‘flavor’ to spice up White neighborhoods (HOOKS 1992). In the 1980s and 1990s, with the rollback of the social welfare state and the increasing instrumentalization of arts and culture into discourses of neoliberal city policy, an intensification of the efforts to market and brand New Orleans as a city of culture (both high and low) is evident in a number of the city’s urban renewal and planning policies. These efforts were aimed at transforming the post-industrial city to one that could compete in the service economy. In many of New Orleans’ archival documents related to the city’s arts, culture, and tourism at this time, there was expressed concern, particularly in the Marc Morial mayoral administration (1994–2002), that tourism could not be the sole industry of the city. In response, the administration sought to generate a greater entrepreneurialization of the city’s artists and culture, which was indeed aimed to attract tourists, but it was also rationalized as helping to generate what was seen as a more sustainable economic development strategy beyond tourism. Moreover, the city rationalized these aims in not only economic terms, but they were also rationalized in cultural and social terms as well. That is, the city’s cultural policies around arts, culture, and tourism – including diverse initiatives such as the Arts Tourism Partnership (1997; see also GLICKMAN 1993), the 280th Anniversary event (COREY 1997), the Jazzland Project (1997), and the Urban Arts Training Program (1997) – were also aimed at resolving social antagonisms, producing civically engaged citizens, and rehabilitating youth. Each of these programs were components of broader governmental aims in the city’s efforts at entrepreneurializing arts and culture as a means of helping to draw tourists and residents back into the city center. However, once again, the revitalization and renewal aims that saw cultural practice as an entrepreneurializing potential were all aimed primarily at revitalizing spaces of Whiteness. But for my purposes here, perhaps the most significant cultural policy New Orleans’ city government implemented were those created to attract film and television production. As GREENBERG (2008, 30) notes, “by the late 80s, urban tourist agencies … worked increasingly with filmmakers, TV producers, and commercial location scouts to promote their destinations as possible shooting locations.” It was during the 1980s, then, that a number of cities began to open film commissions, often as part of tourism boards. Film commissions were created under a dual rationality, where cities saw film and television production as a way to market the city as an interesting and unique destination to potential tourists and investors as well as an economic generator that could bring in dollars to the local economy through production and spillover investments. 8 New Orleans first formed its own film com-

8

Following a 1992 report that displayed movie induced tourism data, film commissioners and city tourism, convention, and tourism boards began to work together to synergize the relationships between the two industries (RILEY et al. 1998). Prior to this time, film production was valued largely in terms of employment and local investment dollars, which appears to be the

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mission, the New Orleans Film and Video Commission, in 1986. In its earliest conception, the benefits of a film commission for the city were rationalized largely in terms of employment and economic benefits rather than those of tourism and marketing, as evidenced in the minutes of the original steering committee: “The primary objective for the commission should be … to bring the city a diversity of business and employment opportunities” (New Orleans Film and Video Commission Steering Committee 1986). In an endorsement of the proposed resolution for establishing a film commission, it was stated that the commission was a key component of diversifying New Orleans’ economy (MARTENS and KORSAK 1986). Yet, there was no funding for staff or operations provided to the commission until 1991, at which point it was funded in the form of $100,000 per year grants from the New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation (Economic Development Trust Fund Application 1994). The commission was also housed under the Tourism, Arts, and Entertainment Office within the Mayor’s Office. This suggests that while the commission’s role was not initially seen in terms of its relationship to tourism, it soon created a tight connection, seeing the potentials for the local tourism board to market the city to potential film producers and, in turn, for producers to market the city back to potential tourists. The primary job of New Orleans’ film commissioner was, and still is today, less about cultivating a film production economy within New Orleans, however, than it is about attracting Hollywood and New York productions to the city for onlocation shooting. 9 The commissioner thus plays a role in helping to ‘sell’ the city and its locations (New Orleans Film and Video Commission Steering Committee 1986), which, in turn, the New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation help to ‘sell’ back to film and TV viewers of those productions. While film commission

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case in terms of the establishment of the New Orleans Office of Film and Video based on their initial draft documents. A key concern with the city’s tax incentives and their links to runaway production is the criticism of the impact of Hollywood production on local and independent production practices (e.g. MILLER 2005; TINIC 2005). These critiques are typically waged in relation to Hollywood’s offshore productions in Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, and elsewhere, whose many incentives and favorable exchange rates have borne the brunt of much of the criticism and concern over runaway production to begin with, but these incentives are also billed as beneficial to the local production economy in order to garner support amongst its citizens. TOBY MILLER (2006, 103) argues state funding of state and city film commissions essentially amounts to subsidizing Hollywood, providing “hidden subsidies to the film industry via reduced local taxes, free provision of police services, and the blocking of public wayfares, Small Business Administration financing through loans and support of independents, and State and Commerce Department briefings and pleni-potentiary representation.” Critics fear in particular the way in which incentives for big Hollywood productions de-incentivize small and independent local productions (MILLER 2005). Such is especially the case in Louisiana, whose incentive program requires a $300,000 minimum budget in order to receive incentives. This kind of legislation adversely impacts local production, as local and independent film producers unconnected to Hollywood or New York are unlikely to ever be able to claim the credit. Therefore, it provides little incentive for the kind of “home-grown,” local production culture that the city claims will be the result of such policies to flourish.

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and their interrelated tourist promotions do not necessarily drive Hollywood decision-making regarding where and how to film, they are components of, in collaboration with city government, the broader practices and institutions of the neoliberal city that help shift cities toward the service industry. So, whether or not they are ultimately successful in ‘causing’ Hollywood to come to town, the practices of film commissions can be understood as technologies of governing that produce both discourses and material practices that implicate the way city space is both imagined and practiced as a media city. When it was created, the New Orleans film commission devised numerous methods to attract Hollywood productions to the city in its early years, including partnering with the New Orleans Film Society to begin the New Orleans Film Festival. This annual festival highlighted the cinematic qualities of the city’s neighborhoods and locations as well as the array of resources available to potential productions (Economic Development Trust Fund Application 1994). 10 Yet, the locations that New Orleans aimed to sell were relatively limited. For example, in the Commission’s first printed resource directory, the pamphlet includes photos and descriptions of choice neighborhoods the Office suggests would render optimal filming locations. The neighborhoods included are unsurprising – the French Quarter, Garden District, and Uptown. The brochure suggests the city includes “many other interesting neighborhoods” but fails to list them (New Orleans Office of Film and Video 1993). Though it lists Armstrong Park, which is formally located in the Tremé, it fails to mention its location, suggesting only it is “appropriately located near the city’s Cultural Complex.” It lists the practices of Mardi Gras Indians – a practice associated with the city’s Black neighborhoods and cultural history (LIPSITZ 1990) – as a potential draw to filmmakers as well as the connection of these practices to their neighborhoods, but, again, fails to list these neighborhoods. Thus, until Katrina and particularly until Treme, the Tremé neighborhood and other areas of the city typically associated with deprivileged Blackness have received scant attention from both the film commission and Hollywood. While the French Quarter, Garden District, Uptown, Central Business District, and, more recently, the Warehouse District (Arts District) and the Marigny 11 were featured in glossy tourist pamphlets for their unique culture and marketed as potential filming locations to Hollywood, other neighborhoods were marked out as targets of exclusion, 10 In addition to supporting the Film Festival, the film commission engaged in a number of other efforts to “sell New Orleans as a location and to sell local production professionals as crew members. These projects include, publication of the first film resource directory; … direct mail campaigns to industry decision-makers and participation in key trade shows and exhibitions; … eliminating the ‘red tape’ and facilitating the permit process for production on location; and advertising in major trade publications; … [and] supporting educational and training opportunities which afford technical expertise to citizens” (Economic Development Trust Fund Application 1994). 11 The Marigny has a large gay population, and as a result, it has received increased attention from city planners and policy makers as a “bohemian” neighborhood that fits within Richard FLORIDA’s (2005) creative class and city strategy because it has a high “gay-index.” It is also home to a number of music venues on Frenchman Street, which is often described as the “locals’ Bourbon Street.”

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renewal, and management. The cultural practices of residents in these neighborhoods were figured as a problem and an obstacle to overcome in order to produce these neighborhoods as fully self-maximizing and profitable. This marginalization was precisely the way in which the Tremé neighborhood was addressed in the years leading up to Katrina. The Tremé is an historic neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter built primarily by free people of color with a long history of struggle for social justice. It is also a neighborhood that has seen much destruction as a result of various urban renewal policies aimed at cultural revitalization in ways that had complete disregard for the existing culture in the neighborhood. Thus, while the cultural economic policies and practices of New Orleans more broadly in the 1980s and 1990s, discussed above, spoke to the efforts of the city to entrepreneurialize neighborhoods through arts and culture, it is relatively unsurprising that Tremé during this time was mostly subject to various programs that targeted blight, crime, business and real estate development, and investment. This was characteristic of most of New Orleans’ ‘other neighborhoods,’ i.e. those outside of the spaces of tourist consumption and promotion, during this era. The culture of these neighborhoods was treated as a problem to be overcome through demolition and rehabilitation programs. In the 1980s and 1990s especially, homeownership programs and Empowerment Zone legislation were rationalized as being able to cleanse the neighborhood of ‘problem’ elements like crime and poverty that were seen as constituting the neighborhood as “deteriorating.” In these examples, existing Tremé culture was seen as a threat rather than an asset to its ‘empowered’ future. These efforts did not go uncontested, however, as Tremé residents rallied for affordable housing and drew upon cultural practices as a means of contesting the dominant discourses through which the neighborhood was constituted. The disregard for cultural history and practice in Tremé has a long history. Viewed largely by the city as a deteriorating slum of little significance, New Orleans and state politicians have visited upon Tremé a number of egregious demolition and urban renewal policies that had tremendous impacts on the neighborhood before Katrina. These include the building of the Municipal Auditorium, routing the Interstate Ten (I–10) through the neighborhood, and the building of Armstrong Park. The Municipal Auditorium was built during an urban renewal period in New Orleans in 1926 that drew from discourses of City Beautiful movements. The Auditorium was envisioned as just one building that would become part of a whole cultural center. The aim was that the cultural center would be an economic generator to the city and would simultaneously serve to ‘beautify’ the city and its residents through arts and culture (CRUTCHER 2010). Though funding prevented the building of the rest of the cultural center matrix, the Municipal Auditorium required the destruction of whole blocks of homes in Tremé. In addition to the Municipal Auditorium, another significant block in the Tremé was destroyed when the I–10 highway was completed in 1969 directly through the neighborhood down Claiborne Avenue, effectively severing the neighborhood in

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half. 12 Like many of the highways built during this time, Tremé was chosen as the neighborhood through which the federal highway project would run because the population and its neighborhood were seen as expendable and had little political power to oppose the plan. But Claiborne Avenue prior to the I–10 was an important site for African Americans in the city, as a central route for many of the social aid and pleasure clubs’ parades, a gathering space for African Americans on the Avenue’s wide neutral grounds, and the site of a number of African American businesses, shops, and restaurants (BARRIOS 2010; CRUTCHER 2010). In its place, a highway overpass was constructed over the Avenue, leading again to the demolition of houses, businesses, and public space that had been an important site of New Orleans’ Black culture. Tremé was also the site of another urban renewal project that required the destruction of another part of the neighborhood – Armstrong Park (though the Park has had various names through the years). The development of Armstrong Park began in 1970 and continued well into the 1980s due to a number of financial problems that continually stalled the completion of the project. The development of the park was a continuation of the cultural center project that began with the building of the Municipal Auditorium, where city leaders still hoped for a cultural complex to revitalize the downtown. The park went through various stages, owners, and plans, but throughout, the desire to create a space for entertainment and culture remained central. In each of these examples – the Auditorium, the I–10, and Armstrong Park – whole blocks and areas of Tremé were destroyed, often in the name of culture, with complete disregard for the already existing culture and community of Tremé’s residents. Moreover, residents were often cut off from the supposed cultural benefits that these renewal projects were supposed to create. For example, Armstrong Park was surrounded by a large fence to protect the ‘safety’ of parkgoers with no entry access from the Tremé neighborhood (BARRIOS 2010).

12 The I–10 was proposed in 1960 but not completed until 1969 as part of the Federal Highway Act (CRUTCHER 2010).

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Figure 3a and 3b (Photos by author) The fence surrounding Armstrong Park from the Tremé neighborhood side at the corner of North Rampart St. and St. Philip St. Though there is a gate on St. Philip Street, this gate remains closed and locked.

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The message of the fence, then, was that Tremé residents and their culture were threats to the safety of the park, not potential park-goers or culture bearers themselves. By the 1990s, Tremé became the target of various neighborhood rehabilitation programs aimed at increasing home ownership and ‘empowerment.’ Although these programs often noted the harms of years of demolition and destruction of the neighborhood, they too figured the cultural practices of its remaining residents as problems to be overcome. However, rather than demolition, these programs sought out a more rehabilitative set of disciplinary programs to address the neighborhood’s blight and poverty. For example, in the early 1990s, Tremé was targeted by the Neighborhood Planning Office, a subset of City government, whose mission, as described in an inter-office memorandum, was “to increase the capacity of neighborhood residents to improve their environment and residential life” (WRIGHT 1990). The goal for these programs, in other words, was to increase their capacity, self-responsibility, and self-reliance – to become spaces of neoliberal governance and citizenship – and to excise those parts of the neighborhood deemed threatening to these goals. These aims were facilitated through a number of homeownership programs targeted at low-income communities like the Tremé, including the Neighborhood Development Foundation (NDF), a public-private partnership initiated by James Rouse (a developer known for his shopping mall and festival marketplace projects). The NDF acquired, rehabbed, and resold houses to low-income families, but the emphasis was almost exclusively on homeownership, where it aimed toward “judicious use of the client’s resources and on encouraging self-reliance” (Neighborhood Development Foundation 1986). The NDF is characteristic of neoliberal efforts to encourage homeownership, what George H. Bush termed the “ownership society,” as a vehicle to good citizenship (BÉLAND 2007; KOSTERLITZ 2004). These programs, initiated in the 1990s, required potential homeowners to invest in ‘sweat’ equity, where homeowners put in labor to finish their own houses and, assumedly, helped discipline into them an embodiment of the neoliberal principles of self-reliance and responsibility. While the goal was to provide affordable housing, potential residents were required to have stable employment and good credit histories, producing a highly exclusionary process. Similarly, Marc Morial’s administration initiated the Neighborhood Revitalization Trust Fund, which was aimed at creating public / private partnerships for housing, economic development, and social services to neighborhood communities. Echoing the Moynihan Report’s (MOYNIHAN 1965) discourse that Black communities no longer faced racism but, rather, the deterioration of Black culture wrought on by matriarchal families, the goal of the Fund was to reduce “violence, crime, and other social ills related to the breakdown of the Black family” (Modus, Inc. 1994). Tremé was therefore frequently constructed as a problem neighborhood that was ‘deteriorating,’ often legitimating destruction or disciplining of the neighborhood and its residents in the name of ‘empowerment.’ This discourse of empowerment can especially be seen in the New Orleans’ Empowerment Zone application in which Tremé was proposed (and finally accepted) as an Enterprise Community.

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The Empowerment Zone Program was a cornerstone piece of federally initiated neoliberal policy in the 1990s, whose aim was to make cities, and impoverished neighborhoods in particular, self-regulating, self-governing, and self-sustaining. Neighborhoods were targeted as the appropriate sites to cultivate moral, neoliberal citizens, and rehabilitate those in poverty toward ‘empowerment.’ The emphasis of New Orleans’ Empowerment Zone plan was on capacity building, sustainable activity, prosperity and productivity, connectedness, and citizenship. Thus, it is clear that the aim for the Empowerment Zone was both economic as well as social, toward broader forms of neoliberal governance and citizenship. In its application, the city stated that it aimed to provide “an environment that empowers individuals to become full citizens, capable of exercising rights but also able and willing to take responsibility for themselves, teach their children well, and support those around them” (Empowerment Zone Application 1994). Proposing Tremé as a potential candidate to be an Enterprise Community, the report describes the neighborhood as a “picturesque area of 19th Century Creole and Greek Revival Cottages,” in which, “because of its poor location … the city put many of its undesirable necessities – the prison, a soap factory” (Empowerment Zone Application 1994, III–4). In stating the neighborhood’s assets, the only organizations included in the “communitybased organizations” section are those related to real-estate development, homeownership, and rehabilitation programs. It also cites a number of non-profit service providers who provide housing for the homeless, youth development, and health care as potential assets as well, whereas the neighborhood’s musical and cultural heritage organizations and traditions are noted as “other potential neighborhood based partners” (Empowerment Zone Application 1994, III–7). As partners, rather than assets, these cultural organizations appear to be more tasked to facilitate the neoliberal restructuring of the neighborhood by getting their members and neighbors to cooperate with these structural adjustments – not as assets of empowerment themselves. The Empowerment Zone legislation was a key component that continued the efforts of the city to gentrify the Tremé neighborhood. Though the neighborhood had long resisted gentrification, largely due to its proximity to the Iberville and Lafitte public housing projects as well as resistance and agitation by residents who fought for affordable housing (CRUTCHER 2010), significant efforts toward gentrification were made in the 1990s. Though noted as attempts to ameliorate the problems wrought by previous eras of urban renewal, developing the Tremé Villa, which now houses the New Orleans African American Museum of History, and making Tremé into a historic district in 1998 both were initiated by Mayor Marc Morial with the aim of attracting the Black middle class to return to the city as gentrifiers (CRUTCHER 2010). The Villa was constructed to attract the Black middle class as cultural tourists, and the historic district legislation largely aimed to preserve architectural structures rather than culture, history, memory, or people. Additionally, efforts like the Tremé Community Special Purpose Grant initiated by the Tremé Development Corporation, which – while citing problems of displacement of residents and the desire to preserve the “cultural lifestyle” that such displacement destroys – again were aimed at homeownership, sweat equity, and other efforts that fit

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squarely within a neoliberalizing rationality for the neighborhood and aided in gentrification (Mills Consultant Services, Inc. 1994). A similar rationality can be gleaned in a number of initiatives in the 1990s that were detailed in a series of articles that ran in the Times Picayune and spotlighted revitalization and renewal efforts in the Tremé during this time. According to the articles, these efforts promised a “turnaround” to a neighborhood characterized as “long neglect[ed]” (Toward bringing Tremé back 1997). These programs, in large part public / private partnerships, were aimed to “stabilize the area,” by decreasing blight with the hope to decrease crime, especially by soliciting residents to participate in the homeownership process to become more actively engaged in their neighborhoods (DONZE 1996; GRAY 1997; Tremé rehab finished 1996). The programs these articles highlight are indicative of neoliberal policies aimed to produce neighborhoods and communities who could ‘help themselves’ rather than depending upon the state. Yet, distinct from the broader entrepreneurializing neoliberal policies around the arts and culture, these policies aimed at the Tremé fail to account for or provide a rationality in which the culture of Tremé is anything but a threat to the kinds of culture the city sought to forefront at that time. Despite the city’s best attempts to gentrify the Tremé neighborhood, however, many Tremé residents actively resisted these efforts, often through cultural practices like second-line parading and Mardi Gras Indian masking, music, the formation of social aid and pleasure clubs, and other more direct forms of political and social action. As REGIS (1999, 2001) notes, these practices demonstrate struggles over the right to public space. Other more direct political efforts were made to contest gentrification as well. Second-lines even reclaimed the Claiborne Avenue I–10 overpass when they realized that the acoustics created by the overpass made the music resonate and carry, and second-lines continue to make the overpass a key stop in their parades. Additionally, in the 1970s, after the destruction of over 175 homes that were cleared for Armstrong Park, Tremé residents formed the Tremé Community Improvement Association and agitated for the building of a Tremé Community Center to provide a space of recreation and community building for low-income residents (Greater New Orleans Community Data Center 2005). In 1993, the Committee to Save Tremé and Armstrong Park held a press conference opposing the proposal to house Harrah’s Casino in Armstrong Park, citing the historic demolition of the neighborhood, police harassment, and other forms of denigration of the Black community as incitements to action against what was viewed as another attempt to exclude African American voices from debates over the future of their own neighborhood. The list of questions and points that were to be brought up at the press conference strongly emphasize concerns over displacement, gentrification and rising rents, the destruction of Black cultural practices, and displacement of Black cultural events (Committee to Save Black Tremé and Armstrong Park 1993). Though the Casino was eventually temporarily housed in the Park, it was never granted a permanent place there. Additionally, the Tremé Street Festival, initiated by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band in 1991 in an effort to give back to their neighborhood, represents struggles within the neighborhood to resist gentrification

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and displacement by celebrating the neighborhood’s African American culture through music, food, and crafts. As a Dirty Dozen band member stated, Tremé, is where it really got started for us … That’s an area where I grew up and an area that provided a lot of work for the Dirty Dozen. So I wanted to go back and say thank you now, not thank you 20 years from now. (quoted in AIGES 1991)

Later the festival moved beyond featuring primarily music from Tremé and included literary workshops as well (Big sounds take to the streets 1993). The Tremé Street Festival, which became an annual event, was a way for members of the Tremé community to resignify the neighborhood as a space of community and cultural practice that resisted its negative significations by the city, development corporations, and so forth as well as to keep neighborhood traditions like the brass band alive. Whereas many of the earlier policies discussed here attended to the Tremé neighborhood in disciplinary terms, aimed to ‘empower’ the neighborhood through homeownership programs and sweat equity, while containing what were perceived as its ‘dangerous’ elements of culture, the neighborhood, along with many of the city’s other Black and poor neighborhoods, has been made subject more recently to what GIROUX (2007) has referred to as a “biopolitics of disposability.” Bound up with the forces of neoliberalism, GIROUX (2007, 308) suggests that “the public and private policies of investing in the public good are dismissed as bad business, just as the notion of protecting people from the dire misfortunes of poverty and sickness … Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion.” As the city becomes increasingly expected to be self-sufficient and self-responsible, those populations and spaces that fail to entrepreneurialize were less likely to receive the kinds of assistance programs discussed earlier, as they were instead deemed failures and, hence, neglected. According to GIROUX, this was a new kind of biopolitics, one that demarcated between those portions of the population that would be made to live, and those that would be left to die. The marker between these populations was at the intersection of race, and especially Blackness, and class, where the Black and poor and their neighborhood spaces were increasingly cut off from social goods, boundaries and bodies policed and imprisoned, and, essentially, rendered into disposable populations whose lack of entrepreneurial productivity was deemed a threat to the health of the city and the state. This kind of policy of neglect increased especially during the Bush administration, during which time GIROUX (2007, 307) suggests, the confluence of race and poverty has become part of a new and more insidious set of forces based on a revised set of biopolitical commitments, which have largely given up on the sanctity of human life for those populations rendered ‘at risk’ by global neoliberal economies and have instead embraced an emergent security state founded on fear, class privilege, and updated notions of racial purity.

Neighborhoods like Tremé were thus targeted for increased policing and control, where their potential security threat was ‘contained.’ It was a neighborhood largely abandoned by the state and the city, and it is precisely this abandonment that Giroux suggests made possible the devastating effects of Katrina. It created a context in

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which whole segments of the city’s population were left without access to resources and the ability to flee the oncoming water, whilst at the same time normalizing the kind of neglect, and demonization, of those populations in the days following the storm. Following Hurricane Katrina, the future of the Tremé neighborhood was uncertain. Even though the neighborhood received only moderate flooding in comparison to some of the city’s other neighborhoods, many of Tremé’s residents were displaced and scattered across the country, unable to return home. Indeed, the city has been made subject to a kind of “disaster capitalism” (KLEIN 2007) that has utilized displacement of the city’s poor people of color to further a set of aggressive neoliberal policies. Specifically, many critics note that the rebuilding process has prioritized solutions that emphasize real estate development, gentrification, homeownership, and other forms of private investment that continue to displace, and render disposable, the poor (see, for example, ADAMS 2013; GOTHAM and GREENBERG 2014; GUNEWARDENA and SCHULLER 2008; JOHNSON 2011; PECK 2006; REED JR. 2008). A major concern is that these strategies point toward a ‘Whitewashing’ of the city (DYSON, 2006), where the city that will ultimately return will be one that has erased and ‘cleansed’ the city’s histories of Blackness and Black cultural production. Others warn New Orleans is becoming further entrenched in a touristic culture, where local culture, particularly Black culture, is produced solely for the consumption and pleasure of tourists (GOTHAM 2007; HARTNELL 2009; SOUTHER 2007; THOMAS 2014). While POWELL’s (2006) provocation that New Orleans is a “new Pompeii” that will never return was probably overstated, it is undoubtable that the city remains grossly behind in the rebuilding process, even 12 years later at the time of this writing, precisely what will happen to New Orleans, and especially its most marginalized and most vulnerable neighborhoods, continues to remain uncertain. Yet, the Katrina event also made visible the gross class and racial inequalities in the U.S. that were of such an undeniable magnitude that even conservatives could not deny the unequal effects of the storm (BRAUN and MCCARTHY 2005). FEMA’s and the Bush administration’s neglect of the Black and poor of the city, vocalized by Kanye West’s claim that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” became speakable and even aired in mainstream news reports. Rather than speaking about race as the product of individual biases and prejudices, or better yet, not speaking about it at all, structural racism was laid bare for all to see, if they dare look. This biopolitical logic that justified the abandonment of whole segments of the population, and the poor, Black, and elderly in particular, became visible in the images that proliferated following the storm, which, GIROUX (2006, 9) argues, opened up a possibility for a deeper structural critique: America was forced to confront these disturbing images … The Hurricane Katrina disaster … revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of two decades demonizing.

The floating dead bodies displayed through people’s TV screens and on the front pages of newspapers, according to GIROUX, disrupted the conservative agenda and

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opened up the possibility for politicized contestations of neoliberal rationalities. And, so, while many fear that the Katrina event would be utilized to further gentrify and ‘cleanse’ the city of the Black ‘underclass,’ which, to some degree, it has, the event also undoubtedly laid open the potential to critique the kinds of urban planning efforts and cultural policies that were made in the decades prior to the storm. In so doing, the event also drew attention to how those efforts contributed to the storm’s devastating effects on the city’s Black and poor neighborhoods. It is thus within this context of the competing forces of increasing exclusion and displacement within historically Black neighborhoods and the opening of a potential critique of these processes that urban planning in post-Katrina New Orleans took shape. In the next section, I turn to look at the discourses that emerged in this context. I aim to highlight the ways in which those discourses laid important groundwork for understanding the particular role of media production in urban renewal in the post-Katrina era more generally, and of the specific kind of work that Treme could be situated to do within this context more specifically. POST-KATRINA CITY PLANNING: NEIGHBORHOOD, EQUITY, AND MEDIA It is important to note that the planning process following Katrina was long, complicated, and oftentimes contradictory. The devastation borne out following the event made the city a panacea for planners, and the city was soon flooded with the glitterati of the planning community, all vying for a role in imagining and planning for a new New Orleans. As Kristin FORD (2010, 29), former City Planning Commissioner in New Orleans from 1992–2000, notes in her book The Trouble with City Planning, New Orleans soon became “a place where [planners] could win contracts to write plans for recovery from the disaster based more on their pet planning theories than on what they knew about the city.” 13 Urban planning following Katrina was therefore a significant space of innovation and testing for the urban planning community more generally. Thus, while the rationalities engendered by these plans are specific to New Orleans, they also have implications for the broader rationalities through which urban planning is understood as a discipline and practice. New Orleans’ neighborhoods constituted central components to each of the three major recovery plans proposed by urban planners following the storm. In postKatrina New Orleans, neighborhood was a term made synonymous with the citizen, where citizenship was predicated not on national or city-based affiliation, but, rather, on neighborhood. To some extent, this was a factor that government and city 13 Three significant plans were put into place for the immediate post-Katrina recovery before the City Planning Commission turned to the task of forging a city-wide Master Plan – the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the Lambert Plan, and the Unified New Orleans Plan. As OLSHANSKY et al. (2010) note, each of these efforts at planning for recovery were vociferously debated, contested, and emerged in competition with the others.

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planning aimed to overcome – it spoke to the spatialization of long-standing antagonisms and inequities over the allocation of resources, rights, and privileges. Yet, at the same time, neighborhood affiliation also became a fact that government and city planning attempted to mobilize in its efforts to rebuild and to solicit citizen participation in the rebuilding process. 14 Perhaps no other event solidified more clearly the sense that neighborhood was the central rationality that held together the antagonisms over race, class, space, and the right to the city in post-Katrina New Orleans than the Bring New Orleans Back Commission’s (BNOBC) “green-dot map” (KRUPA 2010). Funded by the Urban Land Institute as well as by other private philanthropic donors, the BNOBC returned with the first report that offered a comprehensive plan on how the city would be rebuilt. The report begot widespread criticism and controversy largely around its argument that a post-Katrina New Orleans would have to be a city with a “smaller footprint,” or, in other words, that not all residents would be able to return home and not all neighborhoods, particularly those vulnerable to future flooding, would be rebuilt. The report’s findings were published in The Times Picayune, along with the so-called “green dot map” that depicted which areas of the city would not be rebuilt by covering them with large green circles, denoting their future as green spaces (KRUPA 2010; The Times-Picayune 2005). According to the Brookings Institute’s The New Orleans Index at Five report, the “green dot” controversy ensured that “the debate from this point forward focused on issues of race, income group, neighborhood identity, and who would be allowed to rebuild and who would not be allowed to rebuild” (COLLINS 2010, 3). In response, subsequent recovery plans, including the Lambert Plan and the Unified New Orleans Plan, all emphasized neighborhoods as central bedrocks to the rationality of the future of New Orleans with a focus on the right to return for every neighborhood. 15 14 This rationality is evident in early urban planning documents, such as those related to the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC), where discussions regarding citizen participation all hinged centrally on neighborhood participation. As the American Planning Association report argues, a central need for the BNOBC was to develop a formal neighborhood planning program to ensure citizen participation and an inclusive voice in the planning process. The document suggests, “There is consensus among neighborhood groups that they lack a voice in the planning process at all levels … One highly successful mechanism involves taking a neighborhood approach to presenting proposals to citizens” (American Planning Association 2005, 14–15). This recommendation was soon followed by each subsequent planning body, including that of the Master Plan. 15 The City Council commissioned the Lambert Advisory to devise a competing city plan to the BNOBC based on the right of all neighborhoods to return rather than one based upon neighborhood “viability.” The plan, termed the Lambert Plan, was focused on neighborhood participation in the planning process, where neighborhood organizations and leaders galvanized residents to devise their own plans for their own neighborhoods. The plan was criticized for failing to address all neighborhoods and instead only those that flooded (COLLINS 2010) as well as in creating a confusing planning atmosphere of competing plans. The City Planning Commission thus sought funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in order to create a unified plan that addressed all neighborhoods, termed the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), which was later merged with the Lambert Plan.

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While these efforts represented a short-term plan for recovery, there was pressure by the state and federal government to have a longer plan for the city’s future, and federal funding dollars were made contingent upon the approval of a comprehensive master plan (OLSHANSKY et al. 2010). The City Planning Commission thus began efforts at drafting a master plan that would outline the city’s goals for development and management for the next twenty years. Informed by the various debates over the recovery plans, citizen participation formed a central component of the Commission’s planning process, creating what some have suggested is an unprecedented partnership between local citizens, expert planners, and government in urban planning (OLSHANSKY et al. 2010). Completed in 2010 and subsequently ratified by the City Council (EGGLER 2010), the Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030 (City Planning Commission 2010) includes a new Land Use Plan that influenced the subsequent drafting of a new Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance as well, which many have argued is the most significant portion of the plan as it “translates the broad land-use categories and principles of the master plan into specific rules about what is and is not allowed on each piece of land in the city” (EGGLER 2010). I argue New Orleans’ new master plan, Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans, heretofore referred to as the Plan, orchestrates a post-Katrina rationality of governing space that ties diverse neighborhoods to creative culture and media industries. The Plan rationalizes the city through a principle of inclusivity and equity and the role that culture and creative cultural practices, in particular, play in producing that equity. This rationality of equity and creative culture is tied to the entrepreneurialization, networking, and affiliation of neighborhoods to networks of power. Media industries are tasked to facilitate the entrepreneurialization of creative culture and neighborhood space, where a decidedly post-Katrina rationality works to produce not just a media city, but, rather a ‘media neighborhood.’ The media neighborhood refers to the practices by which vernacular and local cultural practices and performances specific to neighborhood histories, identities, and spaces becomes entrepreneurialized through their networking into on-location film and television production. By comparing these discourses from the new Master Plan to that of the city’s previous Master Plan, the New Century New Orleans Master Plan (City Planning Commission 1992) which was proposed (but never actually adopted by the City Council) in 1992, I aim to demonstrate two related points: 1) although the rationalities of equity, neighborhood culture, entrepreneurialism, and media industries do not arise out of nowhere, the Katrina event nonetheless significantly impacted the discourses through which city space, and neighborhood space and culture, in particular, were understood in these terms; and 2) the rationality of creative culture and media industries, neighborhood, and equity make possible a production like Treme. In subsequent chapters, I argue Treme plays a significant role in putting into practice the connection between neighborhood entrepreneurialization, creative culture, and media industries that is laid out in the rationality of the 2010 Master Plan. 16 16 Although SHARON ZUKIN (2010) is right to critique Jane Jacobs for faulting urban planners in the destruction of her ‘authentic’ city rather than the twin forces of money and power embedded in global capitalism, real estate development and investment, and marketing, urban planning

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Ultimately, this new Master Plan foregrounds the significance of neighborhoods as the central framework for understanding and organizing the Plan’s three main principles: livability, sustainability, and opportunity. The Plan details how each of these three principles can be put into action, and the space as well as ideal of neighborhood and neighboring serve as fundamental building blocks to each principle. Significantly, it imagines neighborhoods as integrated into a kind of whole (not a one), where cooperation and equal participation outstrips the history of neighborhood antagonism and inequality. As the executive summary states, In 2030, New Orleans is a city of unique historic character and ethnic and cultural diversity. The hard work of recovery and resettlement has restored the city’s neighborhoods. Rehabilitated and new homes fill once-empty lots in “dry” and “wet” neighborhoods alike … In 2030, the city will offer a choice of neighborhoods. (City Planning Commission 2010, 14)

Before arriving at what the Plan terms a “shared destiny” that is founded on a sense of “equity,” however, there is a recognition that not all neighborhoods come to the table equally in the status quo. Thus, the Plan creates a new rationality of space that replaces the antagonism between wet and dry, back-a-town and uptown, neighborhoods – distinctions that correspond roughly with Black / poor and White / affluent neighborhood spaces – with that of stable, recovering, and revitalization with the aim of ensuring the right of return for all neighborhoods and all citizens. 17 In so doing, the Plan embodies the competing forces of neoliberalizing city space and the more social justice oriented efforts to place value on the right to the city and the right to return for the city’s most marginalized. Media industries and culture play an important role in helping to resolve this tension by offering up entrepreneurialization of marginalized neighborhoods and cultural practices through the creative industries. In order to assess more specifically how these proposals take shape in the Plan, I offer a close read of how the Plan figures equity, neighborhood, and creative cultures and media industries.

discourse is nevertheless useful for understanding the rationalities through which space is constructed, maintained, and struggled over at a particular conjuncture. In suggesting this, I am not arguing urban planning in New Orleans is to “blame” for either creating or resisting turning the city into a neoliberal corporatized space of global consumption, and, indeed, I recognize fully that the politics of spatial production, governance, and regulation are extremely complex and often go beyond as well as circumvent the guidelines of the urban plan. However, the Master Plan is particularly insightful in elucidating the discourses that make possible particular rationalities of space at a given moment. Urban planning seeks to orchestrate myriad and diverse interests, institutions, and practices, including housing, business, ecology, arts and culture, transportation. The plan is therefore useful for tracing the emergence of a post-Katrina governmentality, and it lends insight into the ways in which space is engineered, imagined, and practiced toward the aims of producing post-Katrina citizens and demonstrations of citizenship. 17 I want to emphasize here that the Plan’s goal for the right for all to return is highly contested. Many doubt that is the goal, and there is still much debate in the city as to whether that is or should be the goal. My point here, then, is not to laud the Plan for the goal, but rather to emphasize that this is the rationality and rhetoric that serves as a crux for how the plan was proposed to residents and the City Council.

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Equity A central discourse in the Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030 is that of equity. The plan states, “equity means fairness, equal opportunity, and treating everyone with respect and dignity” (City Planning Commission 2010, 9.47). Going beyond a conception of equity that is figured in only economic terms, it notes, “achieving equity takes many forms.” These forms include concerns for fairness, equal opportunity, and respect and dignity in issues of employment, entrepreneurship, economic development initiatives, rebuilding, civics, creative culture, and environmental justice, and the Master Plan outlines strategies for achieving equity in each of these areas, where a sense of racial and ethnic inclusiveness is evident. For example, with regards to entrepreneurship, the Master Plan commentates on the strategies that might be utilized to increase minority owned businesses. In terms of rebuilding, the plan makes a commitment to addressing “disparities among neighborhoods” (9.47), and stresses the importance of supporting the cultural creativity of every member of the New Orleans community. As stated in the executive summary, the plan makes a commitment to “the principle of ‘every place and every person’ in the future of the city” (10). The Master Plan imagines itself, as well as future planning processes, as not only working from within the principles of equity and inclusiveness but also in helping to produce the contexts that make equity possible by creating an inclusive planning process. The Plan suggests that by putting into place a system that makes possible broad-based citizen participation in the planning process, the city is now equipped with mechanisms and techniques to ensure more widespread democratic participation and, thus, in ultimately cultivating a sense of shared destiny and equity. As the executive summary suggests, Historically New Orleanians have competed in the political arena along lines defined by race, neighborhood, income, and other differences. The process for creating the Master Plan was itself a tool for inviting people to cross these lines to find shared solutions based on data, technical analysis, trade-offs, and similar qualities in place of the politics of affinity. (City Planning Commission 2010, 19)

Contrast these recognitions of the chasms between race, neighborhood, class, and so forth with that of the New Century New Orleans Master Plan of 1992, which primarily drew upon a discourse of tolerance rather than equity and affinity. The Plan suggests that New Orleans’ “historical diversity of its neighborhoods” is one of the unique aspects of the city, where “a wide variety of ethnic groups in New Orleans have lived in harmony – in the same neighborhoods and often on the same streets” (City Planning Commission 1992, 40). Marked by a clear historic amnesia of the perspectives of New Orleans’ ethnic and racial Others, the Plan nonetheless deploys a discourse of multiculturalism through a rhetoric of tolerance that celebrates a kind of racial and ethnic harmony characterized by a repression of the history of social struggle and a silencing of existing struggles and inequalities. As critics of discourses of tolerance note, tolerance is largely deployed as a means of containing diversity and multiculturalism rather than promoting it (BROWN 2008). In

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other words, tolerance is invoked as a discourse that serves to regulate and manage power relations rather than contest them. The New Century New Orleans Master Plan does acknowledge what it understands to be an increasing sense that this ‘historic tolerance’ is wearing thin due to the “deterioration of our inner city” and the “lingering local and national recession” (City Planning Commission 1992, 40). The planners, however, stop short of suggesting that it is the role of the Plan to cultivate this sense of tolerance. Instead, they suggest, The solution lies not in City Hall, but within us as individuals … [to] … set aside prejudices and grievances … work together to end the economic and social isolation of any New Orleanian. We must work toward a stronger sense of community among all of the people of our city. (City Planning Commission 1992, 40, emphasis in original)

This is a significant point that is steeped in a racialized neoliberal rationality of individual self-responsibility for ameliorating social injustices. Though it points out some structural forces in cultivating social injustice, e.g. the lingering recession, it nevertheless suggests that individual mindsets are central to altering those injustices, not structural, institutional, or spatial adjustments. This is not the case with the post-Katrina Master Plan, which sees urban planning as necessarily intervening to solve for racial injustice by promoting equity. Further, the statements of the 1992 Plan are significant also for the emphasis on the word ‘any’ New Orleanian. This works in contrast to the 2010 Master Plan’s emphasis on the word ‘every’ New Orleanian. This is a significant distinction, one that marks a transition from a rationality of the city in more individualizing terms to one inflected by a post-Katrina rationality of inclusiveness, equity, and the right to return. Neighborhood Producing neighborhoods as productive and creative sites of citizenship and culture are at the forefront of putting into practice these goals of equity, inclusiveness, and return. The centrality of neighborhoods as a rationality of the Plan for the 21st Century is evident in how the Master Plan discusses housing, a bedrock concern for the Plan and most New Orleanians who continue to face a housing shortage since Katrina. The Plan proposes a ‘reinvention’ of the city’s approach to housing and blight, suggesting a “housing policy focused on building neighborhood and neighborhoods rather than projects or developments” (City Planning Commission 2010, 5.5). In this sense, housing is seen not only as an object of individual development, but rather as a matter of neighborhood development, and it is not just buildings that are being referred to here. Rather, the culture of particular neighborhoods is understood as just as central to the rebuilding of that neighborhood as are the material buildings. In part, this rationality of neighborhood culture put forth in the 2010 Master Plan is steeped in both Richard FLORIDA’s (2005) rationality of creative cities and the centrality of diverse neighborhoods as sites of creativity as well as in the New Urbanist (LECCESE and MCCORMICK 2000) principles of neighborhoods as the

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building blocks of community. However, the Master Plan also inflects these broader, more general principles with a very localized attention to the specifics of New Orleans by tying it to ‘creative placemaking’ and a ‘holistic’ approach to historic preservation. These discourses differ significantly from The New Century New Orleans Master Plan, where marginalized neighborhoods were figured as problem spaces and their cultures as dangerous. The new Master Plan instead aims to network these neighborhoods into technologies of governing, through which they can entrepreneurialize their existing culture. As the Executive Summary of the 2010 Master Plan makes clear, the Plan was constructed and is to be implemented within the principles of ‘creative placemaking.’ According to the White Paper in which the concept was formed and from which the 2010 Master Plan draws, creative placemaking builds on the concept of creative cities but adds to it a more distinctive appreciation for the uniqueness and diversity of individual cities and practices (MARKUSEN and GADWA 2010, 5). Creative placemaking efforts therefore often attend to specific neighborhoods, where revitalization is aimed not at a creative cities “me, too” replica but rather to “nurture distinctive qualities and resources that already exist in the community and can be celebrated to serve community members while drawing in visitors and new businesses” (MARKUSEN and GADWA 2010, 4). It thus makes clear that the intent of creative placemaking is not only aimed outwardly but also inwardly, at entrepreneurializing and putting to work the creative culture already existing in particular spaces within the city. This too has governmental aims, as the paper suggests, “Cultural participants are more likely to be civically engaged in their communities” (7). Moreover, creative placemaking is infused with a kind of causal governmental reasoning (HUXLEY 2007) that suggests nurturing creative places can help to produce creative citizens. The paper suggests, “Places are the spatial setting for arts and cultural production and consumption” (MARKUSEN and GADWA 2010, 9), and “the more residents make art, the more likely they are to become creative entrepreneurs” (14). Further, the New Orleans 2010 Master Plan puts creative placemaking into practice by linking together the seemingly competing forces of preservation and innovation. That is, the Plan argues, “New Orleans’ unique character and timeless quality should be enhanced, not changed” (City Planning Commission 2010, 16). It aims to “draw people from every walk of life together to enjoy the city’s natural setting, renewing the city’s tradition of landscape design and leadership” (17), where, Preservationists have been joined by people just as committed: entrepreneurs who celebrate cultural diversity … neighborhood activists who say no to the wrong buildings and developers who work with them to make these buildings right … The kind of partnership between city and community [that] holds the key to building successful 21st century cities. (City Planning Commission 2010, 18)

Noteworthy here is the emphasis on cultural diversity as central to entrepreneurial endeavors, as well as the newfound significance of neighborhood activists who can partner with culturally sensitive developers and preservationists. In effect, the Plan

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draws from the events of Katrina to produce a rationality that places new value on the participation of neighborhoods in city government as well as in the potential of the cultural diversity of hitherto marginalized communities who had been pushed out of the way by both preservationists and developers in the pursuit of real estate profits and economic development, as discussed in the previous section. Historic preservation, in particular, has long been a dividing issue in the city, pitting preservationists against developers and business. Furthermore, preservationists have also been criticized for fetishizing architectural history over the history of peoples and communities and thereby pushing out poor and marginalized populations by driving up rents (HODDER 1996). In Tremé, historic preservation efforts are widely disputed. As CRUTCHER (2010) suggests, Tremé was long excluded from efforts of historic preservation because it was deemed expendable, deteriorating, and not worthy of preservation because of its proximity to public housing projects. It was only later in 1988, when gentrifiers increasingly saw the neighborhood as a space of realestate speculation in light of increasing rents in the French Quarter that the neighborhood was deemed worthy of historic district status – not for its cultural history but for its architectural value and development possibilities. Clashes between the neighborhood’s African American working-class residents and new gentrifiers often revolve around historic preservation, where long-time residents argue, “For outsiders, the most important thing here are the buildings. For us, it is our culture, for us, that is what we consider community, not the buildings” (quoted in BARRIOS, 2010, p. 601). Significantly, the 2010 Master Plan attempts to soothe relations between neighborhood residents, preservationists, and developers by, as planning consultant David Dixon argues, “demonstrating that New Orleans’ cultural heritage is its most potent weapon in attracting investment and talent” (quoted in EGGLER, 2010). Taking what is termed a “holistic approach” to historic preservation, the 2010 Master Plan calls for “looking not just at historic structures in isolation, but also preserving the cultural traditions, community and social structures, and socioeconomic diversity that characterize beloved New Orleans neighborhoods” (City Planning Commissio, 2010, 6.13). Significantly for the Tremé, the Plan calls for the removal of the I–10 and the Claiborne Avenue overpass as a way to restore and ameliorate the effects of what it understands as failed urban renewal efforts and to further promote the cultural traditions and practices within the neighborhood (City Planning Commission 2010, 20, 100). Although much of the Plan suggests that tourism is a problematic industry to pin all of the city’s hopes on for its future, it aims to couple these new forms of historic preservation of culture with cultural and heritage tourism in areas like the Tremé (which, it is argued, the removal of the I–10 might help to promote as well). The Plan calls for a promotion of tourism to areas beyond the already existing popular sites, those areas “off the beaten path” not only for the potential tourism dollars that can flow into the city as a result, but also because of the potential that tourism has to foster a cultural economy conducive to a creative entrepreneurial culture, “generating jobs, and enhancing quality of life” (City Planning Commission 2010, 64). The Plan specifically calls for investing in “heritage tourism, such as in the

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Tremé district as a center of African-American history and cultural tourism” (9.22). The Plan states that the Tremé, in particular, is the “birthplace of jazz” and “cultural traditions that are integral to New Orleans identity” (6.6). These efforts, then, are rationalized to link tourism with cultural and historic preservation under the guise of a creative arts culture. In so doing, expanding tourism to new cultural heritage destinations off the beaten path is envisioned as a new kind of historic preservation initiative that is central to rebuilding and revitalizing post-Katrina neighborhoods (6.5). The difference constituted by a post-Katrina rationality of neighborhoods can in part be gleaned in the differences between the 1992 and 2010 plans. In the 1992 Master Plan, neighborhood also provided an undergirding rationality of the plan, but within the Plan what is valued in terms of vital and distinct neighborhoods is historic architecture and the creative cultures that are linked to the city’s White and tourist areas such as the French Quarter, Garden District, and Uptown. Though the Plan notes the significance and importance of “a broad mix of ethnic backgrounds and income levels,” neighborhoods that are characterized by this element of culture and value are made subject to strategies aimed to ensure that they are “safe places to live and raise families” and are “clean and well-maintained” (Citizen Advisory Committee 1992, 8). Racial diversity is not commented upon; it is assumedly included in the ‘ethnic’ mix. Thus, although this earlier plan includes a sense of the possible value served by the creative cultural practices of racially and ethnically diverse communities, the concern with these neighborhoods was much more so with regards to implementing safety and security policies, eradicating blight, and creating reinvestment through enterprise zones, capital improvement investments, tax incentives for reinvestment and development, and various design guidelines that would ensure a sense of safety and cleanliness in ways that problematized Black bodies and the Black underclass as dangerous criminals (Citizen Advisory Committee 1992, 10). Although the 2010 Master Plan is not free of these elements of criminalizing, policing, resignifying, and cleansing Black space in New Orleans, there is more so an advancement of what YÚDICE (2003) refers to as the “expediency of culture,” where spaces of racially and ethnically diverse cultures are characterized as economic and social expedients within a marketized framework, rather than as largely criminal and in need of cleansing. Central to this is the attempt to create an entrepreneurial creative culture. The Plan states, Under the new paradigm … jobs follow people … Key human capital building blocks include high quality education and workforce training at all life stages, cultural and recreational amenities, and vibrant, safe, convenient, and environmentally sustainable neighborhoods. Similarly, cities that develop a strong entrepreneurial culture can attract and retain footloose entrepreneurs seeking to exploit new product and market opportunities. (City Planning Commission 2010, 9.2)

The Plan thus proposes “Rebuilding the economy on the city’s cultural legacy” (21) by emphasizing the city’s potential to cultivate the creative industries and cultural economy. Creative workers and artists are valued for “their propensity to create neighborhood clusters of activity,” where it is emphasized that “In New Orleans,

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many traditional arts and cultural expressions are historically rooted in neighborhoods” (5.32). Thus, the Master Plan aims toward a rationality of city space that helps to cultivate and nurture the creativity of diverse neighborhood spaces and to entrepreneurialize them for both economic as well as cultural and social aims. There are four different techniques called forth in the Master Plan that aim to produce neighborhood as a site of governing creative and entrepreneurial postKatrina subjects of equity: The Neighborhood Participation Program (NPP), neighborhood audits, district planners, and the construction of design guidelines and zoning policies. Neighborhood Participation Program (NPP). Initiated through the City Council and the City Planning Commission, the NPP provides training and capacity building as well as financial resources to those neighborhood organizations that undergo a process of recognition to become part of the Neighborhood Participation Program. The program aims to effectively bring neighborhoods into a network of governing. 18 It is argued in the Master Plan that creating an NPP will not only help to create more active forms of citizenship and citizen engagement, but, in so doing, it will also help to resolve the social inequities and injustices that were made manifest during Katrina. 19 District Councils and the Planner. The Master Plan’s new spatialization of the city envisions the city as separated into new districts, governed by district councils and a district planner that work in concert with neighborhood organizations participating in the NPP. Thus, the district council and planner play key roles in mediating the interests of city government, business, neighborhood organizations, and individual residents. In so doing, the district planner plays a technical role in constituting the neighborhood as a site of governing as well as in weaving that neighborhood into the larger city whole. 20 18 In so doing, it is not so much that the Master Plan aims to co-opt these organizations for the purposes of governing, but, rather, as Nikolas ROSE (1999, 176) argues in relation to the ways in which community is made into a technology of governance, “a sector is brought into existence whose vectors and forces can be mobilized, enrolled, deployed in novel programmes and techniques which encourage and harness active practices of self-management and identity construction, of personal ethics and collective allegiances.” 19 The Plan suggests the NPP will create a new process for making land-use decisions that will be “seen as fair, transparent, and free of racial, class, or other considerations that would undermine its credibility … Greater public trust will arise from practice and from a growing confidence that City government works with residents and other stakeholders … This outcome will represent a substantial cultural shift” (City Planning Commission 2010, 15.9). 20 The Bureau of Governmental Research released a report before the Master Plan’s finalization, criticizing the Plan’s proposal for district councils and planners to mediate between neighborhood organizations and government because it creates unnecessary bureaucracy that is disempowering to neighborhood organizations. They suggest, “The proposed community participation program does not fulfill the city charter’s directives with regard to neighborhood participation. Indeed, it risks diminishing, rather than enhancing, the neighborhood-level participation in planning and land use decisions envisioned in the city charter. The proposed structure would insert an extra layer of bureaucracy between the neighborhood and the City Planning Commission; it could give disproportionate weight to the views of certain institutions and undefined

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Neighborhood Audits. Another key component of creating neighborhood as a site of governing in the Master Plan is its recommendation of neighborhood audits to be conducted by neighborhood groups and residents on a voluntary basis. These “audit walks” include neighbors walking a particular route and noting issues of concern, which they would then forward to the District Councils and/or the City Planning Commission to facilitate targeted resources and improvements (City Planning Commission 2010, 23). The rationale behind the audits is that they will engage residents to take a more active role in neighborhood improvements and will help the City Planning Commission to become aware of needed improvements that are specifically desired by neighborhood residents themselves, or, in other words, to foster citizen engagement. What is interesting about the New Orleans’ Master Plan’s neighborhood audits is that they make residents the ‘experts,’ or at least quasi-experts, in creating techniques and calculative regimes for managing their neighborhoods (with guided support from the city and district and, particularly, digital software to aid in the audit). They are constituted as self-responsible liberal subjects of the neighborhood. Again, this governmentalizing move must be understood within a post-Katrina rationality – it draws in those neighborhoods that had hitherto been excluded, marginalized, and left to waste (BAUMAN 2004) and reaffiliates them into networks of power. According to ROSE (1996, 54), audit is a technological feature of advanced liberal governance; it is part of the new “calculative regimes of accounting and financial management” that produce “new techniques for exercising critical scrutiny over authority.” Through the process of audit, “entities to be audited are transformed: they have to be ‘made auditable,’ producing a new grid of visibilities for the conduct of organizations and those who inhabit them” (ROSE 1996, 55). In rendering the neighborhood ‘auditable’ and therefore produced through a new grid of visibility, New Orleans’ neighborhoods are governmentalized, made governable, through the active subscription of neighborhood residents and organizations’ participation. This governmentalizing move challenges arguments regarding the rebuilding process as primarily disaster capitalism (KLEIN 2007) or Whitewashing (DYSON 2006) of the city. Citizens are not only driven out (though certainly some are), they are also drawn in, called forth to become post-Katrina subjects that play a role in reconstituting post-Katrina neighborhood space. Design Guidelines, Zoning, and ‘Quality of Life.’ Though the Master Plan does not mandate specific aesthetic design guidelines, it includes very detailed suggestions for such guidelines. A key discourse running throughout the Master Plan that underpins the proposed design guidelines is that of ‘quality of life.’ As the Master Plan states, “Good neighborhoods are the foundation of urban quality of life, and quality of life is the foundation that makes cities successful in the 21st Century”

stakeholders; and, unless the planning district decided to devolve decision making on neighborhood specific matters to the neighborhood level, it would give entities unaffected by a land use proposal a larger voice than that of the affected neighborhood” (Bureau of Governmental Research 2009).

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(City Planning Commission 2010, 5.2). 21 The Master Plan’s suggestions are all tinged with a post-Katrina rationality – they aim at producing active citizens and a community that overcomes its racial, class, and spatial disparities. It includes specifications for standards aimed to “extend the walkability, treelined streets, lively facades on public sidewalks, mixed used energy” of neighborhoods. The Plan suggests that such design and zoning will help to “build community in the midst of diversity,” where “the city can take advantage of the proximity in which people of different races, incomes, and ethnic backgrounds live … to create a renewed sense of community” (14.23). Neighborhood in these four examples above is working as a technology of governing not in a disciplinary sense, as in FOUCAULT’s (1995) understanding of disciplinary power, but, rather, more in terms of his conception of biopower (FOUCAULT 1990). That is, neighborhood is figured as a technology for producing and managing the life of a (neighborhood) population in a productive and creative sense. It constitutes a kind of spatial power that is more aimed at structuring and organizing the movements of free, self-regulating, liberal subjects than at disciplining space and citizens (BENNETT 1995; JOYCE 2003; OSBORNE and ROSE 1999). These neighborhood oriented strategies in the Master Plan aim toward the production of the species, life, and healthy populations by helping to guide particular behaviors, actions, values, and lifestyles through carefully designed and zoned space. In so doing, however, there is also the potential that those behaviors, actions, values, lifestyles, and individuals who threaten the health of the population in this sense are also being zoned out as well. As HARRIS (2012) notes, post-war suburban architecture also drew heavily on a discourse of ‘quality of life.’ Harris suggests that these were code words for a particular classed and raced conception of space that assumed quality of life was constituted by the exclusion of racial Others from an ostensibly White space. The quality of life discourse invoked by the Master Plan is perhaps also code for constituting a particular kind of raced and classed geography, however it aims explicitly at bringing together bodies from different races, classes, and neighborhoods. It thus inflects the spatial dynamics of quality of life with a kind of post-Katrina multiculturalism and discourse of equity and diversity. On the one hand, this is a kind of neoliberalization of racialized space – it turns cultural spaces of racial struggle and history into ‘character’ studies indicative more of lifestyles and consumption patterns than of politics (COMAROFF and COMAROFF 2009). On the other hand, however, there is also the cultural memory of Katrina subsisting within these spaces that creates the potential for a kind of politicized excess that infuses quality of life with the events of political struggle over racial justice. It is precisely the tension between these two potentialities that I argue Treme navigates and the contradictory and ambivalent politics embodied in the ‘media neighborhood.’ Before turning to the series, however, it is necessary to highlight 21 The Master Plan includes detailed character studies of each of the city’s neighborhoods, and it outlines design guidelines and zoning policies specific to neighborhood character that aim toward both maintaining and improving this quality of life under the rationale that doing so will help to produce more economically productive forms of citizenship by nurturing culture.

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the ways in which the Master Plan’s construction of neighborhood as a site of governing and its discourse of equity intertwines with its promotion of the media industry as a key industry through which the city might plan its neighborhoods’ equitable futures. Creative Culture & Media Industries A major component of the 2010 Master Plan is a section on “how we prosper.” This section includes principles and guidelines that lay the groundwork for the urban planning side of business promotion and economic development, where a future 2030 New Orleans is envisioned as “a prosperous city with an entrepreneurial edge” (City Planning Commission 2010, 3). The cultural economic practices of New Orleanians are central concerns, and these practices are envisaged as bound up with neighborhood spatiality. The Master Plan stresses the significance of a neighborhood based arts approach, where “City support for the arts can be most effective at the neighborhood level, nurturing the grass-roots cultural and artistic expression unique to New Orleans and ensuring its continuation into the future” (78). The 2010 Master Plan’s treatment of the cultural economy is significantly different than that of the New Century New Orleans 1992 Master Plan. Though the latter also acknowledges the importance of “arts, recreation and culture,” these are tied primarily to community welfare and opportunities for the city’s children – “arts, recreation, and culture are not only vital to the welfare of our community, they are essential to the development of our future – our children” (City Planning Commission 1992, 15). The value placed on culture here is indicative of a kind of cultural and urban planning policy that is bound up more with high culture and ‘the arts’ in a state-based patronage system that views art as worthwhile in itself (MILLER and YÚDICE 2002). This is not to say that arts and culture were rationalized as devoid of economic value altogether in this earlier Master Plan – it called for drawing on the arts to produce cultural tourism. However, this is a more limited sense in which New Orleans’ cultural and artistic assets are seen as potential capital. There is a notable difference in how the 2010 Plan refers to culture as “a way of life,” invoking WILLIAMS’ (1958) treatment of the term. This broader, more anthropological sense of culture thus places a value on a much wider and diverse array of artistic and cultural practices beyond those conceived by the earlier Master Plan. Indeed, it values life itself as a cultural practice that can be converted into capital value. The promotion of the film, television, and digital media industries constitutes a guiding strategy of the 2010 Master Plan’s vision of how to maximize the entrepreneurial potentials of New Orleans’ citizens. Noting the significance of the city’s burgeoning television and film industry, the Master Plan suggests that the city will need to provide a full range of production services in order to develop a sustainable local industry. It problematizes the city’s tax incentives as a short-term fix, and it calls for expanding media industries through “marketing, incentives, workforce development programs, and professional contacts” (City Planning Commission 2010, 9.33). In other words, the plan is to entrepreneurialize the local population to service

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the needs of the media production industry. In this sense, it echoes the calls of many local activists – calling for a local, homegrown industry not just “Hollywood handouts” (MAYER and GOLDMAN 2010), as it suggests “Without home-grown production and its own large-scale production studios, the film industry will not become rooted in New Orleans” (City Planning Commission 2010, 9.17). Zoning policies and urban planning of space as a means of creating, attracting, and maintaining these creative entrepreneurs are key strategies proposed for embedding the film industry in New Orleans. The Plan calls for the need to “ensure that there is adequate space for affordable commercial property for start-up companies throughout the city” and to “Promote the development of ‘cool spaces’ in lively areas of the city, preferred by young, tech-savvy entrepreneurs” (City Planning Commission 2010, 9.41). This creative cities mentality points to how space is imagined as capable of being engineered to produce entrepreneurial and creative subjectivities. Specifically, the Plan invokes the ‘best practices’ approach of other creative cities by calling for the creation of creative clusters (PORTER 2004). Centered largely in the Warehouse District and the Lower Garden District, the Master Plan promotes further developing the area to link already existing media industries in these neighborhoods and to cluster them together to create productive sociality for innovation and invention. This is evident in the recent building of “Tech Quarter,” which was subsequently renamed to the Intellectual Property Building, a creative media building that houses primarily digital media services. The aim is for the building to extend into and network with the film quarter, which is primarily located on Prytania Street in the Lower Garden District (this is where Treme’s production headquarters was located) to create a new cluster that Greater New Orleans Inc. president Michael Hecht proposes calling the “New Carre” (Welcome to Greater New Orleans 2.0 n.d.; see also I.P. South Building n.d.). 22 Like the discourse of neighborhood, the entrepreneurialized creative workers needed to service the emerging media industries are rationalized in biopolitical terms, where “human capital” and “entrepreneurial culture” are posed as “building blocks” to creative subjectivities. Again, creative subjectivity is highly tied to neighborhood spatiality, as suggested by the way in which the “human capital building blocks” depend upon linking education and workforce training to cultural and recreational amenities that are produced within “vibrant, safe, convenient, and environmentally stable neighborhoods” (City Planning Commission 2010, 77). So too, the building blocks of entrepreneurial culture depend on creating “appropriately designed and priced physical space” that can create “opportunities for networking and collaboration” and thus foster “a risk-oriented community” (77). THRIFT (2008, 44) identifies these architectural spaces as performative buildings that are intended to manipulate time and space to intensify social interaction that promotes innovation and invention. Media is also envisioned as serving another essential function in the 2010 Master Plan – city branding. The Plan suggests that historic neighborhoods and cultural 22 The French Quarter is referred to as the “Vieux Carre,” or Old City.

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practices can be marketed to film and TV production industries, which, in turn, can help to market the city to potential tourists and investors. Again, a post-Katrina rationality is invoked here to rebrand the city in terms of its cultural and ethnic diversity – New Orleans’ historic elements should be marketed to the film and media industries. Images of New Orleans in media such as TV and film will in turn serve to further advertise the city’s unique historic character. New Orleans’ ethnic and cultural heritage is as much a part of its uniqueness and identity today as its physical and architectural heritage. (City Planning Commission 2010, 6.11, emphasis is mine)

Thus, the goals of the Master Plan’s various spatial policies aim to create the potential for media productions that can represent the city. But it does so in such a way that challenges, and to an extent aims to counter, previous representations, cultural policies, historic preservation efforts, and developments that privileged, romanticized, and nostalgized the French Quarter and Creole culture. Instead, the Master Plan provides a rationale for the kinds of policies that help to direct media productions to represent Black cultural spaces and heritages that are off-the-beatenpath. In other words, they aim to literally and materially point media industries precisely to areas like the Tremé. The 2010 Master Plan therefore lays the groundwork for gathering discourses that produce a rationality of neighborhoods tied to a post-Katrina discourse of equity and hinged on the entrepreneurial and creative capacities of media industries. It is thus to an extent this rationality that makes possible a production like Treme and the production of a “media neighborhood,” as these urban planning schemes link up the potential for the survival of vernacular cultural practices and performances of place-based neighborhood identities to their potential to entrepreneurialize through networking with media production. More so, however, Treme is also a central node holding together a whole network of relations that brings together the three crucial areas from the 2010 Master Plan – equity, neighborhoods, and media industries – and, thus, ultimately offers one mechanism through which the principles, rationalities, and spatiality of urban renewal and rebuilding via creative, cultural production are put into practice. In the following chapter, I turn to looking specifically at the ways in which Treme’s on-location filming and hiring practices constitute this form of rebuilding and the ways in which its production practices more generally help to constitute the media neighborhood as a form of post-Katrina urban renewal.

CHAPTER 3 Location, Location, Location! Sites & Spatial Practices in Location Shooting In his audio commentary on the Season 3 DVD of the season finale of Treme, “Tipitina,” David Simon suggests, after his umpteenth time saying “this is the real … ” in reference to the place they are filming in and the setting for the scene, I just keep saying ‘it’s the real.’ … Our point was to use New Orleans to depict, in a very basic way, the situation in which a lot of Americans, not just New Orleanians find themselves, in terms of trying to constitute their society when there is so much arrayed against them at this point. We are here in New Orleans and we see no reason not to use the real. So this is the real Louisiana Music Store. (SIMON and NOBLE 2013)

Simon is making two important points here. On the one hand, he is arguing that the series, though committed to the ‘real’ of New Orleans, is also emblematic for the struggles of other cities. Like New Orleans, many other cities find themselves dispossessed by government and corporations alike, left to fend for themselves, as individuals and communities. And in this situation, his second point, which serves as the backdrop for a core overarching narrative of Treme, comes into focus: these communities are left only with what makes them unique, with their vital cultural resources, with their creative inspiration, with what makes them ‘real.’ And it is in valuing – both economically and culturally – these potentially untapped resources, and their relationship to the everyday and vernacular creativity of these dispossessed places and individuals, that these cities will have the potential to survive. Throughout the series, this message is hammered home to the viewing audience, not only in featuring the real, lived places in the city in which culture is made, but also more explicitly in the script when characters are digging deep and searching for what constitutes ‘authentic’ New Orleans culture. Delmond Lambreaux, the successful modern jazz performer who returns home to help his Mardi Gras Indian chief father, Albert Lambreaux, after their family home is destroyed by Katrina, for example, keeps searching for ‘the sound’ in Season 2 (see, for example, the episode “Slip Away”: BAILEY 2011). He is trying to connect his current ‘outsider’ music back to its New Orleans, and specifically Mardi Gras Indian, roots. Later in the season, in the episode titled “Can I change my mind,” Delmond feels he has connected to the sound and asks his father, other Indians, and local brass band musicians to record an album that mixes these traditions, especially the particular communication style of Mardi Gras Indians, with modern jazz. Albert says he will only record the album if Delmond sews his costume and agrees to mask with their Mardi Gras Indian tribe, the Guardians of the Flame (DICKERSON 2011). Delmond agrees, and they begin to record the album in New York, but Albert is not feeling it. They

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have to move the recording to New Orleans. While they are recording, during the episode titled “That’s what lovers do,” the iconic jazz musician, Dr. John, in his unique and distinctive parlance, states, “New Orleans infect music, it reconstitutionalates it … It matters a difference. Can you dig?” (HOLLAND 2011). This narrative piggy backs on the season’s premiere episode, “Accentuate the positive” (HEMINGWAY 2011), in which Delmond is arguing with some of his New York friends about the commodification of New Orleans’ style music. While his friend argues that New Orleans jazz is “Dixieland shit … caught in that tourist economy, like a minstrel show,” Delmond becomes more and more agitated, arguing that “trad jazz” and New Orleans is called up in everything he plays, and tells them to go fuck themselves. When his girlfriend notes that he makes those same critiques, he retorts, “I get to say that, they don’t.” These themes from Season 2 around Delmond’s struggle with his insider / outsider status, especially, highlight the significance of place and authenticity in New Orleans’ music and the efforts of the series to foreground those themes. Specifically, these themes demonstrate Dr. John’s notion that New Orleans “reconstitutionalates” things – it is in the being there that matters, as the place and its cultural history inscribe themselves onto those things. And it is precisely this “reconstitutionalization” that the Treme production aims for through its on-location and local hiring filmmaking practices. Indeed, the themes discussed from the episodes above are themselves drawn from the real, as Delmond Lambreaux’s character is based on Donald Harrison, Jr., whose father was the Chief of the Guardians of the Flame, and who made this very album twenty years prior. Harrison himself makes appearances throughout the season, playing in the band that Delmond has put together as he simultaneously comments on the brilliance of the idea. These intersections of authenticity – i.e. in terms of the ways in which the history and culture of New Orleans are being put forth as a kind of authentic cultural practice as well as in how they are filming real people in real places – are what make Treme an especially complicated text as well as one that intervenes into present day New Orleans in ways that both draw from and exceed its textual representations of place, race, and ‘authentic’ culture. In the previous chapter, I argued that New Orleans post-Katrina urban planning efforts, and those of the city’s new Master Plan in particular, helped to pave the way for a production like Treme. Urban planning after the storm constructed a postKatrina rationality of rebuilding that balanced the more social justice oriented rhetoric around equity, diversity, and a right to return – made possible through the manifestations of racial, class, and spatial inequalities during the storm – with a more expedient approach to culture and diversity that renders racial and spatial differences potential commodities in the creative economy. In so doing, the media industry, and film and television in particular, were offered up after Katrina as vehicles for marginalized communities and their neighborhoods to potentially entrepreneurialize their creative practices. Getting involved in film and TV was posed as a means of generating profit off of cultural practices that could then be turned into rebuilding and renewal by rendering excluded and off-the-beaten path neighborhoods into sites of experience and spaces that embedded the creative industries. This rationale, along with its attendant cultural policies and governmental practices, helped to

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make possible on-location production practices that might focus on the city’s lesser known neighborhoods and creative practices. Post-Katrina urban planning therefore played a role in helping to make a production like Treme possible. Indeed, even though Simon and Overmyer had pitched a New Orleans themed show to HBO years earlier, it was only after the Katrina event that HBO was willing to greenlight the project (E. Overmyer, executive producer, personal communication, March 15, 2011). Although HBO’s willingness was undoubtedly linked to the potential for audience interest created by the post-Katrina context, the broader cultural economic conditions that made the series a potential worthy investment within this climate of interest was also an important factor. In this chapter, I argue that while these conditions made a production like Treme possible, Treme’s production practices also help to materialize precisely the kind of city that the Master Plan sets out to imagine, and, as a result, the production ultimately works in and of itself as a form of urban renewal. Treme puts the rationales of post-Katrina urban planning – namely, equity, neighborhood, and creativity – into practice by constituting what I refer to as “the media neighborhood.” Specifically, this chapter examines the role of Treme’s on-location shooting and local hiring in neighborhood rebuilding, suggesting that Treme is an example of the ways in which television production in post-Katrina New Orleans constitutes urban renewal. It is a form of urban renewal that is bound up with the entrepreneurialization of the creative neighborhood and ‘authentic,’ particularly Black, cultural practice, which the series helps to constitute through its everyday rituals and experiences associated with filmmaking. These production practices create a new neighborhood context in which media practices and mediatization become constitutive of everyday neighborhood experiences. Specifically, the series’ on-location shooting and local hiring affected the ways bodies moved in space, constituting and cultivating the neighborhood habitus by affecting how and where people could walk, their potential encounters, as well as how they might comport their bodies and present themselves in their newly mediated neighborhoods. Likewise, neighborhoods also implicated how and where the series could film, and the series aimed to maximize its embeddedness in the neighborhood to draw as much from these local particularities as possible (i.e. to be “reconstitutionalated” by them). Treme’s on-going shooting schedule and its aim to film in every neighborhood established the production as a regular inscription on the landscape. It did so in the Tremé neighborhood, in particular, through the ways in which on-location shooting affected and disrupted traffic patterns, resident movement, as well as the business of establishments in which it filmed. Further, Treme’s local hiring captured the living labor embodied in neighborhood space – instrumentalizing and harnessing living labor by entrepreneurializing it, composing bodies and everyday practices in the neighborhood as mediatizable, and enabling creative potential to be transformed into value for the television industry and real estate investors. This production of this “media neighborhood” is, I argue, a form of urban renewal in which media production practices work as technologies for entrepreneurializing vernacular cultural practices already embedded in neighborhood culture, networking them to structures of power, and harnessing the neighborhood as an economic and social space of potential value.

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Like the example of Delmond’s search for ‘the sound’ in Season 2, Treme’s spatial practices of production work to construct a particular searching for and performance of ‘authenticity’ that can be transformed into a viable cultural resource for individuals and their neighborhoods. FROM THE STUDIO TO THE CITY On-location shooting, and the local hiring that often goes along with it, is not a new phenomenon, but it has seen an uptake especially in the last several years, particularly in the television industry. Many iconic film and TV productions about New Orleans were shot in Hollywood, such as the television series Frank’s Place, discussed in Chapter 1, or the classic Elia Kazan film based on Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Treme, in contrast, is filmed almost entirely on-location in New Orleans. Treme’s decision to film on-location was in part the result of the political economics of contemporary media production (see CHRISTOPHERSON and RIGHTOR 2010; SCOTT 2000, 2004). And, more specifically, it was influenced especially by Louisiana’s aggressive tax incentive policy, where the series’ low viewership and potential cost to HBO was promised to return back to shareholders in terms of its low production costs via incentives. But on-location shooting also stemmed from the producer’s aims to create an ‘authentic’ representation of the city that would counter those representations of New Orleans filmed on Hollywood sets, as well as the dominant images that circulated following Hurricane Katrina that focused almost exclusively on the Lower Ninth Ward and painted a largely circumscribed picture of the extent of the storm’s effects across the city (E. Overmyer, personal communication, March 15, 2011). Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had already earned the moniker of “Hollywood South,” which plays on Vancouver, British Columbia being often referred to as “Hollywood North” (GASHER 1995). The city boasted of itself as a major filmmaking destination that rivalled L.A., New York, and Vancouver. In 2003, for example, a study commissioned by the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Film & Television found that production created 2,349 new full time jobs, and the average production expenditures in the state that year was around $189 million and nearly doubled for 2004 (YERTON 2005). This compares to expenditures that averaged irregularly between $10 to $30 million per year in years prior to the 2002 tax incentive legislation (ALBRECHT 2005). Although this pales in comparison to the expenditures in Vancouver’s “Hollywood North,” which in the 2002–2003 year were estimated at about $1.4 billion (British Columbia Film 2003), the sizable increase in filmmaking in the state of Louisiana, and in New Orleans in particular, directly following the incentives had put the city on the map as a major filmmaking destination. Location filming has always been an important part of the industry, and the political economics of what drives that production and the types of filmmaking locations that have become conventional in mainstream film and TV production were

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detailed in CHRISTOPHERSON and STORPER’s (1986) landmark essay, “Flexible specialization and regional industrial agglomerations: The case of the U.S. motion picture industry.” In the essay, the authors argued that, as the U.S. film industry became more and more vertically disintegrated and prone to subcontracting out specialized services, new location patterns within the industry emerged. Thus, while L.A. remained a center for pre- and post-production services, other locations outside California were increasingly attracting film production because of the lower costs associated with filmmaking, leading as well to the rise of more portable film technology and the rise of regional film commissions (also see LUKINBEAL 2004, 2012). However, on-location filming outside LA. has seen a dramatic increase in recent years (Southern California Public Radio 2014). This is particularly the case for television production. Some of this can be explained within the confines of “runaway production,” a concept typically associated with large budget films by Hollywood production companies that are filmed offshore in developing countries where productions seek out the cheapest place and labor to use in their filmmaking (ELMER and GASHER 2005). But in the wake of a rapidly changing television industry, the emerging frenzy of location shooting is suggestive of an intensifying need for producers to be increasingly mobile and flexible. The proliferation of “media capitals” (CURTIN 2003) and the consequent loss of a clear center of production from which productions can run away from therefore challenges the suitability of this as an explanation for the contemporary geography of location shooting. Instead, constituting what MCNUTT (2015, 61) refers to as mobile production, “television series are capable of being planted in an increasingly wide range of locations – not necessarily centered in Los Angeles – and capable of relocating should changes in an incentive system create the need to do so.” Amidst a highly competitive environment in which cities compete with each other to attract the most lucrative productions (GOLDSMITH et al. 2010), more and more cities offer a largely similar set of infrastructure and labor capacities that enable TV productions to move should the conditions become ripe. So, while New Orleans became a popular destination for film and TV production because of the cost saving possibilities tied up with the up to 35 % return on expenditures, this did not necessarily mean the city got to play itself in these productions. Rather, as is popular with on-location filming, a city’s best asset is often its ability to stand in for any place or no place in particular, such that it can be suited to a more diverse array of scripts and narrative possibilities. This is, arguably, why Vancouver tends to be such a popular filming destination – it has effectively branded its urban landscape as a kind of no-place that can be made to stand in for whatever the script calls for (BROOKER 2007; GASHER 2002; LUKINBEAL 2004; MATHEWS 2010). And while the economics, practicalities of production (e.g. the need for street closures), and narrative dimensions of a film or TV project help to determine location based shooting, in general, the script itself tends to drive which parts of that location ultimately make it on screen (BOLLHÖFER 2007). It is in this sense, then, that the on-location shooting associated with film and TV production is generally understood as an institutionalized and industrial process, with a clear set of guidelines, tasks, and hierarchies that determine filmmaking practices. As a

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largely industrialized and routinized process, then, production practices are therefore often understood to work as a kind of culture industry (HORKHEIMER and ADORNO 2002), that imposes itself on the space of the city, creating the city in its own cartographic image (BRUNO 2011), and producing city space as a kind of Hollywood backlot (SWANN 2001). However, the kind of one-way, industrial analysis of location based production practices also misses the more nuanced ways in which filming constitutes, and is constituted by, spatial practices in the city. As LUKINBEAL (2012) shows in his study of location shooting in San Diego, the spatialized production practices of on-location filming are also dependent upon the particular locales in which they shoot. These production practices create what he calls “taskscapes,” where the tasks associated with producing film or TV on-location – such as the script, budget, accessibility, props or dressing, multifunctionality, the need for place establishing shots – perform a kind of double inscription between the production and the landscape that helps to drive that location’s ultimate value. LUKINBEAL argues that these inscriptions and incorporative “modes of logic” between production and place are best understood not so much through the industrial processes of filmmaking but rather through the more everyday tasks that produce the forms that cinematic landscapes ultimately take. Similarly, LANDMAN (2009) found that the production practices associated with the television series Farscape, filmed on-location in Sydney, Australia, could not be explained merely through the kind of industrial analysis often associated with critiques of runaway production and their impacts on local culture and place meanings. These critiques generally assume that production merely flattens local culture and place meanings by imposing both the script’s narrative and its routinized production strategies onto the places it films, “overlaying or repressing the local meanings of place [that] can readily be seen as a form of colonial and cultural reterritorialization” (LANDMAN 2009, 143). LANDMAN suggests this critique misses the more complex ways in which location based shooting intermeshes with local places. She argues that the place of production helps to shape both the narrative and the everyday production practices, especially because of the need for producers to hire local crews and contract out local services in order to make the production both cost effective and manageable. Producers must therefore navigate the cultural practices and routines of the local inasmuch as those at the local level must learn to navigate the routines of the production. As I discuss below, these co-constitutive relationships between production and the local are particularly evident in Treme, as they play out in and through the more mundane and everyday practices that are made possible through its location-based shooting. However, because Treme is not only filmed on-location but is also centrally about that location as well, these interactions between place and production become even more significant. While the script does indeed help to shape what ultimately makes it on screen, and the series’ representations therefore have a stake in the production of place meanings, the place also meaningfully shapes the script as well, particularly as the series remains committed to the production of an ‘authentic’ and insider’s representation of the city. Thus, although the series indeed

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replicates the influence of other televisual productions in terms of how they constitute particular geographies of production through their more standardized routines of production, it also deviates from these routines as well, as it navigates the city at the level of the street, the pedestrian, and the neighborhood. It’s aim to represent ‘authentic’ New Orleans therefore becomes bound up with the production’s capacities to put that authenticity to work, quite literally, but it does so not so much through an industrialized and institutionalized process but, rather, through the more mundane actions of everyday life that are bound up with the production and constitution of neighborhood and locality. It is at this more practical level, then, that Treme works as a form of urban renewal by constituting what I call “the media neighborhood.” SHOOTING TREME ON-LOCATION

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Figure 4a, 4b, and 4c (Photos by author) The Treme production filming on location at Mother’s Lounge in the Tremé neighborhood.

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On-location shooting is central to creating what Treme producers hope is an ‘authentic’ representation of New Orleans. Significantly, New Orleans’ authenticity is especially counterposed to previous film and television representations of the city that were filmed primarily on Hollywood sets. As writer and story editor for the show Lolis Eric Elie suggests, “Certainly, if you moved us to L.A., we’d remember some things, get on the phone, Google fly back, but I think it adds in ways that even we as writers don’t even understand or articulate how … small but immeasurable … ways” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Elie suggests that these immeasurables are borne out in the crew living, breathing, and experiencing New Orleans through their daily interactions. That is, he notes, “our crew leaves the set, they are going eating in New Orleans restaurants, going to New Orleans clubs, going to New Orleans churches, going and saying hello to a New Orleans cab driver, all of that informs the show” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). In part, then, the success of Treme’s on-location filmmaking is dependent on the crew embedding themselves in the neighborhoods in which they film. This is especially the case for those tasked with scouting locations. As episode location manager, Mickey Lambert, noted in a March 23, 2014 panel discussion at the Times Picayune building that I organized for my students when visiting New Orleans for the class I was teaching, I’ve been here about 15 years and I learned more about the city of New Orleans working on a television show about New Orleans than I did living here for 13 years prior … One thing that was kind of interesting … every department, costumes, everything, every department that goes into making production, we were all kind of mini-consultants. So we all kind of did our job, like from the locations perspective, if such and such a place didn’t exist in 2008 or whatever, whatever period we were shooting then we couldn’t do that, so we all had our job was to be authentic. And that’s why the show, you know there wasn’t an authentic department … everyone’s contributions had to be authentic, and it was a big no-no … if I brought a director to something that didn’t exist, or we were trying to shoot a band in this space and maybe the acoustics are better, lights better, aesthetically it is better, but this band would never play here, and the audience would never know that, but to David and the producers and everyone on board…it had to be real. So … there’s so many elements to it that didn’t feel like TV production, but it was, obviously it was, but it was pretty great.

Lambert’s comments make clear how the narrative and representational dimensions of the series, particularly its aim to be ‘authentic,’ were inextricably intertwined with Treme’s production practices. The drive for authenticity was so bound up with place, that both the locations and the narrative were shaped around that sense of ‘authentic,’ and it was up to the crew to both know and advise on ensuring those places made it on screen. As “mini-consultants,” they were asked to draw on their own experiences in New Orleans to ensure what made it on screen was ‘authentic.’ In this sense, then, the crew’s intermeshing with place is a means of embedding the film industry and its daily production practices into the landscape, something that became inseparable from the production of the narrative and the script. While this created real-life experiences that the writers and crew members could bring to creating each episode, it also had an impact on the communities and neighborhoods in which Treme filmed. As Eric Overmyer explained, there were

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“some really concrete positive … effects from being on the show and being connected to the show – it’s been good for their business, been good for their work, their reputations, all that sort of thing” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). 1 As a result, he argued, Treme’s on-location shooting worked to provide some resources for rebuilding and revitalizing some of the city’s marginalized neighborhoods and cultural practices. Besides for the resources assumed to funnel back into these neighborhoods through the production’s contracting and populating of their services and businesses, however, Treme’s commitment to filming a diversity of neighborhoods throughout the city on-location also played a significant role in helping to promote these areas as potential filming spaces to future media productions as well. When I spoke to location manager Virginia McCollum about where Treme had filmed, she showed me a map that had a pin in each of the locations they had filmed, revealing that there had been filming in almost every neighborhood in the city as well as in many surrounding parishes. Gesturing to the map, McCollum suggested she hoped to shoot in every area in the city, stating “we’ve taken this show into neighborhoods in the city that I think probably a lot of New Orleanians have never been to” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Her comments suggest she saw it as a kind of responsibility to represent each and every part of the city, where doing so made not only those outside of New Orleans aware of these spaces and places and the practices contained within them, but the production also rendered them visible to other New Orleanians. This desire to include every neighborhood echoes the Master Plan’s aims to create an equitable approach to city planning, where each neighborhood becomes valued for its distinctiveness, embodying the aims of the Master Plan to ensure every neighborhood returns. Filming in these neighborhoods perhaps served as a reminder that these neighborhoods were still here and that they had potential value. But it also provided some degree of an economic stimulus as well as a promotion to potential investors, tourists, and, significantly, future media productions, that helped bring that value into fruition. These practices speak more specifically to the relationship between Treme and Film New Orleans. Film New Orleans, the city’s film commission, serves as a liaison mediating between production crews, city government, police, and neighborhood residents and organizations. Film New Orleans is part of the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Economy, which was created after Hurricane Katrina in a move to demonstrate the city’s commitment to the cultural economy in the post-Katrina future of the city and the central role that film and media industries would play in these endeavors. Despite the Mayor’s stated commitments, however, Film New Orleans still only boasts two full time employees, the same as it had when it was first 1

These arguments regarding the benefits to local businesses are frequently used to justify cities’ and states’ generous tax incentive programs, arguing in favour of the benefits to the local economy due to local spending that is said to outweigh the costs of the incentives (CEIDR 2006; SAAS 2006; TANNENWALD 2010). After Treme’s first season, it was estimated that the production spent 85 % of its total expenditures in the State of Louisiana (BAXTER 2011). Still, it is unclear and debatable if these expenditures made up for the costly tax incentives (MAYER and GOLDMAN 2010; POPE 2010).

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formed during the Barthelemy administration in the 1980s. Virginia McCollum noted, “They are a small office. I’ve been to small towns that have larger film offices than this.” 2 Nevertheless she suggests, “they have been very, very responsive” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). But Treme’s desire to film in any and every location proved to be particularly useful to Film New Orleans. As McCollum noted, she in fact knew more about the filming industry than the director of Film New Orleans at the time, Katie Gunnell, who had relatively little experience in the industry. Treme, via McCollum, who was born in Louisiana and is a former filmmaker herself who worked as a location manager for a number of Hollywood productions in and outside of the state, thus also serves a role in sharpening the services the commission provided, particularly in relation to finding filming locations and negotiating film production practices. In her liaising with the Film Commission, McCollum brought Treme’s desire for authenticity and to film every neighborhood into the Film Commission’s practices and rationalities. It expanded the potential scope of the areas in the city that could be sites of potential mediation and entrepreneurializable through this form of media production. These rationales are particularly evident in the filming practices associated with a Season 3 storyline where character, Davis McAlary, a Garden District native turned DJ who lives in the Tremé, takes it upon himself to lead a musical heritage tour. In the season premiere, “Knock with me, Rock with Me” (HEMINGWAY 2012a), Davis begins the tour at the former site of J&M Recording Studios, where jazz greats like Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles recorded some of their greatest hits. The site of the studio is now a laundromat. He also takes them to the Eagle Saloon, on South Rampart St., where Louis Armstrong supposedly got his start and won a talent show (though a knowing tourist disagrees this is the site), along with other neglected jazz landmarks on the street including the Iroquois Theater and Karnofsky Tailor Shop. Davis points to another spot close by suggesting that it was maybe Louis Armstrong’s childhood home, on Jane Alley, also demolished. As Wendell Pierce notes in the audio commentary for the episode, the scene is a prime example of cultural conflict in New Orleans, in which the city fails to “preserve and revere the landmarks for which we are known around the world” (PIERCE et al. 2013). In an episode later in the season, titled “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say” (HALL 2012), Davis is leading the tour through the 7th Ward to sites related to the history of jazz and Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans, such as Allison “Tootie” Montana’s and Sidney Bechet’s houses as well as Perseverance Society Hall, but they are little known sites both in and outside of New Orleans. Bechet’s house doesn’t actually make it on screen – the house was demolished in 2011. 2

This factor perhaps explains why, throughout my research, I was consistently unable to get in touch with anyone from Film New Orleans. Despite repeated phone calls and email messages, I unfortunately was never able to get their perspective on Treme’s relationship to the Commission, the city, and its practices in neighborhoods. I have thus had to rely primarily on newspaper articles, the Commission’s website, as well as other second hand sources to glean an analysis of Film New Orleans. This is admittedly a shortcoming of this study, for which future research is certainly called for.

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These scenes are significant not only in the ways in which they represent these places and thereby create new place meanings relevant to post-Katrina New Orleans and its cultural history. They are also significant in that they become sites of mediation and sites of production. The fact that the tour emphasizes places that had been demolished is especially important here, in that it demonstrates what is at stake if a wider audience does not gain access to an understanding and acknowledgement of the significance of these sites. As director Anthony Hemingway states on the audio commentary regarding Davis’ stop at J&M Recording Studio, the show makes it possible to discover new things about the places of cultural history in New Orleans. Filming the series therefore connects not only the audience but also the crew to these places. Moreover, it demonstrates to the city that these sites are mediatizable, and therefore significant. It names them and brings them into the consciousness of not only Film New Orleans, but also the other institutions the production must network with in order to get permits, street closures, and so forth to make shooting there possible. It signals to passersby and extras that these are important places. Treme’s on-location shooting practices are therefore key spatial practices that helped implement the Master Plan’s goals of utilizing media industries to entrepreneurialize formerly marginalized neighborhood spaces. By transforming these neighborhoods into valuable sites for potential media production (and tourism), Treme networked these neighborhoods into Film New Orleans and the Mayor’s Office, producing the neighborhood as a potential site of value for future production. By affiliating neighborhoods in this way, the media industry therefore is also helping to connect neighborhoods to these broader techniques and institutions. One of the key ways in which Treme’s particular production practices did this is through their networking with local neighborhood organizations and community groups when filmed in their neighborhoods. Sometimes, this took the form of more informal gestures in trying to create goodwill, such as in neighborhood and community barbeques, but in other times it took the form of negotiating fees with those organizations for filming rights or in fielding complaints about noise ordinances or street closures (V. McCollum, personal communication, March 15, 2011). Ultimately, onlocation shooting positioned Treme as a kind of resource or cultural intermediary between marginalized neighborhoods and city government, in ways that brought neighborhoods into a network of affiliation. To a degree, they are posed as the vehicles through which an ‘equitable’ future for those neighborhoods (the rhetoric of the post-Katrina urban planning documents) is brought into fruition by making media production a means for neighborhoods to gain visibility and to return. Involving neighborhoods in shooting is a form of eliciting a kind of neighborhood engagement, rendering Treme a technology for constituting neighborhood governance in ways that are similar to those of the Neighborhood Participation Program discussed in the previous chapter. It takes hitherto more dispersed and unaffiliated organizations that worked through communal ties that went back generations, such as in the case of the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and it positions them less as organizations that exist outside of or even in conflict to government and instead as a kind of public / private partnership that gets brought into the city’s strategies for urban renewal and rebuilding. This is quite distinct from how these organizations have been

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figured elsewhere, where often neighborhood organizations are theorized as helping to bring back their neighborhoods in spite of government. Indeed, this is often how Treme figures these organizations as well. However, as Treme works to bring them into their own network through their everyday production practices, these organizations become affiliated with both the broader aims, as well as the more material and technical mechanisms, of government policy and urban planning. Again, I am not suggesting Treme imposed cultural significations from above or conjured an existing mediated taxonomy of the city and imposed it on these neighborhoods as a form of urban renewal. Rather, the series harnessed the culture that was already in these neighborhoods and helped to situate that culture as a site for potential mediation. Treme’s commitment to on-location shooting as well as its on-going shooting schedule, and its aim to film in every neighborhood established the production as a regular inscription on the landscape, affecting and disrupting traffic patterns and resident movement. This is no simple matter, as anyone who has witnessed the filming of a major TV or film production might attest to. The simple fact of the enormous trucks that roll into the narrow side streets of Tremé and New Orleans’ other neighborhoods ensure that passers-by can neither ignore nor avoid the production. In the audio commentary for the Season 3 finale, “Tipitina” (HEMINGWAY 2012b), in which the bar Gigi’s burns in a fire, the producers discuss the difficulty of that episode because they actually burned the set, which spread and created some damage. In the same episode commentary, Nina Noble discusses the scene in which chef Jeanette Desautel is told by her new boss that she cannot have live music playing after 10 pm, for the benefit she wants to hold for Gigi’s as a result of the fire, due to a noise ordinance. Noble notes that this was actually the case where they were filming, as there was a senior center upstairs from their filming location and no live music after 10 pm was in fact the rule imposed on the production. These are examples in which filming practices both implicated and were implicated by place, in which the narrative and representational meanings constructed by the production bled over into the production practices themselves and vice versa in more mundane, everyday ways. These kinds of intermeshing of production and location are not visible within a purely industrial framework that assumes that the series’ production practices are part of an institutionalized and routinized set of production procedures endemic to the television industry. Instead, they demonstrate how on-location production works as a site-specific spatial practice that must navigate place more tactically, on the ground, and therefore demands a practical lens for making sense of both its production of space. Treme affects the ways bodies move in space, constituting, cultivating, and adapting to the neighborhood habitus (BOURDIEU 1990) by affecting how and where people can walk, their potential encounters, as well as how individuals and collectives might comport their bodies and present themselves. In so doing, Treme is implicated in the production of neighborhood as locality, where, as APPADURAI (1996, 185) notes, “as local subjects carry on the continuing task of reproducing their neighborhood, the contingencies of history, environment, and imagination contain the potential for new contexts (material, social, and imaginative)

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to be produced … neighborhood as context produces the context of neighborhoods.” Treme is therefore an example of the ways in which media works as a spatial practice to create new sets of everyday rituals and experiences that are not unhinged from the history of neighborhood practice, but out of which creates a new context in which media practices and mediatization become constitutive of the everyday practice of neighborhood. Before I discuss how this plays out as a form of post-Katrina urban renewal, however, I first discuss how these practices of on-location production are also implicated in local hiring in ways that positioned Treme as a means for entrepreneurializing neighborhood spaces. HIRING THE LOCALS: AFFECTIVE LABOR & AUTHENTICATING PERFORMANCE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD Like on-location shooting, Treme’s employment practices also promised a cultural and economic boon to the neighborhood. The producers have stated that they were committed to a local production team, and there were efforts to make use of the various infrastructures of pre-and post-production provided locally in the city (VANDELAY 2010). Most visibly, though, Treme provided employment to a range of cultural workers, especially musicians, whose difficult struggle to make a living in the city began well before Katrina. Many locally based musicians played themselves in the series, often playing at venues or on streets where one can regularly see them play if one was in New Orleans. These efforts to hire not only Black but also local cultural workers make Treme significantly different from Frank’s Place. Treme is directly productive in its aims to both promote and revitalize the New Orleans music scene. Going beyond just featuring this music on the show, as Frank’s Place did, Treme hired these practitioners, providing them with regular employment and helping them to network into other potential gigs. Treme thus played a material role in the production of a key segment of the labor force, and in so doing, it also played a role in the production of spaces of vernacular creativity (EDENSOR et al. 2010) that aligns with the city’s aims of entrepreneurializing these city spaces. Louisiana’s motion picture tax incentive program provides an additional 5 % tax credit to the 30 % filming credit for local hires. Lolis Eric Elie suggests “I am certain HBO is saying, yes I want that 5 %” as a reason for why the production aims toward local hiring (personal communication, March 15, 2011). The total tax incentive credits claimed by Treme for its first two seasons of filming are listed below.

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Louisiana

Louisiana

Louisiana

Louisiana

Credits

Expenditures

Payroll

Expenditures

Payroll Tax

Certified

Tax Credits

Credits

Treme Season 1,

$6,429,236.00

$2,481,980.00

$1,928,770.80

$124,099.00

$2,052,869.80

$24,162,442.00

$8,631,426.00

$7,248,732.60

$431,571.30

$7,680,303.90

Year: 2009 Treme Season 2, Year: 2010

Table 1 Total Tax Credits Claimed by Treme (Louisiana Entertainment, email communication, 2011).

As the table shows, Treme claimed over $9 million in tax credits, over $500,000 of which was for “payroll tax credits,” or local hiring, for its first two seasons. 3 Executive Producer Eric Overmyer, however, argued that, “I don't think the tax incentives have anything to do with [HBO’s] support for the show.” Yet, he followed up that comment with, “[tax incentives] make it good for us, our ratings haven't been sky high ... [HBO] would have made this anyway ... It didn't hurt, it's a plus ... It might get us an extra year, it might keep us out a little longer” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Indeed, as this personal communication was conducted while Season 2 was filming, and the audience numbers and social media buzz only dwindled in subsequent seasons, there is no doubt that the tax incentives contributed to the continuation of the production for 1.5 more seasons. What remains significant, though, is that for Treme, perhaps more so than other productions in the city, the political economic motivations spurred by the state’s tax incentive program more clearly align with its cultural agenda as well in terms of the producers’ commitment to creating an ‘authentic’ representation of New Orleans within a post-Katrina rationality. That is, they hopeed its representations would counter what they believe is a long history of negative, stereotypical, and inauthentic representations of the city in other film and television productions as well as the depiction of the city after Katrina in journalistic accounts. Its local hiring practices therefore combine both the more industrialized and institutionalized economic considerations bound up with the tax incentive structure with those relevant to its more practical narrative dimensions. But, what is more, each of these also no doubt influences the other – as the tax incentive structure provides a rationale that drives

3

The State’s definition for local hiring, however, is fairly fuzzy, as, according to the 2002 Louisiana Motion Picture Incentive Act, a person is defined as “local” if they are a “resident” who maintains a home in the state for more than six aggregate months per year. Given that Treme typically films for about six months of the year, this means that many of their New York and Hollywood crew could make a claim as a local hire.

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decision making to center the crew, and potentially the story, more locally, and that local crew then also influences its narrative decisions. Therefore, Treme’s on-location shooting was significantly influenced by, as well as influenced, its local hiring practices, and this local hiring was both narratively and practically driven. As Lolis Eric Elie stated, local hiring was an aesthetic practice that serviced the story, such that if “for day players, for cultural folks, you know you've got some Mardi Gras Indians, we are gonna try to find Indians, gonna try to find musicians, real carpenters” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). But, again, these were practical and not only aesthetic concerns as well, as Laura Schweigman, an associate producer, suggested that since Treme was “making a show about a city … you want people that have local relationships, that know how to work on a team, know their way around the city, know vendors” (personal communication, March 16, 2011). It is therefore not only that these local personalities and characters lent authenticity to the series (as many critics of the series have already argued, e.g. FUQUA 2012; POTTS 2013), although that is certainly an overarching aim, but it is also that these local folks provided practical access to these places that made it possible to construct that authenticity in the first place. Further, Eric Overmyer suggested that local hiring was also a matter of social responsibility, stating, “I think there is a sense of obligation also to the community in terms of hiring the crew” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). That is, even beyond the cultural workers and actors they hired above the line, the producers felt a sense of obligation to hire below the line crew as well, as a kind of charitable contribution to helping to revive the economy. Yet, even Treme felt the crunch for trained professionals. Schweigman noted that the amount of filming in the city made it difficult to find trained production crew that was local. Thus, Treme initiated training efforts to bring up crew. For example, they held a production assistant training in coordination with Film New Orleans and other local media production organizations in the city. As Schweigman saw it, this was not only beneficial to Treme, but it was also a contribution that Treme made to the community. She suggested that Treme did what they could to ensure the crew “have all of the tools they need to be good at their jobs … You want to extend the crew base … to have quality crew … to just keep expanding that so people have an opportunity, especially youth” (personal communication, March 16, 2011). It is precisely in providing this kind of ‘socially responsible’ job training and opportunity for rising through the ranks that made Treme’s production practices play such an integral role in putting into practice the goals of post-Katrina urban planning and renewal. Their production practices stimulated, as well as made possible, the production of the kinds of local creative workers the city was banking its future on. In an era in which education and state funding for that education, particularly higher education, was increasingly out of reach for much of the population (RUSSELL 2016), Treme provided a privatized resource and vehicle for helping to stimulate that kind of creative labor. In addition to providing training and bringing up production crew that entrepreneurializes individual laborers as media workers, Treme also helped to entrepreneurialize, as well as harness, the living labor of the neighborhood as a whole. It did so through its outreach to local neighborhood groups, individuals, and locations

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to appear on the show as extras, special guests, as well as recurring characters to play themselves or characters similar to their own. There are numerous examples from the text in which this is the case – from politicians like Jacques Morial and Oliver Thomas, musicians such as Kermitt Ruffins and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, Mardi Gras Indians such as Donald Harrison, Jr. (Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame), to the various local chefs who responded to casting calls for the many restaurant scenes in the show. These practices in a sense harnessed the collective potentiality of the neighborhood, helping to implement the creative placemaking rationality of the Master Plan. That is, in providing vehicles for the creative practices embedded in the locations in which it filmed to have an avenue for entrepreneurializing their cultural work, Treme was in fact doing the creative placemaking work by drawing on existing culture in a particular neighborhood and entrepreneurializing that through the media industry. As Wendell Pierce commented on the filming of a scene of chefs working the kitchen in an audio commentary on Season 3’s premiere episode, “Knock with me, rock with me,” this is “a new style of filming … fictionalized documentary.” He suggests that it wouldn’t be possible to get actors to portray these people and that there was something significant about “putting people in front of the camera and having them do what they do. You are capturing this other world, and you can’t get it by faking it – not at all” (PIERCE et al. 2013). Though he is commenting on a particular scene and about the specificity of the subculture of chefs in a local kitchen, his comments could be extended more broadly to the unique subcultural practices of Mardi Gras Indians, brass band musicians during a second-line gig, or audiences at a New Orleans Bounce music show. These are specific, place-based practices bound up with the histories of New Orleans’ distinctive culture and its neighborhoods, and it is through the local hiring practices that this kind of embedded filmmaking was made possible. It is also through this embedded filmmaking that these cultural practices were given a vehicle for entrepreneurializing their creative labor. These filmmaking practices both stimulated and captured the authenticity and distinctive cultural practices – even as they are played out in the quotidian aspects of daily life – that could generate both meaning and value for the neighborhood. Treme did not impose a culture or media image from above, but rather it aimed to stimulate the cultural creativity of the daily practices of residents in the neighborhood habitus. These practices make clear a kind of distinction from previous eras of urban planning and renewal that depended upon the media industry. In Treme, the media industry is calling upon, as well as helping to provide resources to, the everyday and living labor of neighborhoods to effectively brand and render the neighborhood as both socially and economically productive, rather than media imposing a set of meanings (whether in the form of characters or storylines and so forth) or aiming to cleanse or exclude particular neighborhood spaces. Echoing the rationalities of equitable inclusiveness of the Master Plan, location manager Virginia McCollum suggests, “We try to be very inclusive. I think it is absolutely wrong to go into somebody’s neighborhood and exclude them … none of us tolerate that. We all welcome the relationships we have with neighborhoods and the people there” (personal communication, March 15, 2011).

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In these efforts, Treme created a unique position, held by Karen Livers (a local actress and historical theatre activist), titled “specialty casting,” whose job was to find, connect, and negotiate with the local community for casting and other purposes. Livers saw her position in ethical terms, as a social responsibility to the community to “guarantee that people from New Orleans will be connected and involved” in Treme (personal communication, March 15, 2011). She suggested that the culture of New Orleans is something that can’t be faked, “you have to get the real thing.” Her job, then, was to ensure that in each scene, they had “the real thing.” Livers suggested, for example, that she ensured that “if we’re going to Bullet’s – a neighborhood bar – [we] use the people that go to Bullet’s every Tuesday that hear Kermit [Ruffins] play” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). This too, according to Livers made Treme seem more palatable, more neighborly, in the eyes of residents, whom she suggested felt they had a part to play in the series. In addition to hiring extras, Treme also networked with local cultural organizations to capture “the real thing” in the form of distinctive, and especially racialized and neighborhood-tied, cultural practices. Again, Karen Livers played a key role here as a cultural intermediary. As she explained during the panel discussion with my students, I had to get into the community, and I am a Tremé baby, I was born and raised and still own the house around the corner from where we shot, but did I ever participate in cultural things in New Orleans, no … I knew second-lines because they had passed in front of my door all my life no matter where I lived in the city, I was familiar with Indians, I always participated with the Guardians of the Flame, but that was because they brought it to the stage … my world was Theatre … when the show comes, I had just become the year before a member of the Guardians of the Flame. Perfect spot, because the Queen of the Guardians is now basically organizing the downtown Indians, which gave me the foot in the door to the Indians and embracing that culture … When we staged … Season 1 Episode 5, we staged a second-line. So how do you stage a real second-line … to make it authentic and to look like, well you have to throw a secondline. And second-lines happen on every Sunday, so we can’t do it on Sunday because then we would be stepping on a crew, and taking away from them because we need to do what we need to do, so what we did was create a second-line weekend. So, we had the second-line on a Saturday and they had theirs on a Sunday. It took a while because the men are not easy to deal with and communicate with because they felt like … people came through after Katrina with video cameras and promised people … people think … they are gonna be on TV, they are gonna get some money … something for telling their story and bringing it all out there and nothing, so by the time Treme comes in everybody is afraid to share because they feel like they are culture vultures and they stealing from us and … No … I found Tamara Jackson who helped me organize over 300 second-liners to participate in a second-line at 6 o’clock in the morning in 30 degree weather in New Orleans … and they came … So the authentic thing … let’s just have a second-line and stick our actors in the middle of it. (Karen Livers, specialty casting director, personal communication, March 23, 2014)

Livers suggested that a key part of the series, then, was again embedding the crew into the culture itself, building trust, and persuading cultural bearers to participate in the show. Again, she emphasizes the significance of authenticity, and though in the case of the second-line, it is a kind of staged authenticity, it is worth noting that these are cultural practitioners, engaged in their everyday activities, perhaps at a different time and day, but who nonetheless are engaged in their cultural work in

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the midst of a film crew. What matters the most, as Livers’ quote above suggests, is getting the local folks involved in this cultural work to participate in the show. Like the second-line, a myriad of examples of the local and vernacular cultural practices embodied in these cultural organizations are on display in any individual Treme episode. From brass bands to Mardi Gras Indians, Baby Dolls to social aid and pleasure clubs, Treme made an effort to hire the real individuals and groups behind these neighborhood-based New Orleanian traditions. On the day I visited the set, Treme was filming in the Tremé at Mother’s Lounge. It was supposed to be Mardi Gras Day, and Karen Livers had made sure that many of the people at the Lounge were the people that would have been there on that Mardi Gras day. In particular, she had ensured that the Baby Doll group in the scene that day was the actual Baby Doll group that would have been at Mother’s Lounge on that particular Mardi Gras, stating “there are other Baby Doll groups, but only these Baby Dolls will be at this club” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). 4 Livers told me how the head of this particular Baby Dolls club in the 7th ward had passed away just around the time that the scene was supposed to be filming. Though this history was not part of the narrative of the story, she argued having the Baby Dolls here at this place and this time, being part of the scene, obliquely signifies this story, this history, and pays tribute to the significance of this cultural practice. In addition to extras and these kinds of vernacularly creative neighborhood groups, Treme also drew heavily on musicians in its local hiring efforts, and it therefore helped to push a converged, creative industries (between film / TV and music) effort toward rebuilding and renewal. Treme’s promotion of New Orleans’ musicians and music aligns with the city’s strategy to utilize jazz revival as a way to rebuild the city. Jazz has been harnessed as a practical vehicle for using culture as a resource to generate the funds and will to rebuild, with both potentially hopeful forms of resistance to dominant rebuilding strategies as well as more insidious, neoliberal consequences (PORTER 2009; see also WATTS and PORTER 2013). As PORTER (2009, 599) notes, In a local context where the connections between music and civic identity have been long established, and in a broader neoliberal context where “culture as resource” “has become the foundation for claims to recognition and resources,” invoking music to respond to the exclusionary vision of the city’s future is appealing. It makes sense as well, given how audible the music has been in narratives across the planet about the city and its future. The state of the music has even been seen as a kind of barometer of the city’s recovery.

On the one hand, he notes, more official efforts to promote jazz as a form of revival are visible in places like JazzFest, which tend to present a kind of multiracial coming together of the city in ways that often hold up certain kinds of acceptable and

4

Baby Dolls are women, usually African American women, who dress as baby dolls, with satin bonnets, pacifiers, and bottles in tribute to the history of the women who worked in Storyville – the city’s former red light district located within Tremé and later razed to build the Iberville housing projects – and dressed similarly (ANTOLINI 2013; VAZ 2013).

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‘respectable’ Black culture, like the brass band and second-lining tradition, as cultural resources to urban renewal. In these examples, culture as an object of consumption becomes the key to revival, as it can be entrepreneurialized into major events that can attract a broad audience and contribute to the city’s cultural economy and tourist industry. On the other hand, he notes that “Music has also been deployed at a practical level to rebuild the city in ways that potentially counter probusiness and elite-serving visions for its future” (PORTER 2009, 600). Citing Musician’s Village, a neighborhood rebuilding project in the Upper Ninth Ward spearheaded by jazz greats Harry Connick, Jr. and Wynton Marsalis, he suggests these kinds of projects could potentially further anti-racist rebuilding efforts. As perhaps the primary and most visible mechanism for promoting New Orleans music and musicians at the present conjuncture, Treme represented a significant mechanism for helping to implement this strategy of jazz as revival. It is an especially significant one in that Treme helped to create convergences between the film / TV industries and the music industries as well. As such, Treme made it possible to harness the economically and culturally productive potentialities of jazz culture – and its many entanglements to cultural practices that exceed its strictly musical performance – in a more extensive way. It helped to create a rationale in which the connections between Mardi Gras Indians, second-lines, brass band performances on street corners and local clubs are not only interconnected with each other, but are also bound up with seemingly more dispersed activities like hanging out at your local bar, making and eating food, and marching in and watching a Mardi Gras parade. Indeed, many of Treme’s episodes across its 3.5 seasons have scenes that flow from one of these activities to the next, or meshes the activities together, demonstrating their intrinsic connections and value to the broader cultural economy within New Orleans. Creating these scenes in this way constructs these interconnections not only representationally, but also practically, as folks meet and work with each other on set. This implicates the way in which musicians understand their work, and, consequently, expands the ways in which music – now in this broader sense as it passes through the film and TV industries – can be employed in the rebuilding and rebranding of the city. In so doing, it helps to entrepreneurialize musicians in ways that align with the Master Plan’s aims for drawing upon media as an entrepreneurial engine of equitable and creative neighborhood culture. An article in New Orleans’ Offbeat magazine that covers the music scene in the city refers to the effect of Treme on local musicians as being “touched by Treme” (RAWLS 2011). The article suggests that though the series might not get each individual artist featured on the show new gigs, it has been valuable in connecting them to networks of relations that have ‘intangible’ effects. Treme producers worked specifically to ensure that musicians featured on the show reaped financial benefits and that the money did not go directly to labels. As a result, Those who want to be touched by Treme have become more business-conscious. One artist cut an album hoping to have a song licensed from it by the show. Others now have incentive to get their publishing in order, which represents a consciousness shift in a city that has treated albums like souvenirs to sell off the bandstand. (RAWLS 2011)

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This speaks to the way in which the series invoked a shift in how artists understand their relationship to cultural practices, creating a possible shift in how individuals understand the possibilities for entrepreneurializing these practices. In other words, it helped to constitute a post-Katrina entrepreneurial subject. As Karen Livers noted, Art got better here, jobs got better for artists here I think after Katrina … artists … had never understood the Art Council’s grants. Now [they] understand the importance of filling out an application and getting one because it helps them get gigs … I think it helped the artists become more aware of other possibilities outside of just gigging and other ways to gig. (personal communication, March 15, 2011)

No doubt, one of those other ways of gigging is to network into the television and film industries – to utilize one’s skills in the great deal of film and television production happening throughout the city. Given Treme’s desire to cast a wide net to cultural workers and neighborhoods throughout the city, it offered a particularly significant vehicle for helping to bring artists into this rationality. It also connected them up to, and networked them into, film and television production happening in New Orleans. Treme brought extras, creative practitioners, musicians, and neighborhoods as a whole into a network of relations that furthers the entrepreneurializing aims of the Master Plan. Treme might be understood as providing the technical resources, for example, of implementing a particular way for the media cluster between digital and film / TV industries to be connected up to these more marginalized neighborhoods by networking with the music industry. Again, it is significant that it did so not by imposing industries onto these spaces or places, but in trying to harness the interconnections (through, for example, its cultural mediators like Karen Livers) that are made possible by the ‘authentic’ cultural practices and creative placemaking already at work in these neighborhoods. In addition to musicians, extras, and cultural practitioners, Treme also hired local individuals who often played themselves, or characters close to themselves, in the series. Jacques Morial (son to New Orleans first African American Mayor, Dutch Morial, and brother of former Mayor Marc Morial), for example, appeared sporadically in the series where he played himself. In one episode, he served as an advisor of sorts to DJ Davis McAlary, who was considering running an ironic campaign for City Council. In the episode, Morial voices many of the same concerns that he did in his real-life activism, including criticisms of the city’s closure of public housing and Charity Hospital, the lack of affordable housing, and permanent displacement (DONZE 2010). Additionally, Oliver Thomas, who is a former City Councilperson forced to resign in disgrace after being convicted on corruption charges, played a character close to his own in a recurring part on the show in Season 2 (ELIE 2011a). Though he went by a different name and his corruptions were slightly different than those in real life, Thomas essentially lived out his own disgrace on the series, perhaps in an effort to make amends for his wrongdoings. 5 Various other examples like these abound, and even each of the main characters was 5

Thomas also created and starred in a play where he dramatized his story of political downfall as well (MACCASH 2011).

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based on a real-life New Orleanian, many of whom often made special appearances on the show (such as Davis Rogan, who serves as the model for the Davis McAlary character) or were contracted out to consult for the series to ensure the authenticity of the characters (WALKER 2010b). According to Livers, the authenticity that is provided by the local hiring of extras, musicians, cultural practitioners, consultants, and local personalities produces something ‘magical,’ You can get extras to go in there and they’re going to have a fantastic time, but it’s not going to be like the people who sit in Bullet’s every Tuesday, and when I say every Tuesday, I mean every Tuesday in the same spot to hear Kermit play. That’s magical … some nights you can be there and the whole club is on the same rhythm and the same, same everything, and you just know people, this is their ritual. (personal communication, March 15, 2011)

Virginia McCollum echoes these sentiments, suggesting getting folks who live in the neighborhood where they are filming to be involved: Lends a reality to it that you might not get otherwise, like taking somebody from someplace else and saying, “stand on this corner and look normal, look natural.” You get somebody used to standing on that corner and they really look natural, and they are happy to be a part of it. (personal communication, March 15, 2011)

Although the stakes of this authenticity are undoubtedly bound up with the series’ textual representations and its narrative realism, it would be mistaken to stop here in terms of what makes these filming practices so significant. These productions of authenticity, and the performances they invite from local residents to play out their daily lives in the neighborhood, are also bound up with the significance of the series in putting that authenticity to work toward entrepreneurializing these performances as well. Here, again, we see the practical ways in which Treme embeds itself in the neighborhood through its filmmaking practices of shooting and hiring become constitutive of the production of neighborhood as locality and as habitus. Filmmaking both captures and helps to structure these performances, as well as renders them into economically viable resources. In this sense, the series’ focus on food culture and the performances of chefs, which takes up an increasing amount of air time as the series proceeds, almost becomes an allegory for how more ‘low culture’ cultural practitioners might shape their creative capacities into creative, rather than service-based, labor. That is, like the series Top Chef (Bravo 2006–present), a popular reality TV series whose host Tom Collichio makes a few Treme appearances, Treme also requires its participants to ‘dig deep’ into themselves, to make things that reflect where they come from, to put their soul into their respective cultural products (like Delmond Lambreaux in searching for ‘the sound’). In so doing, they are promised the potential of success. On Top Chef, the individual struggles of the participants can be made into gold if they allow themselves to authentically represent those struggles in their food. The premiere episode from Top Chef’s season 14 in Charleston, South Carolina (each season is held in a different city in the U.S. and features regional authenticity in food culture), highlights this potential especially, when a White (John Tesar) and a

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Black (Gerald Sombright) participant are forced to compete in a sudden death challenge on the site of a local plantation, now turned a cultural heritage and tourist destination, after finishing on the bottom in the previous challenge. In the episode, the hosts note the significance of filming on the site of a plantation, and they ask Sombright, who is from St. Louis, Missouri, how he feels to be in that place, and how it might influence his food. Visibly upset, Sombright suggests the site is important and stirs his emotion, but that he is just going to try to cook his food. He ultimately ends up losing, apparently unable to take the pain and the hurt of having to cook on a plantation – the affects driven home to the audience through the script, music, and filmic visualization – and turn it into an authentic representation of himself and his roots. Similarly, the cultural workers contracted out by Treme are being asked to transform their painful experiences from pre- and post-Katrina racism, classism, and dispossession into an ‘authentic’ performance for the TV screen that will resonate with audiences. But they are being asked to do so not just to create good TV, but like Top Chef, there is also a kind of promise here that doing so will enable these cultural workers to network themselves into more successful careers, i.e. that they will be better suited to entrepreneurialize their affective labor. Although Treme’s hiring practices are no doubt laudable efforts that stand in stark contrast to many media productions, including many in New Orleans, there is also an undoubtedly neoliberal element here where culture – whether in the form of everyday practices of extras, musicians, or in other kinds of creative work – is being harnessed as a resource (YÚDICE, 2003) for profit. In this case, Black culture is being served up as an object of consumption for TV viewers through a TV series, but it is the more practical aspects of production that make possible the instrumentalization and entrepreneurialization of those cultural practices. Though the individuals who get the work profit to some degree from this work through a pay check at the end of the day, it is largely the industry that capitalizes on this labor – i.e. HBO has much more to gain from its representations of authenticity than those authentic individuals. Yet, the implications of Treme’s entrepreneurialization of cultural labor is also more complicated, and perhaps ambivalent, than this critique of neoliberal and cultural expediency allows. As SAKAKEENY and BIRCH (2013) note in their study of the cultural practices of Black New Orleanian musicians, music has never existed outside of economy. Further, when ‘protectors’ of the cultural traditions of musicians lament the commodification of music, what that often ends up meaning is that musicians are then expected to play for free or for very little pay, just because they ‘love it’ or because they are honoring their tradition. Discussing the critiques of musicians who get hired out to perform second-lines on a daily basis for mostly White tourists at the Harrah’s Casino, SAKAKEENY suggests that for many of the musicians who play these gigs, this is one of the best paying jobs in town, with security in terms of pay and benefits. A similar rationale can be seen at work for Treme, where the creative labor performed by musicians for the TV camera can be turned into more steady gigs and better pay, even if it means the commodification of ‘authentic’ cultural practices

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for mostly White HBO audiences. And this potentiality goes further than the performances for Treme, as Karen Livers suggests that Treme’s efforts had spillover effects, such that: The show has helped up the game financially … we pay extras better than any other venue around … Second-liners and brass bands weren’t making as much as they make now because we set a standard … because now you are hiring a group that has been on Treme. (personal communication, March 15, 2011)

Appearing on Treme thus helped cultural workers network into other potential avenues of employment by featuring their talents. But it also provided them with a steady pay check that allowed them to say no to other gigs they might otherwise be forced to take to survive (RAWLS 2011). As Lolis Eric Elie noted, however, the salary provided to most of the cast that Karen Livers connected with the series was not a sustainable one, which made it different from the kinds of gigs, like Harrah’s, that Sakakeeny is referring to, particularly as Treme only lasted a few years and was never meant to be a permanent member of the neighborhood. Elie suggested, “We want to strengthen the culture by hiring people to do what they do, [but] ain’t no Mardi Gras Indians getting rich by being extras on this show, but they’re getting a couple of extra dollars and they are getting some praise” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Elie followed up this with the argument that: What is incredible about the community, particularly the Mardi Gras Indians is that they don’t rely on no White folks or no middle class Black folks to … get what they’re doing, and because they have been so oblivious to the outside taste, the culture remains strong and the outside has come to them. (personal communication, March 15, 2011, emphasis mine)

Treme therefore did not merely provide financial means to stimulate these cultural practices, but rather, it played a broader role in connecting the vernacular cultural practices of Baby Dolls, Mardi Gras Indians, local brass bands, and so forth to a Hollywood production that, in turn, connected these practices up with a wider and more dispersed network of actors and institutions. In so doing, Treme acts as a technology for entrepreneurializing vernacular cultural practices already embedded in neighborhood culture, networking them to structures of power, and harnessing the neighborhood as an economic and social space of potential value not just for Treme, but for the broader creative industries and cultural economic strategies bound up with post-Katrina rebuilding. THE MEDIA NEIGHBORHOOD Despite its relatively short run, Treme was a constitutive part of how filming in New Orleans presents itself as a constant potential, and it served, especially, to incite the potentiality for that filmmaking to be a resource available to a much wider swath of neighborhoods than had been the case prior to its inception. There was always the potential for a chance meeting with crew members, whether they were out filming or when they were learning about the culture at the local bar. In one of the audio

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commentaries, for example, it is noted that the scene is being filmed at the Serpent Bar, which is in the Warehouse District, and they note that it is where the crew mostly lived and the bar they typically hung out in after shooting (PELACANOS and ALEXANDER 2012). It is unclear if their interactions from going to the bar led them to identify it as a site, but this comment drives home the significance of the more practical ways in which location based shooting helps to inscribe the text on the landscape and vice versa. More so, however, it demonstrates the ways in which this inscription helps to influence neighborhood habitus by encouraging particular dispositions that make it possible to get yourself or your location onto the show. As folks go about their everyday life, for example, they might run into Virginia McCollum while she is scouting potential locations, and, as she noted, “I’m always listening, oh I always listen … we are there, we are in the places where life happens in the city, not just in the boardrooms, or the fancy restaurants, but the corner store” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). On the one hand, this rings out as a kind of warning – a kind of acknowledgement of how the media industry works to govern space through surveillance, disciplining bodies and minds (Foucault 1995) through the warning, “be careful what you say, it might end up on TV!” But it is meant as more of an invitation, more as a kind of governing through freedom, an invitation that is not about “you must,” but “you may” (ARVIDSSON 2005; ROSE 1999). It is an invitation to residents to tell their stories, to become involved, to take part. And people do – McCollum recounts: They’ll shout storylines to us on the street … there used to be a vanful of people who walked into a very close neighborhood who all hopped out and looked around looking rather foolish … but now, it’s like, “you’re Treme.” And people … start talking to us or telling us they want to be in it, be an extra … we try to get folks who live in the neighborhood to be involved. (personal communication, March 15, 2011)

This fundamentally changes everyday life in the neighborhood, where media becomes imbricated in the daily practices of everyday citizens, reconstituting the neighborhood as a media neighborhood and citizens as always already potentially engaged in mediation. In so doing, Treme might be understood as capturing the living labor (HARDT and NEGRI 2000; MARX 1973; READ 2003) and the affects of everyday life in the neighborhood, constituting what I refer to as the media neighborhood. As READ (2003) notes, living labor is “activity, as creative power, as the pure power to create the new … This labor produces not only things – objects – it is also productive of needs and sociality … It is this power that capital must utilize” (p. 80). Though capital depends upon living labor, they also exist in an agonistic relationship, where living labor always threatens to disrupt and overflow beyond that which capital can harness and measure to produce value. Treme’s spatial practices of production offer techniques for capturing this living labor embodied in neighborhood space – it instrumentalizes and harnesses living labor by entrepreneurializing it, composing bodies and everyday practices in the neighborhood as mediatizable, enabling creative potential to be transformed into value for the media industry. Again, it is not a spectacular creativity that is being captured, but the daily, embodied practices of

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neighborhoods and the raced bodies most affected by Katrina. In this context, Treme works biopolitically to extract value from the living labor of social life itself (HARDT and NEGRI 2000; LAZZARATO 1996; TERRANOVA 2004), whether it be blowing a trumpet or standing on a street corner. The implications to producing the media neighborhood extend beyond just the Treme production. For, as Virginia McCollum indicated, Treme had an investment in cultivating a partnership with neighborhoods such that it would lead to a lasting and sustainable film industry in the city. Thus, though she suggested that there was not much of a possibility for changing the “culture of production,” Treme could potentially impact how neighborhoods expect film producers to interact with them and vice versa (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Perhaps more so than any individual practices of production, then, Treme affected the city and the neighborhood most significantly in its embedding media in the quotidian practices and daily spaces of New Orleans’ more marginal, Black neighborhoods. The media neighborhood is a space that can be valorized by the city as garnering the entrepreneurial capacities that might enable the (precarious) right of every neighborhood and every citizen to return. Media production becomes a mechanism for eliciting neighborhood engagement, bonds, ties, and identities. This works especially in the ways in which Treme, in particular, focused on an equitable practice of highlighting every neighborhood and the diverse and marginalized practices of their residents. The media neighborhood is offered up in contrast to the disembodied creative city – as a space not of flagship projects or simulations of creative clusters, but, rather, as an embodied and practiced space of indigenous creativity that serves as the creative life-force for producing creative industries. Yet, the media neighborhood must also pass through the lens of an economic rationality, where cultural practices are assumed to be worthwhile because they can produce a return on investment (YÚDICE 2003). A key question that emerges from this logic is what happens to those forms of culture that do not seem to create a return on investment? In terms of Treme specifically, the series showcased forms of cultural practice that had hitherto been left out of this calculating logic, including some potentially ‘uncreative’ and more vernacular cultural practices (like sitting on a bar stool, for example). But it has also been criticized for the ways in which it tended to feature more culturally acceptable and respectable forms of Black cultural practice, such as the brass band tradition, while only paying lip service to those more associated with the Black underclass and a ghetto-aesthetic, such as Bounce music, New Orleans’ unique contribution to hip hop. Although Bounce played a significant role in the narrative of Season 2, and a number of Bounce musicians like Big Freedia and Katey Red were featured that season, perhaps to make up for their glaring absence in Season 1, these representations have been criticized for the ways in which they privilege the White characters’ consumption of the music (BUCHER 2015). What’s more, Bounce rarely made an appearance after this season, as if it was just a blip on the New Orleans music scene and not a constitutive component of the broader themes of the city’s cultural creativity and its potential for revival so central to the series. Ultimately, the show very much depends upon the capacity for

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the cultural practices it features to produce an economic value in terms of the production of audiences and brand value for HBO, themes I explore further in Chapter 5. What I want to emphasize here, however, is that Treme subsumes, or at least extracts, value from the local, cultural practices it features on the show, and while Treme might lead to the incorporation of some new cultural practices and spaces in the city, like Tremé, as places of value and cultural export, it is important to ask to what extent the series further excludes and displaces the poor who fail to entrepreneurialize or who refuse mediatization? Treme’s transformation of neighborhood space ultimately presents a particularly complicated case because the series navigates between the more strategic approach to urban planning that draws on the creative industries, where media imposes a kind of top-down commodifying and homogenizing branded space, and the more vernacular and tactical spatial practice that is often associated with resistance. That is, following DE CERTEAU (1984), there is an extent to which the spatialized production practices of Treme work at the level of the street, where the production becomes a kind of pedestrian, practicing “multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised” (DE CERTEAU 1984, 96). It does not follow the taxonomy of the film industry’s production practices that had been cultivated by the various cultural policies and urban planning efforts leading up to Katrina (discussed in the previous chapter). Treme’s “media neighborhood” instead navigates between a propagation of a creative cities approach that favors film, television, music production, and digital media as creative industries, while also highlighting, making possible, and bringing into visibility and policy making discourse the more vernacular forms of everyday and banal creativity practiced at the level of the pedestrian, which are often excluded from the creative cities literature. These include practices such as standing on a street corner, Mardi Gras Indian sewing and handiwork, as well as forms of cultural creativity that receive the brunt of police and governmental repression in New Orleans because of their association with deprivileged Blackness. Treme therefore demonstrates the complicated ways in which the constitution of television production as a form of post-Katrina urban renewal and rebuilding is contradictorily both a component of and potential mechanism for resistance to the kind of neoliberalizing, Whitewashing, and gentrifying forms of urban regeneration decried by critics of post-Katrina urban planning. I turn to fleshing out these questions further in the following chapter, where I look specifically at the touristic practices to which local hires and viewers alike are invited to participate.

CHAPTER 4 From the Screen to the Street: Treme Tourism From its inception, television has been bound up with discourses of tourism, as it was initially marketed as providing a “window to the world,” facilitating armchair tourists who were invited to become mobile through viewing the world in the privacy of their own home (SPIGEL 1992; WILLIAMS 1974). Acknowledging this link and likening broadcast television to the guided bus tour, David Simon suggests that for Treme, his aim is instead toward a street-level, “real kind of tourism,” where you can go to the level of the street and the bar and experience the real life of a particular place. In so doing, he argues television, and Treme in particular, can be a “healthy form of tourism,” where viewers can be immersed in a culture that they would not have experienced otherwise and engage with it at the in-depth level of the pedestrian (SIMON et al., 2010). This kind of street-level tourism is made even more possible by the series’ practices of on-location production, discussed in the previous chapter. Existing scholarship on Treme generally agrees the series is a tourist text, with varying evaluations on whether it reproduces a damaging tourist gaze of New Orleans in and through the viewer, i.e. one that props up a Whitewashed and spectacular, commodifiable view of the city. A major concern in the literature on Treme is that its form of spectatorship is a commodification of culture that evacuates historical contexts and political struggle. RATHKE (2012, 262) for example, suggests the series represents “an in-and-out adventure” that refuses “to deal with the issues and dynamics of power.” THOMAS (2012) also argues that Treme is best understood as a tourist text, as it follows a long history of touristic practices interested in Black culture and heritage tourism that empty out cultural practices from their history and, in this case contemporary situatedness in, political struggle. Yet, analyses of Treme’s relationship to tourism almost exclusively focus on how the text interpellates the viewer as an armchair tourist. Few go beyond the series’ representations in considering Treme’s relationship to practices of tourism, but the series does not just invite the viewer to tour through their screens. Viewers are also enjoined to take physical tours as well. This coincides with the city government’s post-Katrina aims to stimulate the creative economy in the rebuilding process, discussed in Chapter 2, with the hopes of drawing in tourists invested in precisely the kinds of creative and ‘authentic’ culture featured on Treme. Understanding Treme’s relationship to tourism, then, requires going beyond the text to analyze its co-articulations to a range of other entities, institutions, and individuals who are implicated in touristic practices in the city. Although many critics fear the city’s rebuilding efforts are aimed primarily at attracting tourists back to the well-worn tourist areas (e.g. GOTHAM 2007; SOUTHER 2013; THOMAS 2014), Treme instead provokes a kind of pedestrian-oriented tourism

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that invites viewers not to the well-known tourist sites in New Orleans like the French Quarter or the Garden District. Rather, they are invited to sites that have hitherto been excluded from tourist promotions and in previous Hollywood representations of the city. This aligns with the post-Katrina rebuilding rationality discussed in previous chapters, contributing to the urban renewal and rebuilding of New Orleans both economically and culturally, as it aligns with aims to rectify previous forms of exclusion of these spaces by entrepreneurializing marginalized neighborhoods as sites of cultural and television tourism. On the one hand, this offers some opportunities for those historically excluded from New Orleans’ cultural economy and tourism to have access to resources. On the other hand, however, televisual tourism is also bound up with practices of gentrification that further displaces and excludes the most marginal from this kind of access. Although the Tremé neighborhood was no stranger to struggles and tensions over gentrification (and the cultural antagonisms of urban renewal policies that had hitherto razed whole blocks of the neighborhood) before Katrina, gentrification has intensified since the storm and following the airing of the series. For example, the African American / Black population in Tremé dropped from 92.4 % in 2000 to 63.7 % between 2012–2016, and there was also a significant drop in low-income households, with 44.3 % living on less than $10,000 per year in 2000 and only 20.3 % in that category in the 2012– 2016 period (Treme’/Lafitte 2018). While Treme is clearly not the only factor in this gentrifying trend, the series no doubt plays a role in promoting the neighborhood as a hip, cool, and ‘authentic’ space and, as a result, tourism to the neighborhood has increased dramatically. Indeed, film and television are crucial ways in which post-industrial cities aim to rebrand spaces and attract tourists. These strategies play a role in reshaping urban spatiality and culture, often in tandem with broader city aims toward urban renewal and economic restructuring. As GLADSTONE and PRÉAU (2008, 152) argue, in New Orleans, “the growth of tourism contributes directly to gentrification through the housing choices of those who work in tourism-related industries” as well as by increasing land values and rent gaps, both of which are key precursors to gentrification. As a result, Treme tourism strips the neighborhood of its assets (WOODS 2009) and puts them into the hands of real estate developers and investors at the expense of generations of residents and renters who built the neighborhood’s culture and community that has become so attractive to both Hollywood and gentrifiers alike. Thus, I contend that the rebuilding and renewal strategy offered by Treme tourism is a form of enacting neoliberal governmentality, wherein power is utilized as a productive form of entrepreneurialization of tourists and residents alike within the confines of market forces that empower those forms of culture that can be marketized as ‘authentic,’ while further marginalizing, displacing, and discarding those forms of culture that cannot. Toward these aims, this chapter suggests Treme works as a cultural governing technology (BENNETT 1998) that materially puts a post-Katrina rationality of rebuilding, discussed in Chapter 2, into practice through soliciting practices of tourism. I figure Treme tourism as a practice for directing “the conduct of individuals toward an array of different ends,” where it solicits viewers to not just interpret its

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text, but it also enlists their participation as viewer-tourists (FOUCAULT 2003). In so doing, Treme tourism produces particular kinds of touristic behaviors that align with contemporary, neoliberal governing rationalities. I first look at histories of tourism in New Orleans and Treme, as well as situate debates and struggles over gentrification within these histories. I then turn to consider how Treme’s production practices intervened into these histories by constituting new sites and spatialities associated with television production. TOURISM IN NEW ORLEANS & TREMÉ BEFORE KATRINA New Orleans is famously a city of neighborhoods (PIAZZA 2005), and the city’s marketing of its neighborhoods as distinctively cultural has played a special role in the imagined community (ANDERSON 1991) of what it means to be an American. New Orleans is imagined as an exotic, romantic, and mysterious city. It is understood as quirky, ethnic, raced, but also politically backward and corrupt. New Orleans as this kind of Other – both romanticized and made abject – has thus played a central role in constructing a foil for definitions of American citizenship. It is a space where outsiders go to play, a space where “les bon temps roule” as they say, a space that has never been able to be fully Americanized. As a result, New Orleans is often referred to the northernmost part of the Caribbean, as it appears to have more in common with Caribbean culture than with American culture. The ways in which the city imagines itself are products of a long history within the city to produce itself as an ‘authentic’ city as well as a site of tourism (GOTHAM 2007). However, its claims to what makes it ‘authentic’ and the images on which it draws, fluctuate due to historical contingencies. Throughout this history, however, a complex relationship between race, culture, and space has persisted in a struggle over how the city would be defined, lived, and practiced. New Orleans thus has a complicated cultural and spatial history. The history of slavery had a fundamental impact on the city’s racialized geography. As CAMPANELLA (2006) notes, New Orleans displays the “paradoxical yet typical” urban geography of other southern cities. It is paradoxical in that, in contrast to northern cities, southern cities tended to be more integrated and mixed through the Jim Crow era and only became highly segregated in the period following Brown vs. Board of Ed and the Civil Rights movement. Thus, the jarring sense of hypersegregation that was so evident after Katrina is actually a rather recent phenomenon. New Orleans was actually even more integrated than other similar southern cities (DYSON 2006; GOTHAM 2007; SUBLETTE 2008). This is in part due to the tendency toward the backyard pattern of building, where slave quarters were built behind slave owner’s quarters in the city (DYSON 2006). This practice produced an urban pattern of blocks within superblocks that tended to have Black blocks that were enclosed by larger blocks populated by Whites producing a “salt and pepper” or a “checkerboard pattern” of racial segregation where Black neighborhoods were interspersed with White neighborhoods (SPAIN 1979). These patterns were also inextricably bound up with the city’s unique geography and climate. Because the city was built around

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a swamp and enclosed by the natural barriers of the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchatrain, there was limited inhabitable space to build on. Moreover, the city’s dense, urban population in addition to the large number of free people of color within the city’s boundaries and the political fragmentation within the city made policing the boundaries of race more difficult (GOTHAM 2007). All these factors have contributed to New Orleans as historically marked by a much greater degree of racial mixing than other cities in the U.S. It was not until the 1950s and the so-called White flight from the city to the suburbs after the Civil Rights movement that more northern patterns of racial segregation became evident in New Orleans. OGLETREE and TROUT (2006) suggest that it is during this period that New Orleans emerged as two faces. The first face is that which was made visible to the promotion of the city as a site of tourism and consumption. The second face was rendered invisible and existed as the underbelly of inequality and structures of exploitation that were produced to service the first face. These two faces went beyond practices of representation, however, and were inextricably bound to the material structure of the city’s geography. New Orleans became divided into areas known as “uptown” and “back-a-town,” corresponding roughly to these two faces. Uptown – the Garden District, Uptown, the French Quarter – are those areas above sea level, the “silver by the river” (BUICK 2011), protected by the geography’s natural levees, and are primarily inhabited by middle and upper class Whites. The city’s “back-a-town” are those neighborhoods below sea level, protected by the Army Corps of Engineers’ defunct levee system, and are primarily inhabited by the city’s people of color and the poor. Katrina is only the most recent “unnatural disaster” that made evident the relations between race and space in New Orleans and the ways in which these are bound up with possibilities for agency and, indeed, survival. The Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 created a disaster on par with Katrina, as did Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which affected many of the same neighborhoods as Katrina. 1 Despite these racialized spatializations and their relationships to exploitation and inequality, however, or perhaps precisely because of them, the city’s marginalized, back-a-town neighborhoods have distinct and vibrant cultural practices. People claim roots to their neighborhoods over many generations, bound up with a strong connection to and memory of their histories as they are bound up with a history of place (POWELL 2006). Black cultural practices in these spaces, in particular, tend to signify and help to materially construct a sense of community and connection while at the same time playing out struggles over public space and the right for Black bodies to inhabit that space. This struggle is particularly evident in the practices of second-lining, jazz funerals and Mardi Gras Indians (BARRIOS 2010; LIPSITZ 2001; REGIS 1999, 2001). It is these practices, discussed in the previous

1

In the former, elite businessmen and city officials decided to bomb the levees in order to prevent the Central Business District and French Quarter from flooding. Thus, when rumors circulated that the levees were bombed during Katrina, residents had good reason for thinking that might be the case.

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chapter, that Treme seeks to revitalize and entrepreneurialize through its practices of on-location production and local hiring. However, Black culture has also played a central role in constructing New Orleans’ image and promotion of itself, especially to tourists, whether in the form of abject or romantic Otherness. Pointing to New Orleans’ 1884 World Industrial Cotton Exposition and the city’s bid for the 1930 Panama Exhibition, GOTHAM (2007) argues that in each of these examples, New Orleans’ culture was served up as an object of consumption in ways that problematized Black cultural practice as barbaric and un-American. This image of the city was further buttressed by post-war White flight from the city to the suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s. White disinvestment from the city spurred officials to new forms of urban renewal and place marketing as a means of attracting business investment and tourists to revitalize the economy. It was during this era in the 1950s that the “holy trinity” of food, music, and architecture became central to the city’s representation of its authentic cultural roots. Black culture, and jazz music in particular, became central to this representation and the marketing of the city. Advertising for the city and its cultural events, for example, would utilize the second-line as a key iconic symbol, and second-lines were frequently staged in the French Quarter for tourists and conventioneers (REGIS 1999). However, as THOMAS (2009) notes, the marketing of Black culture was filtered through competing discourses of desire and disaster. She suggests, On the one hand, tourists were encouraged to think that they were experiencing and celebrating Black culture by eating Creole cuisine, listening to jazz music, and sharing in anecdotes of quadroon balls and secret voodoo rites. On the other hand, tourists were directed to adopt the White supremacist memory of slavery and Black culture that views the Old South with a sense of loss and nostalgia. In effect, the city’s promotion of Black cultural consumption produced a “desire” for “Blackness” at the same time that this “Blackness” was used to signify the “disaster” of Black emancipation and desegregation…tourists were signaled to consume or gaze upon Black culture, without the uncomfortable acknowledgment of the history of slavery or its persistent legacy of racial and class inequality … [and] left the actual Black New Orleans invisible. (THOMAS 2009, 750–751)

Black culture (especially voodoo, music, and food) was served up as an object of exotic and spectacular consumption. It was there to be consumed by Whites desiring a walk on the ‘wild side.’ Yet, this discourse of desire for Black culture was complemented by a discourse of disaster that nostalgized the pre-Civil Rights era, where Civil Rights and struggles for equality that denigrate the romantic and nostalgic past were posed as disasterous. The discourse of disaster thereby erased the histories of struggle out of which Black cultural practices, like the second-line, were born (REGIS 1999). Thus, tourist discourse within New Orleans serves to offer up Black culture and multiculturalism as objects of consumption, yet, at the same time, it excludes and demonizes the spaces, places, and bodies out of which Black cultural practice is born. Tourism within New Orleans thus elides the history of racial struggle in the city, constructing desire for Black culture in a way that contains the threat of the politicization of Blackness and the history of racial and class inequality. This has been carried out spatially in terms of practices of tourism, where Black culture

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is on display in tourist areas, but tourists are discouraged from going to Black spaces. These concerns especially come to bear on the relationship between New Orleans and the jazz music industry. New Orleans has long branded itself as the ‘birthplace of jazz,’ which is a central component of Treme, where this branding slogan is aimed to attract global tourism as well as investment in the city’s music industry. The city has tried to cash in on this history and the industry through various urban renewal projects like building Jazzland (an amusement park) and Louis Armstrong Park, as well as through cultural events like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Yet, New Orleans’ branding around jazz culture and the music industry also goes beyond an economic dynamic and speaks to the social aims of the city as well. Its jazz branding was used to rhetorically construct the city as multicultural and free from racial strife during the Civil Rights era when the city was undergoing a great deal of racial struggle and antagonism (SOUTHER 2013). The centrality of jazz to New Orleans’ culture is heralded as “a visible signifier of the possibilities of multiracial democracy” where “jazz history and culture affirm the nation’s success in overcoming its racist legacies” (PORTER 2009, 596). 2 However, the use of jazz as a multicultural branding and tourism promotion belies the city’s duplicitous treatment of the Black working class who serve as the producers of that culture for outside consumption. As PORTER (2009, 601) notes, The tourist economy that supports a significant amount of jazz performance in the city is both product of and engine of the neoliberal restructuring that has taken such a huge toll on Black working-class New Orleans … the consumption of, and discourse about, this music produces a sense of connection across racial lines that obscures such social dynamics and produces an overly optimistic view of the state of the racial order.

Yet, SOUTHER (2003, 40) argues, the touristification of jazz also helped to fuel a “renewed grassroots interest” as well as “creating a sustainable cultural resource that enriched the community,” all the while also furthering tourist development at the same time. This suggests that the utilization of jazz for tourism promotion and urban development cannot be simply explained as a corrosion of local culture, but, rather, it speaks to a more complicated struggle over cultural resources, memories, and histories. The Tremé neighborhood in many ways symbolizes and has been the site in which these struggles between race, space, and culture have materially played out. Congo Square, believed to have been located in Tremé, is a particularly significant space in New Orleans that demonstrates the complex relationships between race, space, culture, and communication in New Orleans. During Spanish colonial rule, slaves were permitted to gather publicly as well as to play the drum. It was during

2

For further discussion on the complex racial antagonisms in the jazz music industry and jazz performance, especially as it relates to discourses of multiculturalism and resistance to assimilation, see LIPSITZ 2004; MURRAY 1976; O’MEALLY et al. 2004; SAKAKEENY and BIRCH 2013.

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this era that Congo Square was erected. 3 Congo Square was a space where slaves gathered to trade and became a space of religious practice and drumming, providing a space to communicate and to express African cultural traditions in such a way that would have been dubious to the White onlookers (VENTURA 1985). During British colonization, slaves were prohibited from gathering at Congo Square, and the site was turned into a slave auction site, an ironic and painful turn of events that is all too characteristic of how the city has historically dealt with the neighborhood. In more recent years, Congo Square has been resurrected as a memorial and heritage tourist site in what is believed to be its approximate location in Armstrong Park (SUBLETTE 2008). Following Hurricane Katrina, there has been much debate over tourism within the city and in the Tremé neighborhood. SOUTHER (2007), for example, argues that the city continues to privilege the tourist economy as the means for recovery, and it is therefore the traditional tourist spaces, especially the French Quarter, that garner the most attention in the rebuilding process. Additionally, GOTHAM (2007) notes the city is moving towards greater corporate control over tourism as well as increased mechanisms of surveillance in tourist areas and greater emphasis on theming. Discussing the Katrina “disaster tours,” in particular, HARTNELL (2009) suggests that the possibilities that might have been opened up by Katrina are foreclosed by tours that privilege pre-Katrina themes. She argues, “Like the commodification of Black New Orleans that arguably formed the centerpiece of the city’s tourist industry before the storm, Katrina tourism can be read as a process of forgetting” (HARTNELL 2009, 724). The tours foreground environmental destruction decoupled from its links to social justice issues, particularly race and class hierarchies, in ways that “deemphasize the role of race politics in the impact and aftermath of the hurricane and depoliticize the environment in order to make it a ‘safe’ space for disaster tourists” ( HARTNELL 2009, 725). This acceleration of staging New Orleans as a space of tourism following Katrina has perhaps led to the city becoming further entrenched in what GOTHAM (2007) refers to as a touristic culture. GOTHAM suggests that the 1984 World’s Exposition held in New Orleans contributed to an intensification in the marketing of the city and transformed it from a tourist culture to a touristic culture – where image and reality implode such that reality is structured by the image. Thus, whereas local culture created a means through which to promote the city as a site of tourism in the previous era, it is now the necessity for creating tourism that drives investment in and production of local culture. Local culture itself becomes a product of the tourist industry rather than providing the products for the industry. He suggests that Katrina tourism has only accelerated this touristification. Yet, Hurricane Katrina also threatened to disrupt the traditional discourses on which New Orleans tourism is built, as the images plastered on newspapers and on

3

Though historians argue that the space was used by slaves before the Spanish colonial period, it is likely that it was not called Congo Square until that time because it was during the Spanish period that large numbers of Kongo slaves inhabited the city (SUBLETTE 2008).

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TV and computer screens revealed the parts of New Orleans that the tourism industry had for so long sought to contain. Debates over post-Katrina tourism therefore offer up a complex set of antagonisms regarding race, space, and culture in the city. On the one hand, critics fear any loss of tourism will further devastate the economy, which is highly dependent upon the industry. But, given the problematic ways in which tourism has helped to produce the very racial and class inequalities that made Katrina’s devastation possible, there is also a fear that the kinds of tourism that have emerged after the storm might only exacerbate these inequities. Drawing on the conception that Hurricane Katrina produced a disconnect between the city’s commodified brand image before the storm and the devastating images of racial and class injustice, GOTHAM (2007) proposes that perhaps post-Katrina New Orleans will lead to the implosion of tourism from above and may even spur what he terms a “tourism from below.” In particular, he suggests post-Katrina tourism offers up the possibility for new contestations over what constitutes authentic culture. This is due in part to the fact that culture has become a key strategy for both organizing and drawing investment for rebuilding projects, leading to renewed struggles and debates over which and whose culture is worthy of investment. These struggles over what constitutes authentic culture and the role that tourism might play in either promoting or denigrating those cultures have come to the forefront in particular in debates over city planning. As detailed in Chapter 2, the promotion of the film, television, and digital media industries is envisioned as serving an essential function of city branding and tourist promotion, in which historic neighborhoods and cultural practices are aggressively marketed to film and TV production industries, which, in turn, are believed to be capable of helping to market the city to potential tourists and investors. Because Treme remains so heavily invested in representing neighborhoods off-the-beaten tourist path, as discussed in the previous chapter, it has a direct stake in helping to promote these neighborhoods to potential tourists. And, indeed, there has been much interest in existing scholarship on Treme regarding its relationship to tourism. Specifically, whether the series represents a touristic text that reproduces the tourist gaze of New Orleans in and through the viewer has been a key subject of debate about Treme. THOMAS (2012, 214) argues that Treme is best understood as a tourist text, “cultivating a particular type of tourist and tourist gaze among its viewers.” Of particular significance in debates over Treme and whether or not it constitutes a tourist text is its relationship to discourses of authenticity. Producers of Treme stress that the series is committed to communicating a sense of New Orleans that is ‘authentic’ rather than a spectacular version of the city seen in most mediated representations. But critics suggest that Treme’s adherence to constructing an ‘authentic’ New Orleans promises viewers a kind of voyeuristic gaze into what MACCANNELL (1992), drawing on GOFFMAN, refers as the “backstage.” In other words, the series promises viewers a kind of insider’s tour, where they will be able to experience the city “as it really is.” REED, JR. (2011), for example, argues Simon’s “vision has been captured and colonized by the touristic discourse of ‘real’ authenticity.” The claim to “real authenticity” he suggests both buys into and helps to reproduce the touristic mystification of New Orleans. As THOMAS (2012, 220)

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contends, this has potentially exclusionary effects, as only those forms of culture deemed ‘authentic’ through this touristic gaze are deemed worthy of saving in the wake of Katrina. She argues, “by seeking to extol and preserve only particular types of structures, histories, and cultural productions, the HBO series, and the walking tours inspired by it, run the risk of rebuilding a tourist Tremé at the expense of the real one.” FUQUA (2012, 7) argues, however, that Treme cannot be understood as an entirely touristic text that reproduces the tourist gaze, as it provides a complicated understanding of authenticity. She suggests the series produces a complex understanding of “what it means to feel, televisually speaking, at home.” As a result, she argues Treme does not necessarily produce the “come-here outsider” tourist gaze because it complicates the intertwining relationships of being from New Orleans and coming to New Orleans by destabilizing categories of belonging. This, then, troubles the series’ adherence to a discourse of authenticity, and, consequently, the production of the viewer as a tourist subject invested in seeking out the ‘real New Orleans,’ as it threatens to dispel the myth that there is in fact a ‘real New Orleans’ or ‘real New Orleanians.’ Although Thomas does discuss walking tours, the analyses detailed above in large part focus on how Treme’s text interpellates the viewer as an armchair tourist. Few therefore go beyond the series’ representations in considering the ways in which Treme does not just invite the viewer to tour through their screens. But viewers are also invited to take literal tours as well. New Orleans for Treme tourists becomes a space not of representation but for doing (LASH and LURY 2007) – for actualizing experiences in which viewers and residents take part in the production of urban spatiality. Taking into account these material practices of tourism produces a different set of questions and ways of analyzing Treme tourism, including considering how the series participates in not only providing ideological arguments about how to rebuild the city but in rebuilding the city itself. That is, because Treme tourism is not only a form of armchair tourism, but is practiced on site as well, the tourism produced by the series has a direct and material stake not only in debates about how to rebuild the city, but it also has a stake in the actual rebuilding process as well. Understanding the implication of Treme in practices of tourism, then, requires scholarship to go beyond the text to analyze its co-articulations to a range of other entities, institutions, and individuals who are implicated in touristic practices in the city. In the following section, I consider how Treme tourism works as a spatial practice by soliciting participation in particular habits, ethics, and behaviors as a means of orchestrating conduct so as to respond to the harms of Katrina. I ask: how does Treme engage viewers and residents alike in practical exercises in ways that direct tourist conduct in particular ways in post-Katrina New Orleans? And, how does this direction of conduct participate in the practice of governing and rebuilding the postKatrina city and its citizens? That is, how does it respond to and provide governing solutions to the problematizations of race, class, and space made manifest during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

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TREME TOURISM

Figure 5(Photo by author) A Segway tour rides through the streets of the Tremé neighborhood.

When I was embarking on my own walking tour of Tremé in 2011, stopping specifically at sites I had seen on Treme, I encountered a tour group on Segways (mobile electric scooters). The site of a group of tourists aboard these high-tech personal transport devices was strange and seemed particularly out of place on Tremé’s relatively empty and narrow pedestrian-oriented streets; yet, it also demonstrated the kinds of incongruities that are beginning to emerge in the neighborhood. Following Treme’s premiere in April 2010, a number of tours inspired by the series emerged. These tours expanded tourism beyond the beaten path to neighborhoods that had previously been marginalized in the city’s tourism literature and promotions. Treme tours are not necessarily unique in this context, as a number of post-Katrina tours take citizens (usually on a bus, sometimes on a bike) through what have been, historically, non-tourist neighborhoods. Indeed, when I visited New Orleans again in 2014 with a class I was teaching, the students and I toured the Lower Ninth Ward on bicycles to see what remained of the neighborhood I had seen under water on TV (as well as to check out Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation’s architecturally infamous houses, see Make It Right n.d.). What distinguishes Treme tours, however, is their lack of focus on disaster and, instead, their focus on culture.

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These cultural aims are particularly evident in the Tremé walking tours that emerged after Treme. Whereas some tours focus more on guiding viewer-tourists to significant historical sites – such as the Preservation Resource Center’s (in coordination with the New Orleans African American Museum, located in Tremé) “Faubourg Tremé Walking Tour” (WADDINGTON 2011) – others, like The Guardian’s published self-guided walking tour, focus particularly on sites that are featured on the show, such as the restaurant Lil Dizzy’s (SHOARD 2010). Historic New Orleans Tours, which promotes itself on its website as “the place to go for authenticity rather than sensationalism” (Historic New Orleans Tours n.d.) offers a mix in its walking tour of Tremé, with stops to sites featured on Treme as well as other historic sites that go beyond the series (Treme Tour n.d.). Each of these walking tours demonstrate how Treme has helped to expand tourism to the Tremé neighborhood, as each references the show as a significant reason to visit the area. Significantly, each focuses on foregrounding African American culture and history, such as the Skull and Bones Gang, the Backstreet Cultural Museum, St. Augustine Church, and the tomb of the unknown slave – all spaces and practices in the neighborhood deeply associated with Blackness. Like the claims from Treme’s producers of the series itself, these tours claim to trouble existing tourist discourses of the city by expanding into this historically rich Black neighborhood. In so doing, each tour is invested in a discourse of authenticity that enjoins viewers to participate in the tour to trouble their own understandings and expectations of the city that they might get from other (more spectacular) tours or on other TV shows. Tourists are thus asked to do more than seek mere pleasure and entertainment. Rather, they are asked to cultivate new knowledge and experience in Black New Orleans through tourism. When I visited New Orleans with a class of Western Washington University students in 2014, I organized a tour for our class in Tremé. I was directed to a particular tour outfit through Treme’s storyeditor, Lolis Eric Elie. He suggested that this tour would give a real local’s view. We took a walking tour of the lower part of the neighborhood, not going past the Claiborne Ave. I–10 overpass into the less well-trodden path. We visited St. Augustine’s Church and the Backstreet Cultural Museum, as well as traversed some of the houses that are featured in the series, such as the house that serves as the filming site for character Davis McAlary’s home. I hoped the tour would be more than a feature of the neighborhood’s history and culture and that it would be infused with some of the politics of the show. I hoped, for example, that the tour would discuss razing the public housing projects; struggles over noise ordinances, policing, and second-lining; and gentrification. But there was little in terms of politicization in the tour we took. Still, the tour was fraught with a discourse of authenticity, where at the end our guide promised us that we were now more “Creolized,” since we had taken in a dose of the “real New Orleans.” Following the airing of the series, Tremé and the walking tours described above, like the ones I took, have also become central features of the city’s tourism promotion. For example, in the 2011–2012 Official New Orleans Visitor Guide, Tremé is listed as fifth in “Neighborhoods and Streets of Interest,” where it references the filming of the series as a point of interest (New Orleans Convention and

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Visitor’s Bureau 2012). Additionally, the two biggest tourism marketing agencies in the city – the New Orleans Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (NOCVB) and the New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation (NOTMC) now feature Tremé as a key destination site on their websites along with the French Quarter, Garden District, the Marigny / Bywater, Downtown, and the Warehouse District. Prior to the series, the neighborhood received scant attention from these agencies. The NOCVB’s page on Tremé makes specific reference to the television series, heading the page as “Tremé: History to Hollywood,” suggesting, “Long before the neighborhood had its own popular HBO series, the Tremé was already heralded as a vital American landmark for African-American and Creole culture” (New Orleans Convention and Visitor’s Bureau 2012). Like the walking tours, the NOCVB’s and NOTMC’s Tremé pages both highlight cultural diversity and its significance for Black New Orleans, emphasizing Black creativity and the neighborhood’s musical tradition as well as links to African American crafts and artistry. NOTMC’s Tremé page speaks specifically to the significance of the neighborhood for social justice, suggesting Tremé is “the site of significant economic, cultural, political, social and legal events that have literally shaped the course of events in Black America for the past two centuries” (New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation 2012). These tourist promotions of Tremé are notable not only for their seemingly post-Katrina motivated highlighting of racially diverse and creative culture of a marginalized neighborhood, but also for their absence of reference to neighborhood crime and risk. Both sites encourage visitors to go beyond Rampart Street and Armstrong Park to discover other historically significant sites in Tremé. This is quite different from the kind of pre-Katrina guidance given to potential tourists, who were often encouraged to stay below Rampart Street safely in the French Quarter and well-trodden tourist areas. Contrast contemporary tourist provocations to a 2004 copy of a Fodor’s guide to New Orleans, for example, where Tremé receives three pages of discussion that clearly states in its introduction, “Unless you are familiar with the area, visit only during the day, follow the recommended walk, and stay alert, as this is still a low-income and thus somewhat risky neighborhood” (TRAVIS 2004). Though some of the sites mentioned above recommend guided tours, this is reasoned as necessary so that visitors can fully appreciate what the neighborhood has to offer, not because of their safety. This is an important distinction that marks Tremé and its residents in the post-Katrina context not as a space of danger with poverty-stricken residents (as was common in pre-Katrina discourse), but, rather, as a place of creativity and rich, diverse culture spawned by its diverse and creative residents. In their promotion of culture, particularly Black culture, these tours play a significant role in promoting Tremé as a creative and ‘authentic’ neighborhood, rich with culture and diversity, thereby playing a role in the city’s aims to recover via the cultural economy through a kind of creative cities strategy of urban renewal (FLORIDA 2005). But Treme-inspired tours also go beyond mere promotion and play a technical and practical role in producing those spaces as sites of creative urban renewal as well. They encourage Tremé residents to see themselves as creative cul-

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tural subjects, where their performance of neighborhood culture becomes a marketable resource (YÚDICE 2003). Tours, then, become a way of engaging residents in the practical exercises of performing authenticity, whether at the Backstreet Cultural Museum or on their front stoops, where they are encouraged to perform their everyday lives as cultural subjects. This means that Treme plays a role in the production of actual neighborhood space, where Treme tours are put to work as a means of urban renewal. These rationalities align with Treme’s producers’ claims that the series’ contributions to an increase in tourism is beneficial to these communities because it provides them with resources to maintain their culture. For example, Karen Livers, who served as the series’ specialty casting director, noted in an interview, There are places that now have tour buses pulling up to them, so that, even if it is just one night out of the week, that’s important. And if we helped to make that happen and make it better, great, and I think because I kind of know how the film industry works for our tourism, the longer this show is on the better it is going to get for everybody and the better it gets for everybody and the show helps to say this is New Orleans, so we don’t lose that too, so we maintain that too, so we maintain some of the culture while also progressing and moving forward into the future. (K. Livers, specialty casting director, personal communication, March 15, 2011)

Livers’ comments resonate with much of the discourse coming from the Mayor’s office, particularly those involved in the Cultural Economy office as well as with the city’s Film Commission, which promotes film and television production in the city as a means of not only economic but also cultural development (see, for example, CUTLER 2011; Mayor's Office of Cultural Economy 2013). This logic is driven by a neoliberal rationality that presumes that cultural development, and in this case, the rebuilding of neighborhoods and cultures after Katrina, is not the responsibility of government and public funding, but, rather, must rely on private investment which, in this case, comes from tourism. While the vision of tour buses rolling through the Tremé is likely, for many, to cause a shudder in the fear that this will turn the neighborhood into a site of spectacular consumption with detrimental effects on the local culture, Treme’s story editor, Lolis Eric Elie (who, at the time of the series run, was a Tremé resident), argued the influx of tourists is part of the reality for maintaining local cultural practices in the current era: “It is difficult for business to thrive … on its local audience … the question is that in this era, how do you manage to keep these things alive and a whole lot of it is really contingent on finance” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). In the status quo, he argued, White tourist investment seems to be one of the only options. This is especially the case according to Elie because of the “disdain that New Orleans and Louisiana politicians have for our culture and the fact that they have done nothing to help people maintain their own historic neighborhoods” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Treme tourism, then, helps to reproduce the rationality that rebuilding in these neighborhoods depends upon individual, private investment through practices such as tourism and media production to take the place of this support. Further, these private and market-based practices of Treme tourism amongst viewer-citizens are represented as solutions to the racial and class antagonisms

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made manifest during Katrina – performing touristic practices or staging one’s neighborhood as a site of tourism become potential solutions to racial and class dispossession. Visits and donations to St. Augustine’s Church or the Backstreet Cultural Museum are positioned not as entertainment, but, rather, as an ethical obligation of a citizen invested in rebuilding a culture and a city. Drawing tourists to these sites reconstitutes the tourist’s relationship to the city and tourist space, inviting tourists to see their tourism as ethical and responsive to the inequalities made manifest in Katrina and even to see their tourism as helping to rebuild these spaces. Despite the NOTMC’s and other tours’ highlighting of historic social justice struggles in the neighborhood, however, these tours do little to throw focus on contemporary social injustices that mark the neighborhood in the present. Little attention, for example, is paid to issues of gentrification and affordable housing or to the continued displacement of long-time residents after Katrina. In failing to acknowledge these practices, Treme-inspired tours promote Black culture within the context of post-racial neoliberalism through a celebration of racial and ethnic difference as forms of consumable lifestyles in ways that largely erase or elide the history of struggle that might contribute to seeing these identities in more political terms (BANET-WEISER 2007). Thus, Treme tourism enacts a neoliberal governmental rationality in which the solutions to social inequalities are posed in individual and marketable terms. Treme inspired tourism is thus posed as a post-Katrina strategy for neighborhoods and residents to garner the resources to rebuild through their racially diverse cultural creativity and distinctiveness. This is, indeed, a guiding narrative for the series – i.e. that the city will survive because of the vitality of its cultural creativity. However, Treme tourism suggests the series does more than convince viewers of this idea that New Orleans will be saved by its’ culture through the text. Instead, Treme tourism becomes a means of guiding, demonstrating, and enacting the expectations for viewers’ citizenship practices. In this sense, the Treme series itself works as a guide or tour map to help direct the appropriate behaviors of viewer-citizen-tourists. The walking and guided tours of Tremé become an embodied and practical site for training citizens to understand themselves in the terms set forth in the series. To an extent, Treme tours problematize and trouble the “tourist gaze” (MACCANNELL 1992) through which previous filmic and television representations have enjoined viewers to experience the city. In part, the tourist gaze is troubled because TV in the case of Treme is positioned as more than a representational medium. TV is instead positioned as a medium for producing the creation of a kind of viewing community in which the expectation for viewer engagement and interaction goes beyond the living room (an issue I take up further in the following chapter). The Treme, HBO, and David Simon brands are meant to guarantee viewers can enact their tourist sensibilities in ways that are distinguished from the ‘bad’ kind of tourism chastised in the series’ denouncements of Bourbon Street tourism, such as in the episode where trombone player Antoine Batiste finds himself embarrassed to be playing a gig on Bourbon Street despite various characters assurances that “there is pride on Bourbon Street” (MCKAY 2010),

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or of its negative depictions of Katrina disaster tours (DICKERSON 2010). For example, an episode in which the character Davis McAlary, a white D.J. and musician that lives in Tremé but has Garden District roots, meets some Wisconsin missionaries in New Orleans to help “save the city” by rebuilding in the Lower Ninth Ward, makes this point poignantly. The missionaries ask Davis – who had recently been fired from his DJ position and taken a job as a desk clerk at the Inn on Bourbon Street – to provide them with information on where to go to hear music. He sends them to discover “the real New Orleans” and, more specifically, Bullet’s Sports Bar, located in the Mid-City neighborhood. As viewers, we too are invited, through the show, to discover “the real New Orleans” that is ‘off the beaten path’ in a ‘ghetto’ area of New Orleans at a bar whose name speaks to its potential ‘dangers.’ Numerous other examples of this kind of ‘insider’s view’ of New Orleans proliferate throughout the show, where particular neighborhood bars, restaurants, and other sites are foregrounded and highlighted for astute viewers. What I am most interested in here is how the series works as a kind of technology of governing by directing the expected behaviors of potential tourists, guiding them, as it were, to the ‘appropriate’ sites. In this sense, Treme tourism is less about “touristic mystification” (REED JR. 2011) than it is about producing a “fictive space [that] not only orients the tourist in actual space but also confers new value onto the landscape” (TORCHIN 2002). Treme tourism enjoins viewers to engage more deeply not only with the television text but also with the spaces and places featured through the lens of the series. Viewers who become tourists are encouraged to visit the sites featured on the show through their careful scavenging for its brand of ‘authentic’ New Orleans, and, in so doing, are constituted as a particular kind of ‘ethical’ tourist. They become constituted not just as everyday tourists but as tourists who embody and practice the post-Katrina rebuilding politics of the show through their tourism. Treme tourism, then, might be understood as a post-Katrina citizenship training, both for those staging sites of tourism as well as for those doing the touring, in which the tourism becomes a means of practicing good (neoliberal) citizenship. The ethics of Treme tourism might best be understood through the series’ critique of disaster tours, such as in a Season 1 episode of Treme, “Right place, wrong time” (DICKERSON 2010). In the episode, Albert “Big Chief” Lambreaux and members of his Mardi Gras Indian tribe hold a ceremony for a fellow tribe member in the Lower Ninth Ward after Lambreaux had found him dead in his house, his body having been there since Katrina. As he and his tribe chant and give a sort of funeral ritual, a bus with a “Katrina Tour” sign pulls up alongside them. The driver says, “How you doing sir? What’s this about?” in a gesture to ask Lambreaux to give an insider’s view of New Orleans’ culture to the tourists on board. Lambreaux replies sardonically, “What’s this about?” and the driver responds, “People want to see what happened.” Disappointed, disgusted, Lambreaux commands, “Just drive away!” After hesitating for a moment, the driver, clearly recognizing that he had committed a serious offense, replies, “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m sorry,” and he drives away. As the tour bus drives away, the camera focuses on the backs of the Indians, looking away into the distance as the bus drives on.

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On the one hand, this scene could be considered a denouncement of postKatrina tourism altogether. David Simon’s commentary on the scene, however, suggests otherwise. Instead, he noted, there was overwhelming, almost pornographic curiosity about the Lower Ninth Ward, as if it was the only place drowned by the waters. New Orleanians, Black and White, recognized that the focus on a singular narrative – the poor people got left behind to drown – was very satisfying to outsiders who wanted to make a particular political point. (quoted in PONIEWOZIK 2010)

This suggests that the scene is less about the touristification of New Orleans’ postKatrina neighborhoods and more particularly about the ways in which particular types of tourism position subjects in relation to the city, its devastation, and consequently result in a particular, singular, political point. That is, Simon’s concern seems primarily with the way in which disaster tours fail to account for every neighborhood, and instead play into a kind of “disaster pornography” that focuses on one particular neighborhood. This gives insight into how the series’ text helps to guide the particular practices of viewer-tourists. It gestures toward a “street level tourism” of the pedestrian, rather than that of the guided bus tour that’s become the symbol of the disaster tour, and it encourages tourists to go off-the-beaten path to seek different stories. On the one hand, as Lolis Eric Elie pointed out in our interview, Treme tourism might offer resources to a neighborhood and residents who have always had to rely on private funding, and, perhaps, the tourism brought to this area might help to maintain local and marginalized cultural practices. Yet, on the other hand, there are also real risks to this strategy as well. As DÁVILA (2012) has noted, the role of culture in neoliberalism is racialized and classed, and those that are most likely to be able to benefit from the entrepreneurialization of culture through tourism are those who can justify their culture in market terms. She argues, Neoliberal economic logics often demand the transformation and proper repackaging of culture for public consumption, and a distancing from popular classes and histories through processes of appropriation, transformation, and mainstreaming. The result is racial and class-based hierarchies that are not only marked by the politics of representation, in terms of the cultural content alluded to or appealed to by different cultural industries, but also by the exclusion of racialized others from the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural products. (DÁVILA 2012, 4)

For Treme tours, the question becomes what kinds of culture get included on the tour, and who gets to participate in the production, circulation, and consumption of culture on these tours? Although the series text itself could be a kind of self-guided walking tour, the primary institutions that have taken advantage of and cashed in on Treme tourism are those who historically have a stronghold in the tourist industry. Further, while these tours might expand what is counted as a New Orleans’ cultural destination – e.g. to a Laundromat that used to be the site of J & M Recording studio, or to a house that has no particular architectural value or is considered blighted but is deemed of interest because it is associated with the series – depends upon individuals and communities to be able to network and entrepreneurialize sites

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and practices that adhere to the ‘right’ (or, in other words, the Treme-based) discourse of authenticity. In so doing, Treme tourism risks shifting the responsibility for the maintenance of local culture onto individual tourist-citizens, which can help to rationalize inequalities as individual rather than structural failures. Another major risk this neoliberal strategy of rebuilding through Treme tourism poses is gentrification. As tourists both in and outside of the city are made aware of and help to finance the vitality of these local cultural practices and their significance in relation to neighborhood space, so too does the desirability of that neighborhood go up in terms of real estate speculation. Before Treme’s premiere, many Tremé residents were hopeful that the show could bring positive attention to the neighborhood, but they were also fearful that such attention could also have gentrifying effects that would drive up rents. Louis Charbonnet, owner of the Charbonnet mortuary, a key institution in the neighborhood with deep roots and connections to the neighborhood’s jazz culture, was quoted in The Times Picayune stating, “I just hope it’s not a landrush … if the show’s a success, then the neighborhood will be popping” (RECKDAHL 2010). When neighborhood practices are tied to creative and artistic culture, a major risk is in driving up neighborhood rents and consequently driving out those who had made the culture in the first place (ZUKIN 2010). Significantly, in this context, a concern over gentrification is that it further prevents those displaced after Katrina from returning because they can no longer afford to live there. Surprisingly, those working with Treme that I spoke with seemed relatively unconcerned about the potential for Treme tourism to lead to gentrification. When I asked Lolis Eric Elie about the potential for the series to influence gentrification, he argued, I don’t really see any way forward but gentrification. But then in a broader sense this is all cyclical, White flight is followed by White return, which will be followed by Black return eventually … because White return helps to make areas trendy and hip. (personal communication, March 15, 2011)

Elie seems to assume a kind of post-Katrina oriented creative cities strategy (FLOR2005) for urban renewal that presumes investment in hip local culture, which he acknowledges is somewhat a result of the series, will attract Whites but more importantly, eventually, the Black middle class. But what happens to the poor? Especially as public housing projects are being razed and, in their place, new mixed income housing is being built? Treme was highly invested in these questions in its Season 1 narrative, where Albert Lambreaux decides to occupy the St. Bernard housing projects in protest to the failure of the city to agitate against the federal government to reopen the city’s public housing despite the fact that they incurred little damage during Katrina. His narrative symbolizes the widespread protests by citizens after the storm to have the city’s housing projects reopened. As the Chief states, it “don’t make sense for the city to shut down 5,000 housing units when most people can’t come home” (JONES 2010). This leaves a huge gap of available housing in the city with few plans for how to meet the disparity of available affordable housing. Although, this is not entirely true – there is in fact a rationale of how these

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needs will be met, it is just not in actually building affordable housing as proposed by the series narrative. Rather, the kind of solution that Treme tourism provides is instead a thoroughly neoliberal strategy in which the poor are expected to entrepreneurialize their cultural heritages, embodied in practices bound up with the tourism industry, so that they can afford to live in their neighborhoods. And it is thus to these ends too that Treme operates as a kind of neoliberal vehicle for individuals to return and rebuild. Treme offers one potential mechanism through which individuals can entrepreneurialize their culture, heritage, and individual skills: by selling those talents to a TV series and to viewer-tourist-citizens who come to experience “the real thing.” CONCLUSION Prior to Katrina and the Treme series, the Tremé neighborhood was relatively marginalized in New Orleans’ tourist promotion, particularly in terms of how it utilized media production industries to elicit touristic practices. Tremé was understood as primarily a problem space, ‘infected’ with Black criminality, concentrated poverty, and blight, making it subject to various interventions to either gentrify or rehabilitate its populations. The Katrina event, however, affected the rationalization of neighborhood and culture in New Orleans. The devastation borne out by city, state, and federal neglect of the city’s most impoverished and Black neighborhoods made manifest a complex interweaving of race, class, and space in the city. These problematizations of city policy’s relationship to particular neighborhoods were not easily quelled and reinscribed back into the dominant tourist narrative, but rather, created a distinctly post-Katrina context for tourist discourses and practices. The city’s post-Katrina discourse of tourism acknowledges these fractures and seeks to entrepreneurialize marginalized neighborhoods and cultures via media production as a means of drawing in tourists. Treme tourism provides a mechanism for post-Katrina rebuilding in an era in which the resources that are assumed to support local vernacular culture within neighborhoods do not come through public financing for the arts and culture, but, rather, through private investment. It is as yet unclear what the consequences of Treme tourism will mean for the Tremé neighborhood and for New Orleans in the long term. Although Treme tours remain a popular item, there is no telling how long the neighborhood’s popularity will ultimately last. On the one hand, television tourism’s entrepreneurialization of neighborhood space, local culture, and indigenous practices through tourism provides resources to residents and business owners that has, in the past, neither been given readily by the city and state nor by private corporate investment or philanthropy. Further, it might provide a possibility for calling forth a kind of engagement with the city from viewers that can contribute to potential ties of solidarity, rendering Treme tourism a kind of political act. Yet, in the particular case of the Tremé neighborhood, a concern is that the show’s relationship to practices of tourism and both its promotion of and implication in materially cultivating and entrepreneurializing vernacular cultural practices will contribute to gentrification.

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What I hoped to have demonstrated in this chapter, however, is one way in which Treme intervenes materially into post-Katrina New Orleans, as a form of urban renewal, and some of the potential stakes involved in television tourism. Although Treme is indeed worthy of criticism as a tourist text and for its attempt to construct an ‘authentic’ representation of New Orleans on screen, these representational practices are also tied to material practices of tourism that participate in the production of the ‘authentic’ city itself and play a broader role in governing the post-Katrina city. In the following chapter, I continue these ruminations on the role of Treme tourism, looking specifically at the ways in which HBO’s promotional discourses of the series situated tourism not only as a rebranding and revitalizing of New Orleans, but also of HBO’s own brand as well.

CHAPTER 5 It’s HBO: Affective Economics of Place In a 2010 interview for the trade publication Broadcasting & Cable, HBO co-president Eric Kessler explained HBO would be moving its brand forward to reflect new media’s effects on the cable subscription network. Since its adoption in 1996, the network’s ubiquitous brand, “It’s Not TV, it’s HBO” served to define HBO by distinguishing it, and its viewers, from what HBO imagined it was not – namely, the bland, formulaic, and mass programming of network TV (LEVERETTE et al. 2008). Yet, branding HBO as the antithesis of TV no longer made as much sense, as the medium was evolving, and so was, according to Kessler, HBO. He suggested, “It is not just about television anymore … it’s the content … It’s time to reflect the fact that we are on multiple devices and always will be going forward” (GREGO 2010). Thus, Kessler announced the new streamlined branding slogan, “It’s HBO.” The year 2010 marked a particularly significant turning point for HBO, who rolled out a number of new strategies in an effort to redefine its brand and relevance in a changing television landscape. So too, it marked a turning point for television in which cable subscriptions declined for the first time (HBO and the future of payTV 2011). At this time, trade publications circulated a discourse that HBO was in a ‘post-Sopranos’ crisis, referencing the supposed demise of the network since the end of its hit original series, The Sopranos (HBO 1999–2007). This discourse suggested not only had other networks successfully incorporated their own forms of ‘quality’ drama to compete with HBO, but, also, new competitors like Netflix and Hulu – who offered online television streaming services and were beginning to produce their own original series – began to challenge HBO as well. 1 HBO was faced with a changing televisual landscape and viewer practices, with new competitors rising that certainly looked more like “not TV” than HBO. Whereas in previous chapters, I have considered how Treme intervened into the city of New Orleans, here I consider how New Orleans and Treme intervened into HBO. Thus, as the previous chapters have contended, Treme helped contribute to rebuilding New Orleans, but, as I argue here, Treme also helped contribute to rebuilding HBO. It is this confluence of interests, between the cultural economy of the city and the cultural economy of a changing television industry, that this chapter centers. Specifically, I argue HBO drew on Treme as one strategy to rebrand itself as not just “not TV” but instead more than TV in a post-broadcasting, convergent me-

1

With regards to HBO’s post-Sopranos crisis discourse about cable and network competitors, see Crupi, 2010. On Netflix and Hulu as new competitors in original programming, see ANDREEVA 2011a, 2011b; MILLER 2011; PEREZ 2012; POGGI 2012a oder b?; ROHTER 2012.

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dia era by capitalizing on Treme’s ability to create ‘passionate engagement.’ Passionate engagement is a prevalent marketing and branding discourse typically associated with the emotional and affective investments of audiences harnessed through forms of new media interactivity (ARVIDSSON and BONINI 2014). But I contend that Treme helped HBO to inflect passionate engagement with an additional vector of place-based engagement in order define itself against its newly rising post-broadcast competitors. As SZALAY (2014, 115) notes, HBO dramatic content promotes brand mutation … HBO dramas are incipiently financial forms; they are stock markets in proprietary brand equities and, as such, capture how flagship television dramas across the entertainment industry now internalize and negotiate conversions between otherwise diverse corporate properties.

I argue Treme helped to engender this brand mutation through inviting viewers to passionately engage not just with the show, but also with New Orleans, thus adding place to online interactivity and multi-screen engagement as a means of constructing a seemingly ‘authentic’ brand identity. Treme was utilized by HBO to produce an affective and emotional investment in the brand by facilitating viewer interaction and active engagement not just with the text and with other fans through interactive media but, rather, on a material level in the city of New Orleans. Particularly, the series situates HBO and Treme, through a multitude of new media convergences, as branded interfaces (LURY 2004) that work to direct viewer engagements in the form of tourism and charity. In so doing, Treme captured, or subsumed, viewers’ affective surpluses borne out of their interactions and experiences in New Orleans and put them to work to produce new forms of brand value and equity for the waning HBO brand. This constitutes a distinct “affective economics,” or logic by which emotion and affective connections are transformed into exploitable resources for profit (ANDREJEVIC 2011; JENKINS 2006). This kind of material engagement in a situated community is quite different from how other scholars have theorized the role of mediated interactivity in the convergent, post-broadcast television era. These scholars have almost exclusively focused on ‘virtual’ communities created on the web and efforts of television networks to cultivate affective engagement through transmedia storytelling and interactivity bound up with the screen, albeit in its matrixed manifestations (e.g. BOURDAA 2014; CLARKE 2012; COX 2015; EDWARDS 2012; EVANS 2013; GILLAN 2011; HARTLEY 2009; IBRUS and SCOLARI 2014; JENKINS 2006; JENNER 2016; LAHEY 2016; LOTZ 2014; PIÑÓN 2014; WOOD and BAUGHMAN 2012). In contrast, I suggest Treme’s production of a discourse of passionate engagement as “neighborhood-tonational reach” points to the important role that place, and the place of New Orleans in particular, plays in making Treme work for HBO’s brand. It suggests the connection to a place-based location and an attachment to a particular place can be harnessed as an affective register to reach audiences far beyond that particular place (indeed, Treme reached not only national audiences, but also global ones through syndication 2). Yet, as I detail below, HBO’s strategy assumes that those affective 2

Treme has aired globally on a number of HBO’s outlets, WALKER, 2010.

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connections can be made even stronger if they take place not only in and through the narrative and the interactive engagements of social media, but, rather in the space and place of on-location television production. In so doing, this form of materially emplaced passionate engagement draws on what COULDRY (2001) theorizes as the power of the “media pilgrimage,” in which visiting the places of media production where “spatial, symbolic, and imaginative boundaries overlap” makes the experience even more intense and imbibes them in an “aura.” This intensity of experience contributes to the production of an affective surplus, which, I argue, is transformed into brand value. Thus, HBO produces a discourse of added value to its mediated and mobile technologies that also enable, and privilege, the mobile consumer to be connected to an ‘authentic’ place, thereby producing a distinctive and ‘authentic’ brand identity as well as another branded interface. This is a production of value that could be considered in terms of what WOODS (2009) refers to as asset stripping, where the creative potentiality of neighborhood culture is stripped for the extraction of value and production of profit for an industry valued largely for its mobility and lack of boundedness to that place. It is important to note that Treme’s form of passionate engagement was just one strategy – and even perhaps a failed one – amongst a number of efforts characterized as passionate engagement that HBO rolled out between 2010–2012 to facilitate its rebranding. It is perhaps too early to tell (and I will return to this discussion in the book’s conclusion), but I want to emphasize that regardless of its success, the Treme moment demonstrates an important way of thinking about television branding and its relationship to new media interactivity that has yet to be fully explored in critical media scholarship. Specifically, it demonstrates how place – even in the post-broadcast age when the television is imagined to be untethered from domestic space (TURNER and TAY 2009) – continues to remain a significant vector through which the television industry rationalizes the medium, the industry, and its value. This is particularly significant in today’s television landscape, as the proliferation of neoliberal cultural policies like tax incentives means that more and more television series will be filmed on-location. HBO IN CRISIS HBO’s brand identity has historically relied on the idea of ‘quality,’ in which ‘quality’ is largely linked to branding, and bound up with the assumptions of the kinds of distinctive tastes and lifestyle choices ‘quality’ TV audiences are assumed to have (SPIGEL 2004). This distinction, encapsulated in the “It’s not TV” slogan, for a long time served as a means to define the HBO brand by what it was not, i.e. bland, unoriginal, commodified network TV, and to suggest that what one gets on HBO cannot be gotten elsewhere (JARAMILLO 2002; LEVERETTE et al. 2008; LOTZ 2007; MCCABE and AKASS 2008). But even before the ending of The Sopranos, critics were prognosticating the demise of the network, suggesting “Let’s face it: HBO is in a slump, and the demise of The Sopranos will only make matters worse” (BERMAN 2006; FRUTKIN 2008). So, by 2010 when HBO rolled out big new original

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series like Boardwalk Empire (HBO 2010–2014), and yet its subscriber numbers dropped (while its competitors – Showtime and Starz – grew), it seemed to confirm that HBO and its ‘quality’ brand was floundering. The trade publication MediaWeek noted, “We may never again see the likes of HBO's heyday, when transformative dramas like The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under made America renew its love affair with TV, but damn it if the premium net isn’t trying” (CRUPI 2010). Taking this sense of a floundering network further, The Hollywood Reporter argued, 2010 would seem to have the makings of a big year for HBO given the tentpole programs it launched in the first two quarters of the year: “True Blood,” … “The Pacific,” … And yet HBO had 28.6 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2010 … its lowest total in four years and the second of its first back-to-back quarterly declines in at least six years. So if HBO is so hot, how come its subscriber base is dwindling? (WALLENSTEIN 2010) 3

By 2012, The New York Observer pronounced, “the channel seems to have lost its bearings” (D’ADDARIO 2012). 4 It was not only other pay subscription networks that were competing with HBO’s ‘quality’ brand. Advertiser-supported cable channels like AMC and FX were taking on HBO’s ‘quality’ formula as well (KELSO 2008). 5 Perhaps most significant, though, were the new streaming services – Netflix, Hulu, and (eventually) Amazon – who challenged the very idea of the televisual medium itself by shifting its relationship to space and time (no longer needing a cable subscription, a cord, or an ‘appointment’) and how the industry could make money in an interactive, convergent media environment. Not only were these streaming services offering a different mode of distribution, but they were just beginning to get into the game of producing their own original content as well (ANDREEVA 2011a; MILLER 2011). Whereas HBO diverged from television’s traditional narrative strategies and form, Netflix and its ilk seem to diverge from the medium’s infrastructure itself (JENNER 2016). And while HBO was continuing to lose subscribers in 2010, Netflix was picking them up, reaching over 20 million subscribers in 2010 (more than either Showtime or Starz) compared to HBO’s 28.2 million subscribers (WALLENSTEIN 2011). A slew of articles between 2010–2012 tried to make sense of the new ‘gamechanger’ and debated if Netflix and online streaming would mean the end of cable TV and HBO (e.g. CARMICHAEL 2011; GROSSMAN et al. 2011; LAFAYETTE 2011;

3 4

5

Reports also showed that this was HBO’s forth consecutive quarter of decline in subscribers, see WALLENSTEIN, 2011. The title of the article, “Is HBO’s Luck Running Out” references the HBO original program Luck (aired January 2012–March 2012), suggesting it was quintessential HBO – ensemble cast and creative auteur showrunner – and its demise therefore demonstrated how its usual algorithms for success were losing traction. At the time, AMC was gaining critical acclaim with programs like Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008– 2013) and Mad Men (AMC, 2007-), and it had just picked up The Walking Dead, which would go on to garner some of the highest TV ratings ever (O’CONNELL, 2014) FX was finishing up its critically acclaimed series Nip Tuck (FX, 2003–2010) and would soon pick up the acclaimed series Justified (FX, 2010–2015) and American Horror Story (FX, 2011–).

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Netflix: Measuring Up 2012; Syndicators Optimistic About On-Demand Services 2011; The Netflix Effect 2011; POGGI 2012a, 2012b; SHIELDS 2010). Floundering amidst a post-Sopranos discourse and a shifting convergent television landscape, the pressure for HBO executives to prove to shareholders and investors that the HBO brand still had value was high. The company’s decision to depart from its long time “It’s not TV” brand suggests that executives were looking to ensure that their programming decisions could prove the value of the brand in the post-broadcast age. This kind of strategy aligned with industry experts and market analysts who were encouraging cable programmers to “go big or go home,” suggesting the need to create “brand defining programs” that could establish a “strong relationship between the brand and the viewer” (GREGO 2012). This discursive context and HBO’s anxieties over its brand value are not unique to television or to branding. Rather, they are bound up with the broader crisis in value associated with post-Fordist forms of capitalist accumulation and neoliberalism, in which there is no material commodity (e.g. audience eyeballs) by which to measure value but, rather, a range of immaterial expressions that serve as key forms of capitalist valuation that are inherently difficult to measure (LURY and MOOR 2010). Given this crisis in value, the discourses of anxiety surrounding HBO executives over the future of the HBO brand, and the industrial doxa of the need to prove a brand value that could be measured and rationalized for shareholders, it might therefore seem curious that HBO would have chosen to renew Treme after just the first episode. Some critics called this early renewal “shocking,” and, indeed, HBO continued to renew the series for three additional seasons even though it failed to garner a sizable audience and received mixed critical acclaim (GOLD 2012). How, precisely, did executives rationalize, and measure, the value that Treme was producing for its brand? The answer: passionate engagement. PASSIONATE ENGAGEMENT & BRANDING POST-BROADCAST TV At the Cable Television and Marketing (CTAM) Summit in 2010 in New Orleans, a panel featuring Treme titled, “Treme: The Art of Building Audience and a Community,” promised conference attendees that executive producers David Simon and Eric Overmyer along with HBO co-president Eric Kessler would share the secrets of how “storytelling and marketing create neighborhood-to-national reach as well as emotional impact” (Multichannel News 2010). During the panel, moderator Dave Walker, a journalist for the Times-Picayune, asked Kessler how Treme fit into the network’s programming strategy. Kessler responded by suggesting that he always asked himself two questions about each program: first, does the show reflect the HBO brand, and second, does the show elicit “passionate engagement” on the part of the audience. He went on to state that Treme met the bill on both accounts. Kessler extolled Simon’s previous work, The Wire, as “the greatest work of art produced on television,” and, laughing, suggested “David [Simon] has become the brand of HBO” (SIMON et al. 2010). What does this mean for Simon to be “the brand

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of HBO,” and, further, what is it about Treme that constitutes “passionate engagement?” And how do these two elements come together in the 2010 conjuncture to articulate HBO to a new branded identity, and a new form of brand value, amidst the changing television landscape? To answer these questions requires some background on the term, “passionate engagement,” which has become a term prevalent in the marketing and branding industries. Indeed, in numerous interviews given by HBO executives between 2010–2012 about the network’s brand, the term passionate engagement was used ubiquitously to characterize the desired behavior of its audience (see, for example, BELLONI and ROSE 2011; CARUGATI 2012). Navigate to any marketing or branding site today and you will inevitably run into the term, as well as promises that it is something that can help you to build an ‘authentic’ brand. The sales, marketing, and branding industries understand passionate engagement as deeply authentic, something that emerges from your very being and, almost incidentally, helps you to sell your product (See, for example, BENDAPUDI 2005; IANNARINO 2010; FUGGETTA 2012). The industrial discourse of passionate engagement points to how social production increasingly depends upon the production of subjectivity through forms of immaterial and affective labor, or “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (LAZZARATO 1996, 132). Passionate engagement is thus defined by industry insiders within the parameters of affective labor, calling for employees, customers, and managers alike to perform not only their jobs but also their identities, their souls, as a means of creating “lovemarks” – or, in Henry JENKINS’ (2006, 20) terms, “the emotional capital” produced through the “active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked consumer” (see also POYNTER and MACRURY 2009). Brands produce capitalist value by parasitically subsuming the productive potentiality and affective surpluses created by consumers through carefully managing their activities to ensure that they unfold in predictable, and hence profitable, ways (ARVIDSSON 2005). The term can be found within a range of media studies scholarship as well, often associated with fandom and fan cultures. This literature associates “passionate engagement” within the context of excess, potential forms of counter-hegemonic resistance, and the authentic expression of the artist (see, for example, HILL 2015; MCCOSKER 2014). I argue it is precisely this sense of the authentic engagement of the fan or artist, and productive potentiality they create, that the industry seeks to capture and direct to profitable ends. Returning to the realm of contemporary television production, the impetus to produce a strong television brand is especially heightened in the era of post-broadcast, media convergence, where new media technologies as well as viewer practices challenge the economic models on which television was initially based. As CURTIN (2009, 13) argues, television as a post-broadcast medium is untethered from the domestic space and shifts from delivering content to a mass audience at an appointed hour to a matrix medium, “an increasingly flexible dynamic mode of communication” that focuses on accumulating interactive audiences across multiple circuits of matrix media. LAHEY (2016, 633) notes, “part and parcel of the television industry’s transition to a digital media landscape in the United States has been an

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emphasis on learning how to reach participatory audiences,” creating what GILLAN (2011) has referred to as “must-click TV.” What matters for the post-broadcast era television industry, therefore, is less any individual piece of content and more so how each piece of content can be synergistically woven into a larger brand identity, as it works to assure shareholders that the network can attract and keep loyal audiences (JARAMILLO 2013). Producing interactive audience consumption through various matrices is a means of constructing a seemingly strong brand identity that can be legitimated to shareholders as holding value. Transmedia storytelling – or the construction of ‘holistic’ branded environments through the production of complex, interweaving narratives across multiple, participatory sites of media technologies – has been a key strategy used to capture this interactivity and for extending participatory expressions to the network’s branded identity, as fans must “hunt and gather” across multiple mediated and branded spaces in order to deepen their engagement with the narrative and other fans (JENKINS 2006). Transmediated fan interactivity creates brand value by rendering participation a part of making the brand feel more authentic, as it emerges and constructs a branded identity from the “grassroots” of the “produser” (i.e. producer/consumer) (JENKINS 2006). It is precisely this combination of interactive and grassroots engagement that the term passionate engagement seeks to capture. Through a multitude of data mining and measurement techniques bound up with “sentiment analytics,” media industries exploit affective and emotional attachment as a way to prove their brand has value to shareholders and investors (ANDREJEVIC 2011). But, as ARVIDSSON and BONINI (2014, 2) argue, post-broadcast branding mobilizes passion as a form of engagement that does not so much exploit the productive labor of audiences as it does “[make] their production predictable.” Analyzing, especially, the role of techniques that measure not only interactive engagement but also passion, they suggest television viewers’ passions become valuable because they enable the predictability of demand and action, as determined by new techniques of measurement of social media interactions, engagement with new mobile platforms, and geolocative data (ARVIDSSON and BONINI 2014, 6). Drawing on ARVIDSSON and BONINI, I extend their analysis of passionate engagement and its relationship to social media interactivity to focus on what has otherwise been largely absent in the scholarship on passionate engagement – the material engagement of viewers in a specific place. Treme demonstrates how the productive labor of the passionately engaged audience is also made predictable and measurable by enlisting viewer engagements in place through practices of tourism and charity. PASSIONATELY ENGAGING TREME Although Kessler’s comment at the CTAM Summit that Treme constituted passionate engagement could have easily situated Treme familiarly into HBO’s ‘quality’ brand, the panel discussion was largely devoid of rhetorics of quality. Instead, the panelists made clear that HBO’s aims to create passionate engagement went beyond

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getting audiences to be invested in the show’s characters and storytelling, or even in utilizing new media technologies to create transmediated storytelling. Instead, the panelists characterized passionate engagement in terms of viewers engaging and interacting with the city and neighborhoods of New Orleans on a physical and material level as well, as facilitated through the network’s transmediated matrices. Emotional impact, then, was cultivated not just through transmedia storytelling and online interactive engagement, but Kessler also rationalized it could be built through the material experiences that the series helped provide to its viewers. In other words, passionate engagement was understood as not merely about moving HBO content and viewers to and through the web, but, rather, utilizing web-based technology to move people to and through New Orleans’ neighborhoods, creating “neighborhood to national reach.” Here, I consider Treme’s text and paratexts; viewer and cultural intermediaries’ interactive engagements with Treme; as well as public-private partnerships between Treme/HBO, the city of New Orleans, non-profit organizations, and private corporations that produce Treme inspired tours and charity. Each of these matrices demonstrates how Treme enjoins viewers to materialize their commitment to the show through spatial practices, and, most significantly, how these material interactions produce brand value for HBO by extracting the affective surpluses produced out of these experiences. A central theme in each of these environments of interaction is the discourse of authenticity. As BANET-WEISER (2012a, 8) suggests, branding aims to build an ‘authentic’ relationship between the producer and consumer, “based on the accumulation of memories, emotions, personal narratives, and expectations.” Treme’s discourse of authenticity works to produce both a sense of a passionate experience for viewers as well as to render the HBO brand as the arbiter of what constitutes authentic New Orleans. This produces Treme inspired tourism and charity as a form of brand equity that can be rationalized to shareholders. Transmediating Tourism Arguably, Treme’s text provides a kind of tourist map to its viewers, and, in so doing, works as one matrix in HBO’s branded interface to move people in and through New Orleans. To think through how Treme’s narrative and text work as ‘maps’ for the viewer-tourist, I want to return to the CTAM Summit panel. During the panel, David Simon credited subscription based cable for enabling a “real kind of tourism,” contrasted with network TV’s “guided bus tour” – a seemingly debased and inauthentic way of engaging with the sites and sounds of the city. Cable television, he argued, can be a “healthy form of tourism,” where viewers are immersed in a culture that they would not have experienced otherwise (SIMON et al. 2010). Building on this, HBO president Eric Kessler suggested, “When I watched Treme, I felt like I had never been to this city before” (SIMON et al. 2010). He stated the show enabled him to learn about the second-line, Mardi Gras Indians, funeral processions, culture, and music all in ways that were an “eye opening experience.” Thus, when he arrived in the city for the CTAM Summit, he noted he looked at and

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navigated the city differently. Simon and Kessler’s comments suggest Treme’s creators hoped viewers would also come to see New Orleans through ‘new eyes.’ It is in providing these ‘new eyes,’ then, that Treme’s text and narrative representations of place could be considered to provide a new ‘map’ of the city. Since the argument that Treme is a tourist text has been covered in other scholars’ analyses of the series (e.g. RATHKE 2012; THOMAS 2012), I do not want to dwell on this particular point. What I do want to emphasize here, however, is how this works not only metaphorically and virtually, but also as a literal and material guide as well, as Treme enjoins viewers to utilize the text as a mechanism for actually navigating the streets of New Orleans. Each of Treme’s episodes is meticulous about making it clear to the viewer precisely in what neighborhood and specific place the narrative takes place. Filming in a number of locations in the city that rarely show up on TV or film, such as the Bywater, Tremé, and Algiers, Treme provides an ‘insider’s guide’ to the city. In the series’ many music scenes in which musicians perform live on set, the viewer is keyed in to precisely where the musicians are playing, whether at the Rock ‘n Bowl in Mid-City, Mother’s Lounge in Tremé, or at Vaughn’s in Bywater, amongst others. The series’ provocateur, DJ Davis McAlary, played by Steve Vaughn, serves as the primary tourist guide, directing on-screen tourists where to go for ‘authentic’ New Orleans (MCKAY 2010) and working in Season 3 as a jazz heritage tour guide, as discussed in Chapter 3. Davis’s official tourist guide role is juxtaposed, though, to the more cinema verité style employed with the other characters, especially characters of color, who rarely interact with or share screen space with tourists and take the viewers along ‘in-situ’ into the ‘Even More Authentic’ New Orleans – i.e. to the spaces and places of daily life and cultural practice. An example of this latter textual practice includes scenes with the Mardi Gras Indian Chief, Albert Lambreaux, where the viewer is invited to witness the painstaking practice of sewing Mardi Gras Indian costumes, the tribe practicing their music and dancing together in the local neighborhood bar, or to witness their memorial service for an Indian who died in the Lower Ninth Ward (the latter of which is discussed in the previous chapter). These examples demonstrate how the textual narrative provides a guide for viewers that directs them on how to practice their touristic sensibilities, positioning the Treme text and the HBO brand as vehicles for enacting ‘authentic,’ “street-level” tourism. Although the text and narrative provide one kind of tourist ‘map’ of the city, HBO also provides a multitude of additional ‘maps’ and guides to the city through a variety of interactive and paratextual platforms. One example of HBO’s official paratexts that works in this way is a set of “Behind-the-Scenes” extras on the website and DVD sets. These extras include featurettes titled “Treme: Beyond Bourbon Street” on the Season 1 DVD box set and “Walking with Wendell” on the Season 2 DVD box set. Each of these special features invite viewers to tour New Orleans with the actors, musicians, and producers of the show as well as other local ‘experts’ not featured on the show. Both provide commentary on the show’s narrative references to New Orleans culture while also highlighting specific places and spaces in the city of cultural significance. In “Walking with Wendell,” viewers tour New Orleans’ neighborhoods significant to African American culture with Wendell Pierce,

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a New Orleans born actor who stars as Antoine Batiste in the series. Giving viewers an insider’s guide, Pierce’s tour emphasizes the significance of particular places and spaces, such as Congo Square and the Backstreet Cultural Museum. These places, obliquely referenced on the show, take on new significance as Pierce enjoins viewers to see why these places are worthy of visiting, and preserving. Although this perhaps points to how Treme provides a virtual tour in its remapping of the city, Eric Kessler’s explanation of the role he saw these extras as playing to the other cable executives at the CTAM Summit suggests they were also bound up with a strategy of passionate engagement aimed at connecting viewers to New Orleans as a material place. As Kessler explained, “Walking with Wendell” was meant to get viewers to “purchase goods from these shopkeepers, buy the music” of the musicians featured on the show so that viewers could “not only engage with the show, but also engage with the residents of Tremé” (SIMON et al. 2010). While this statement could be read as a ruse, PR spin, considering the audience at the Summit (other cable executives and industry insiders) and the goal of the panel to rationalize forms of creating emotional impact and passionate engagement for brand value, it would be mistaken to dismiss Kessler’s statement out of hand. Instead, it lends insight to an industrial rationality that makes sense of how viewer tourism, and consumption, can be harnessed as a form of brand value. These rationalities are furthered in HBO’s Official Treme blog, “Inside Treme.” In contrast to the many blogs devoted to HBO’s other series, the Treme blog does not really elicit viewer interpretation of the text, but rather, invites viewers to actively engage with the city. Entries include, for example, discussions of the Vietnamese fishing community in New Orleans and how this impacts city space and its culture (ELIE 2011b); an interview with disgraced former city council member Oliver Thomas (ELIE 2011a); and ruminations on jazz tourism (Elie, 2012) and urban renewal in and near Tremé (BEAULIEU 2013). Each of these occupy central story lines in the show, but the blog entries are not about the show’s story. Instead, the blog provides the viewer with greater insight into the material realities in which these storylines are situated. Like the “Behind the Scenes” extras, the blog works not only as a space of trasnmediated storytelling around the narrative, but also as another interface through which the city is re-mapped as a mediated matrix through which viewers are invited to tour New Orleans. In addition to the official blog, viewers are also enjoined to passionately engage with Treme by writing their own blogs, many of which are linked to the official HBO blog. Like Inside Treme, these blogs, such as Maitri Erwin’s Back of Town: Blogging Treme or the Watching Treme from Seattle blog, center less on the show’s narrative and instead emphasize places and contexts of those narratives. These viewer-inspired Treme blogs stich together the trifecta of fans, show, and place. Additionally, Dave Walker’s Treme Explained blog on Nola.com, the online site for The Times Picayune, is particularly intriguing in how it draws in viewers to engage with the city on a material level in ways that facilitate tourism. The blog entries largely detail the spaces and places featured in the show, hyperlinked so users can link to maps, websites, or other articles that can help viewers materially navigate New Orleans culture on the ground. It thus invites viewers to passionately

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engage not only with the show, but with these spaces and places in New Orleans as well. These blogs demonstrate the industrial rationality of how the places featured in a television show filmed on-location can be mobilized to cultivate deeper forms of passionate engagement amongst viewers. This elicitation of passionate engagement with material place is thus further extended by efforts of both the city and the tourism industry to capitalize on Treme to draw in viewers as tourists. As discussed in the previous chapter, these tours (including those produced by the city’s tourism marketing agencies as well as the more independent ‘authentic’ tours) direct visitors to places of historical significance in the neighborhood but add specific sites featured on the show, demonstrating how the series facilitates the aims of a form of passionate engagement that can direct viewers to a specific place and thus produce a more ‘authentic’ and meaningful consumption experience driven in and around the HBO and Treme brands. Further, a promotion for the series featured on the web series Pop Pilgrims: A Travel Show for Pop Culture Enthusiasts, in which the hosts travel to sites of media fame as “not just tourists” but rather “pop pilgrims,” demonstrates to viewers how these tours, or pop pilgrimages, might help to further viewer engagement with the show via engagement with the city. Filmed in coordination with HBO’s promotion of Treme, the episode features David Simon accompanying the hosts on their Treme pop pilgrimage, where they visit sites featured on the show, including St. Louis Cemetery, the Backstreet Cultural Museum, and the WWOZ radio station. While touring Tremé and talking with Simon about the neighborhood, the hosts come to the conclusion, “Really the only proper pop pilgrimage for Treme would be to move there” (MODELL 2011). This is significant in that it suggests the kinds of touristic practices called forth from viewers in this particular paratext are not that of an armchair tourist via the TV screen or even interactive media. Instead, it literally, even if only by tongue and cheek, calls for viewers to move to New Orleans. This is an expectation of and demand on viewers that asks for significantly more than most film and television productions. Treme thus invites viewers to do more than endlessly contemplate characters’ motivations through interactive and transmedia storytelling and instead to immerse themselves, physically, in New Orleans. The producers stated that the show is not meant to be easily deciphered by its viewers – it is written more with residents of New Orleans in mind (Eric Overmyer, personal communication, March 15, 2011). This means viewers have to do quite a bit of work to follow the show; indeed, its various paratexts suggest the work required of viewers is for them to physically locate themselves there. Although each of these paratexts along with the show’s text takes viewers on a virtual tour of sorts, the viewer is addressed such that these are imagined to be always incomplete. They suggest the viewer should be left wanting something more – a deeper, and ‘Even More Authentic’ engagement with the city that can only be had by actually going there. Taken together, the passionate engagement elicited by Treme tourism produces HBO as a branded interface (LURY 2004) through which to manage the interactions of viewers with the city of New Orleans. The series, its blogs, behind the scenes features and promotions, online social and streaming platforms, and walking tours

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become individual points in the Treme/HBO mediated matrix, offering numerous individual points of engagement in which viewers’ consumption of the series can be transformed into a form of brand value through the immaterial and affective labor of the viewer-tourist-consumer. What is distinct about what Treme adds to this branded interface, however, is how tourism works to connect each of these other pieces in the transmediated matrix to provide viewers a sense of connection to a material place. It is thus not only the engagements of viewers online from which HBO works to extract value but also their material engagements with the city itself, as viewer engagements on this material level are rationalized to produce a deeper and more passionate viewer commitment. Charity TV Treme tourism is often situated as a form of charity to the city. That is, viewers engaging in tourism are called forth to do so in socially responsible ways such that their tourist practices can help contribute to the rebuilding of the city. In this sense, Treme-inspired tourism and the passionate engagement it elicits from viewers is deeply bound up with what ADAMS (2013) has described as a surfeit of emotion created by Katrina. That is, the Katrina event created an excess of emotion, from those who were affected to those who wanted to help, even conservatives could not deny the emotional pull of the event. The Katrina disaster “call[ed] people to action, to try to help one another, and to fill up the gaps left open by a structure that fails to take care of them” (ADAMS 2013, 124). In this vortex of surplus emotion, ADAMS argues affect mobilized a whole range of industries and institutions, including a new kind of charity industry and its concomitant range of public / private partnerships. However, this charity industry was mobilized not just as, or even primarily as, a means of helping people. Rather, the affective surpluses that it drew upon were put to work more in the interests of profit-making that capitalized on the emotional pull of the event, and the trauma it created. Here, ADAMS is drawing on KLEIN’s (2007) insights regarding disaster capitalism, where corporations and global financial institutions take advantage of the shocks created by disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, to push through privatization, deregulation, and other free-market policies that adversely affect the poor and most marginalized. Likewise, ADAMS links Katrina’s affective economics to the rise of philanthrocapitalism, or the idea that philanthropy should be targeted to make the greatest ‘impact’ that can render profitable returns on investment whilst bringing about various social goods (e.g. BISHOP and GREEN 2008). Both disaster capitalism and philanthrocapitalism depend on the rationality of the free market and public / private partnerships, rather than government intervention, to bring about social change and to rectify social and/or environmental harms. In post-Katrina New Orleans, it was through the charity sector that ADAMS suggests surplus in an emotional sense was transformed into surplus in a fiscal sense, where affect shifted into charity by mobilizing free labor and creating new profits, as well as absolving government of responsibility. After all, if government were

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responsible for the crisis in the first place, so the argument goes, then the private sector and the philanthropy it inspires would be better positioned to resolve that crisis: Affect calls for emotional responsiveness and generates an inducement to action, and as such it generates new business investments and free labor for a struggling socio-economy. Ongoing need becomes a marketing tool and the circulating site for value in the ever-growing infrastructure of the charity NGO market. Affect that is generated by the people who lived through Hurricane Katrina and lost so much from it becomes in some sense unmoored from its sites of origin in people as it circulates among the agencies that hope to profit from it. Charity and philanthrocapitalism appear as new mechanisms of redistribution for taking care of those in need … the process of recovery through these arrangements of capital, public-private partnerships, and neoliberal policy has produced an emotional surplus in which need has become a circulating resource defined by its affective registers. (ADAMS 2013, 174–175)

The affective surplus that Katrina created therefore helped to mobilize a whole new industry around charity that could generate value out of people’s suffering. While ADAMS (2013) considers a range of non-profit, faith-based, and other charitable organizations, she does not consider the ways in which the television industry was also mobilized as a vector for bringing charity to the city. Yet, it is clear that there is an extent to which Treme itself is situated within this circulating resource of affective value. As the series and producers themselves became bound up with discourses of charity, as well as connected its viewers to materializing their emotions through charitable contributions, Treme also became a means for producing brand value and surplus profit for HBO. Although Simon and Overmyer had pitched a New Orleans themed show to HBO prior to Katrina, it was not until after the hurricane that HBO executives began to show interest (E. Overmyer, producer, personal communication, March 15, 2011). This suggests that from the very beginning, Treme was intended to capitalize on the affective surplus created out of the Katrina event, where watching the show could be a potential outlet, a call to action of sorts, where viewers could deposit their emotional surplus to feel as though they were doing something. Capitalizing on the audience’s affective investment in the city after the storm (prior to what some referred to as “Katrina fatigue,” or a loss of interest in the Katrina event) and the city’s generous tax incentives, Treme represented what one critic referred to as HBO’s “noble if ignored charity case” (D’ADDARIO 2012). Referencing the fact that Treme had minimal viewership but seemed to garner a great deal of attention and admiration from not only critics but HBO executives as well, this sensibility that the series was a “charity case” plays on two levels. On the one hand, HBO was providing charity to David Simon et al. in its willingness to continue production despite minimal likelihood of profit. On the other hand, however, it also implies that Treme is a charity case in the broader sense in that HBO’s decision to film a multi-season series in New Orleans was in and of itself a charitable act. This was indeed a discourse that circulated in the production community following the storm, where Brad Pitt’s push to film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in New Orleans created a cascading sentiment that producers had a responsibility to bring production to the city as a form of charity (PITTS et al. 2014).

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At the Cable Television and Marketing Summit in New Orleans in 2010, Eric Kessler suggested Treme represented “one of the shows that HBO people take pride in not just because of the quality of entertainment but because they feel like this is working, getting things done” (SIMON et al. 2010, emphasis mine). Here, Kessler was referring not to the work Treme does for HBO – indeed, the show might be considered somewhat of a failure for the network both in terms of its inability to garner a large, committed audience as well as lackluster licensing, merchandising, and DVD sales – but, instead, for the work Treme appeared to do for the city of New Orleans. In other words, Kessler was suggesting that HBO took pride in Treme because it assumedly made some kind of intervention into the city of New Orleans; it got things done – ostensibly, those ‘things’ had something to do with the rebuilding of the city in the continued wake of Katrina. Kessler’s comment makes evident that Treme was envisioned by HBO executives not merely as a form of ‘quality’ anti-TV, but, rather, as engaged action – as actually doing something in the ‘real world.’ This idea that Treme constituted a kind of engaged action is bound up with producing the passionate engagement of viewers by capitalizing on Katrina’s affective surpluses in the form of charity, both in terms of the forms of charity the production itself engaged in as well as how producers enjoined viewers to engage in charity. These charitable contributions, I argue, align with ADAMS’ (2013) discussion of how charity became not only a neoliberal solution to disaster that capitalized on the circulating affect after Katrina but also helped to produce surplus economic value for HBO in the form of passionate engagement. Throughout its run, and even continuing after the series wrapped filming, Treme engaged in numerous charitable and philanthropic efforts in New Orleans. These efforts, almost all related to cultural and spatial revitalization in New Orleans, demonstrate the ways in which the production’s charity is rationalized as a means of rebuilding. In all, David Simon claims the series raised over $500,000 for various organizations and charities in the city, including “Roots of Music, Common Ground, the New Orleans Musicians Clinic, the Tipitina Foundation and other local charities” (FORBES 2013). As he notes on his website, Simon suggests, In keeping with the theme of Treme, HBO and Blown Deadline Productions [Simon’s production company] have specifically targeted non-profits that service the culture of New Orleans. These are organizations that directly assist musicians and culture-bearers, or expand the reach of musical education within the city. (SIMON n.d.)

The Roots of Music, for example, is a free music education program for middle school aged children in New Orleans whose goal it is keep children off the street, bring children from different neighborhoods together, and to support economic development through investing in the cultural economy and creative practices of individuals (Roots of Music 2012). The Musicians’ Clinic, on the other hand, is “dedicated to keeping New Orleans’ performers alive in body, mind, and spirit by providing comprehensive health care and mental health / social services” (Musicians’ Clinic 2012). These charitable endeavors show clearly the rationality of Treme is in nurturing the creative practitioners that constitute such a huge part of

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their show. As Schweigman notes of the benefit Treme threw for the Musicians’ Clinic, This is a direct person-to-person impact to people that we work with everyday, people that come on our set and perform, the people that work for us day to day, they go to the clinic, the artists and musicians … It’s just really important to support them in any way they can. (personal communication, March 15, 2011)

Funding the Roots of Music program is also part of this aim, as it helps to support the youth in the city who are the future practitioners of the trade that the show invests itself in preserving. While it is implied that the Treme production gave money directly to these organizations – though this is unclear – the production primarily raised money for these local organizations through benefits it hosted, including its three times annual My Darlin’ New Orleans benefit, a more traditional charity and auction event where VIP tickets costing over $100 promised an opportunity to mingle with Treme’s cast and crew (WALKER 2012). In addition, Treme hosted My Lil’ Darlin’ All-Star Revue, which showcased musicians featured in the series to raise money to “preserve the city’s musical heritage and culture” (My Lil’ Darlin’ An HBO Treme All Star Revue n.d.) and a Battle of the Bands benefit, where bands featured in Treme faced off against bands featured in The Wire (SIMON 2012). In addition to these larger charitable events, Treme also engaged in numerous smaller projects with the aims of both cultural revitalization as well as neighborhood support for rebuilding. For example, they held an “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?” benefit in Pontchartrain Park, Wendell Pierce’s childhood neighborhood that his development non-profit is working to rebuild. From this event, Schweigman argues, It was really fun for the community and it got people into that neighborhood … They are really trying to bring back … It creates awareness … and there are people now that are buying and building houses there that are interested in the community because they came for the fundraiser there … We wanted to raise money but we really wanted to raise awareness of what’s happening in this neighborhood. (personal communication, March 16, 2011)

Schweigman’s comments reveal the kind of direct impact that series producers imagine Treme has on rebuilding neighborhoods, as its decision to invest in this particular neighborhood resulted directly (at least anecdotally) in people’s decisions to invest, buy, and rebuild there. This too can no doubt be said about the Tremé neighborhood, as it brought that kind of awareness to people on a weekly basis. 6 Treme 6

When I asked Schweigman and Overmyer about Treme’s and HBO’s involvement with the House of Blues benefit for Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation, they had little to say. Overmyer suggested that that was something HBO was doing, and that the folks involved with Treme were not really involved in these efforts, though the benefit featured music from the show and used the Treme brand in its marketing. The difference here between these producers’ acknowledgement of the work they do in Pontchartrain Park vs. in “Brad Pitt’s” neighborhood is interesting. It perhaps speaks to the way in which the show’s ideology about the kind of attention that the Lower 9th Ward has received in contrast to other parts of the city interacts with their own desires for materially investing in rebuilding the city as well. This, again, points

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also donated to or attempted to ‘give back’ to each of the individual neighborhoods and communities in which it filmed, whether in the form of holding a crawfish broil, barbeque, or donating to a church organization, social aid and pleasure club, or a local rebuilding organization. Virginia McCollum stated that, in her job as location manager, she’s worked out ways for Treme to donate to many different neighborhood organizations, including neighborhood associations in Tremé, Uptown, the Marigny, Central City, Esplanade Ridge, and others, in an effort to “channel funding to the people of New Orleans” (personal communication, March 15, 2011).7 McCollum also notes that each time they have to purchase a permit from the city, they are, in effect, making a contribution, which, she argues, “on an ongoing basis, that really adds up, and it helps a city that’s foundering economically” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Though there is significant debate over whether or not this is the case – i.e. whether or not film production does indeed economically benefit cities, especially in terms of whether or not it evens out with the state’s generous tax incentives (CEIDR 2006; EGAN 2010; FINN 2011; MAYER and GOLDMAN 2010; POPE 2010; SAAS 2006; TANNENWALD 2010; YERTON 2005) – what is most interesting to me here is less the economics than the rationality that these efforts are aimed at a kind of socially responsible neighboring to benefit the communities they work with. Indeed, the producers I spoke with from Treme all seemed to align with the broader rationale identified by Vincanne ADAMS (2013) at the beginning of this section that presumes that private corporate philanthropy is effectively suited to redress the harms of Katrina. In marshalling this rationality, and participating in these acts of philanthropy, Treme situated itself as a key actor in demonstrating that the television industry could be an effective partner in helping to rebuild the city. While this helps to legitimate neoliberal solutions to disaster in post-Katrina New Orleans, it also is worth considering how HBO stands to profit by situating itself as this effective partner in rebuilding. David Simon noted on the CTAM panel, “There is a responsibility … if you are pulling from the real, I think there is a necessity both moral and practical of getting in there and being connected to the community” (SIMON et al. 2010). Simon’s comment suggests that Treme is responsible not only for its representations and storytelling, but they also claim to be acting as a responsible corporate citizen, neighbor, and community builder. This mirrors discourses of corporate social responsibility, in which corporations are encouraged to see their responsibilities as going beyond those of profit. Profit, instead, is to be balanced with other social goods that corporations are expected to provide to the communities in which they

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to the significance of thinking through the interconnections between the show’s representations and its broader spatial practices in the city. It can also no doubt be said that it helps these organizations to become more aware of Treme as well, and increases the likelihood that they will be able to film there, return to film there, or can solicit potential talent from the neighborhood. Producers from the show make efforts to show up at the events, such as the barbeques, both to say thank you to the community as well as to hear their concerns or praise for the series and its work in the city (Schweigman, personal communication, March 17, 2011).

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are a part. Similarly, Simon is suggesting that if Treme was going to profit from its pulling from the communities of New Orleans, i.e. through the many forms of ‘authentic’ culture they seek to display in the show through on-location filming and local hiring, and perhaps especially musical culture, then they too had a responsibility to give back to that community that they were pulling from. However, corporate social responsibility presumes that the benefits to the community that these charitable acts create also help to produce a return on investment as well, as they come back to the corporation through the good will and positive branding that such stewardship to the community begets. Corporate social responsibility demands that charity efforts must render a profit, where acting virtuously is tied up with a business strategy (BARRY 2004; OUELLETTE 2012; VOGEL 2005). Because Treme results in relatively few dollars for HBO due to its comparatively small audience, the particular aim of its virtuous business strategy, then, is perhaps more so in helping to define the HBO brand as ethical, responsible, and politically engaged, which can translate into future subscriptions and various forms of diverse revenue through DVD sales, interest in future content, syndications, iTunes sales, and so forth. In other words, it is through the ways in which charity constructs the Treme brand as a form of passionate engagement, where purchasing on the part of the audience is an extended act of charity that effectively ‘thanks’ HBO and Treme for their charitable contributions, that these charitable contributions are able to transform affective surplus into fiscal surplus. It is worth mentioning, however, that Treme’s expectations of its viewers go beyond mere viewing, just as the expectations of the production go beyond storytelling. Viewers too are enjoined not just to practice their ethical responsibility through watching and consuming Treme paraphernalia, but they too are asked to give. In this sense, charity becomes an outlet for the affective surplus created by both Katrina as well as the series. Viewers could, for example, attend one of the charity events above, but they are also invited to be charitable beyond these events. For example, on David Simon’s website, he has a page titled “Worthy Causes,” where he tells his readers, Below is a list of charities and non-profits that we’ve sponsored in connection with television production in Baltimore and New Orleans. In the event that anything that we’ve worked on for HBO or in prose has found any favor and left anyone ready to unass a few dollars for a taxdeductible cause, it’s probable that something on the list will directly address an issue, locale or dynamic that we dramatized. (SIMON n.d.)

Treme viewers are thus asked to passionately engage with the series through engaging in charitable acts of their own, using Simon’s list as a jumping point for constituting themselves as ethically engaged citizens. In so doing, Treme helps to constitute a kind of “citizen brand,” which Laurie Ouellette defines as “an ethical disposition and suggested mode of civic conduct,” where TV viewers move “beyond a passive engagement with the text … to the investments and actions that produce brand value” by “performing one’s duty as a citizen” in ways that “produce an ethical surplus that can be recuperated as brand value” (OUELLETTE 2012, 69–70). Similarly, Treme helps to imbibe the HBO brand with a kind of ethics and virtuosity

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not only through its text and the representations of politicized and ethical perspective on post-Katrina New Orleans, but it also does so in and through the forms of ethical conduct that viewers are enjoined to engage in through their relationships with the program that result in particular kinds of ethical practices in the city. Treme as charity is therefore part of a broader HBO branding strategy that rests upon a discourse of corporate social responsibility, where the ethics of filming in the city, shining a spotlight on the city’s continuing struggles, and producing civically engaged citizens invested in rebuilding the culture of New Orleans is assumed to also translate back into dollars for HBO. These characterizations of Treme as a form of charity, along with Kessler’s comment that Treme is “getting things done,” and the enjoinment of viewers to constitute themselves as part of a citizen brand, position Treme within the trajectory of what OUELLETTE (2006) has referred to as “Do Good TV.” As OUELLETTE notes, “Do Good TV” is a genre of television programming that emphasizes the social responsibilities of not only viewers, but also of the television industry as well. Ouellette emphasizes that television programming featuring the industry giving back to viewers and communities is not new, but it has nevertheless seen a resurgence in more recent years. “Do Good TV,” she argues, is a result of shifts in both government policy – including “public sector downsizing, the encouragement of publicprivate partnerships, the outsourcing of many government services to commercial firms, and the dismantling of welfare programs” (OUELLETTE 2012, 59) – as well as shifts in the television industry that situate television’s public service obligations in a “voluntary and commercially exploitable form” (58) in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. “Do good TV” as a kind of public welfare must, therefore, be first and foremost profitable, i.e. demonstrate a potential for return on investment. Often, this profit comes in the form of building “brand value” and affective relationships with viewers through branded interfaces and interactive media outlets that encourage audiences to stitch themselves into branded communities through active participation online. As discussed above, Treme perhaps adds to these online engagements the dynamic of place-based action, and in this sense the tourism associated with Treme, discussed above as well as in the previous chapter, becomes itself bound up with a kind of charitable action and engagement on the part of the viewer. Taken together with the more direct ways that viewers are encouraged to give back to New Orleans, Treme is positioned as a branded interface for viewers to contribute to the city’s rebuilding and to contribute to building HBO’s brand value as a form of “Do Good TV.” Treme’s charitable acts of corporate social responsibility in creating communities and resolving the harms of Katrina, therefore, are all filtered through the HBO brand. HBO positions itself as a “platform for action,” exploiting the ethical surplus of community by “making the productive sociality of consumers evolve on the premises of brands; to make it unfold through branded consumer goods in such ways that makes it produce measurable (and hence valuable) forms of attention” (ARVIDSSON 2005, 251). How are these forms of attention, and, in this case, forms of enactment through charitable giving and tourism, transformed into brand value? It is to this question that I now turn.

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TRANSFORMING PASSIONATE ENGAGEMENT INTO BRAND VALUE Tying HBO’s brand value to a particular place and the practices of tourists and their, and HBO’s, charitable acts, opens up the possibility of measuring the passionate engagement of viewers by hinging them to the cultural economy in New Orleans. As GREENBERG (2008, 35–36) notes, media / tourist / city partnerships have played a crucial role in the shift to the branded, neoliberal city, where film and television representations serve the role of transforming the city “from a real place of value and meaning for residents and workers to an abstract space for capital investment and profit-making and a commodity for broader consumption.” While this helps to produce an “intangible exchange value” for the city through the production of its branded image, it also provides a context for a similar production of immaterial value for the TV network brand as well. With regards to charity, Treme can produce a measurable impact by taking credit for the amount of money they have been able to raise for charities that are directly tied to the show, including those listed on Simon’s “Worthy Causes.” Though producers claimed they were not tracking the numbers of tourists or the entirety of their charitable gifts resulting from the show when I interviewed them during the filming of Treme’s second season, they pointed to numerous anecdotal examples to demonstrate Treme’s impact. 8 Although Treme producers might not have tracked tourism numbers directly, the tourism industry in New Orleans and the city’s film commission does, though being able to connect Treme directly to tourists’ motivations and destinations is also a particularly difficult thing to measure (CUTLER 2011). Nevertheless, the city and the tourism industry continually point to the show as an example of how the film industry in the city can produce tourism, especially niche tourism, and the show itself has become a key means for the city to justify the state’s tax incentive program (BRENNAN 2014; SCOTT 2010). So too, both Treme’s producers and the city continually extol the socially responsible giving of the series in terms of its philanthropic efforts as justifications as well. In its direct charitable contributions, positioning its filming in New Orleans itself as ‘charity,’ as well as in its elicitation of viewers’ charitable acts, Treme, and by extension HBO, “recontextualizes corporate and managerial practices … into political … and social contexts” (BANET-WEISER 2012b, 46). That is, the corporate decisions that govern filming on-location are recontextualized within a discourse of ethical responsibility. The tax incentives that Treme receives, for example, are therefore refigured from corporate welfare to a kind of public-private partnership that can contribute to the rebuilding and economic regeneration of the city. 8

Eric Overmyer (Executive Producer and Creator), for example, in our March 15, 2011 interview, cited an example of a group of tourists from Cleveland meeting Wendell Pierce who had said they had never been to nor planned to go to New Orleans until they saw the show. This anecdote was also mentioned during the CTAM Summit panel as well as in media interviews with producers (see, for example, (VARGAS 2010). The prevalence of this anecdote suggests it was mobilized to justify Treme’s value within HBO and to the city of New Orleans.

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Indeed, this transformation of Treme’s perceived ethical responsibility into brand value for HBO was demonstrated quite clearly in a debate that erupted on twitter between David Simon and Andy Cohen, a TV executive and personality on the network Bravo, about the ethicality of Treme taking tax incentives from New Orleans. The debate began when the chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, a writer and advisor for Treme, criticized the tax incentives that Bravo’s Top Chef: New Orleans (Bravo 201–2014) received. In his original tweet, Bourdain questioned whether Bravo agreeing to take tax credits that were provided in the wake of the BP oil spill was ethically responsible, suggesting “Maybe give the 200G back to Louisiana? Would be a nice thing to do” (quoted in FORBES 2013). Cohen responded by calling out Bourdain’s hypocrisy with regards to the tax incentives Treme received, arguing, “@Bourdain read to the bottom, explains what the BP fund actually is? then call me abt Treme’s tax credits from NOLA.” After going back and forth with Cohen on twitter, David Simon finally took to his blog to compose a more thorough response, where he ultimately argued, Although the budgetary authority rests with HBO and not with the Treme production, it is fair to note that for four years, HBO allocated additional funds to underwrite a long-term campaign by Treme to raise money for a series of 501c3 charities in New Orleans. Between various fundraising campaign and events over the last four years and direct donations by producers, more than $500,000 was left behind for the use of New Orleans non-profits. What was in our power to do, we did. Whatever we could leverage, we leveraged. And what we promised those charities, we delivered. Not as an offhand or after-the-fact gesture, but as a continuing effort to use the production and its resources on behalf of our host city. We did the same thing in Baltimore, in fact, when filming there. And to measure apples against apples, what Mr. Bourdain was urging on Mr. Cohen, as I understand it, was not a blanket prohibition against accepting advantageous give-backs from Louisiana, but instead a charitable donation of that benefit, or some portion of it, to help locals. (SIMON 2013)

He further clarified that while Top Chef producers actively sought out additional tax credits, Treme just took what was standard. Simon also noted that Cohen was the head of Bravo, and decisions about tax credits were “above his paygrade,” such that it was HBO that made those decisions about whether or not take the tax credits. Although there is no doubt a difference between Treme and Top Chef in how they position their ethical responsibility to the city, it is clear from this debate that Simon, and by extension HBO, recontextualizes what is effectively a business decision – i.e. whether or not to accept tax credits and how to do so – in terms of a sensibility of ethical responsibility. In so doing, Simon’s diatribe against Cohen effectively becomes a means of helping to solidify HBO’s brand value as an ethically responsible neighbor, as opposed to Top Chef. What’s more is that Simon’s rhetoric positions Treme as somewhat “pulling one over on HBO” by getting them to raise money for the city, perhaps in ways that go against a purely profit driven shareholder interest. Yet, at the same time, he defers responsibility for the tax incentives to the higher ups, again positioning himself and Treme as outsiders in HBO’s broader TV economy. What is interesting to me here is that this rhetoric is particularly valuable to HBO, as it helps to contribute to its branding as an edgy TV network, as a space for real creatives, like David Simon, even while acknowledging

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HBO’s dominant role within the TV industry. The debate between Simon and Cohen therefore does not deny the tax incentives and benefits that made the filming of Treme possible in the first place, since the show likely wouldn’t have gotten picked up without the favorable film economy, but rather situates the tax incentive program in tandem with its discourses of social responsibility. Although the series was only given a five-series episode run for its final season, the fact the show was able to continue at all given its low audience numbers points to the important role that these incentives played in rationalizing its ongoing production. The tax incentives made the work that the show did for the brand worthwhile in the eyes of executives and shareholders, a point not lost on Eric Overmyer, who conceded that the show likely would not have even been made had it not been for the incentives (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Furthermore, it could be argued that Treme contributes to forms of cultural revitalization by directing tourists and their charitable donations to places and organizations off the beaten path. But the profit guaranteed to the creative practitioners (e.g. musicians, chefs, Mardi Gras Indians, and so forth) is relatively little compared to the enormous tax incentives HBO received to film on-location in New Orleans. For Season 1 alone, Treme accumulated a total of over $9 million in tax credits, for an approximate $30 million budget (MATHIS 2012). In comparison, the proprietor of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, which houses numerous items related to Mardi Gras Indian practices and was a filming location for Treme, expressed that he was initially excited when he heard he would receive a check for film royalties, only to find out when the check arrived that he received only $0.97! (personal communication, March 23, 2014). Now, this is not all he received to open up his museum for the film crew over the course of the series’ three and a half seasons, yet it nevertheless speaks to the greatly unequal expenditures for cultural practitioners on site versus the economic benefit for HBO to film there. Further, even if the Backstreet turns a higher profit as a result of Treme tourism, this profit will always pale in comparison to the tremendous profits that HBO could reap in taking advantage of the city’s tax incentives program which, again, hinges on the expectation that it will produce precisely the kind of immaterial labor of viewer-tourist-philanthropists to visit places like the Backstreet. This points to how the cultural policy of tax incentives and the strategy of tying passionate engagement to place through TV inspired tourism and charity work together to value the mobility of the TV industry and viewer-tourists over the labor of the cultural practitioners from whom these industries profit. As DÁVILA (2012) notes, “Our contemporary creative economy values movement and mobility, and it is ‘fickle’ cultural initiatives that can pack up and leave that are most valued and that are said to require incentives and to demand romancing” (Kindle Location 1528–1532). The money that is put into the tax incentive program could be used to profit those individuals and communities within New Orleans involved in the production of culture, but it is instead the film and TV industry who are seen to need the most incentivizing to tie themselves to New Orleans. Thus, the mobility of HBO and its viewer-tourist-philanthropists are valorized and become the means for producing profits off of the place-bound cultural practitioners in New Orleans. The

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practices of those who live in New Orleans and make culture remain undervalued even amidst discourses of the cultural and creative economy, while the creative entrepreneurialism of the mobile television industry and HBO (who can essentially choose where to film) and their viewers (who can choose where to tour or whom to give their charity) benefit from the cultural hierarchies that cultural policies like tax incentives construct by determining which and whose labor is most valuable and worthy of incentivizing. In this sense, Treme’s production of brand value via the branded interface of touristic philanthropy and their concomitant extraction of tax incentives could be considered in terms of what WOODS (2009) refers to as asset stripping. Woods notes asset stripping is a “key pillar of neoliberalism ... it refers to a new state philosophy and a practice of global wealth redistribution that are based, among other things, on the privatization of publicly held assets and the deregulation of corporate practices” (WOODS 2009, 775). Considering especially the role of asset stripping from racially enclosed communities, particularly those in New Orleans, he suggests, “romantic visions of New Orleans have masked the extent to which the region has been the center for class, racial, gender, regional, and hemispheric schisms for centuries,” and he argues the city’s racially enclosed communities have been stripped through various forms of “abandonment, deregulation, and privatization of key public responsibilities, institutions, and rights before, and after, Hurricane Katrina” (WOODS 2009, 775–776). Drawing on this conception of asset stripping of racially enclosed communities, it could be argued HBO capitalizes on the racial enclosures of the relative place-boundedness of New Orleans cultural production, especially those forms of cultural practice featured on Treme that are tied to the specific cultural histories of New Orleans neighborhoods, by transforming these cultural products and cultural practices (which might otherwise be considered a kind of public good) into a means of privatized profit through the mobile tourism and precarious philanthropy of TV industries. Moreover, the discourse of authenticity manages viewer experiences in New Orleans in ways that facilitate this kind of asset stripping. The HBO and Treme brands act as a kind of guarantee that viewers can enact their tourist and philanthropic sensibilities in ways that are distinguished from the ‘bad’ kind of tourism and charity degraded by the series. As such, the HBO brand itself becomes the means through which viewers act and interact in New Orleans. This then stitches the viewer more tightly to the HBO brand, as it becomes the vehicle and means for experiencing ‘authenticity,’ thus deepening passionate engagement with the brand in ways that seem themselves authentic. In this sense, Treme’s embededness in discourses of authenticity plays a role in shaping an urban imaginary of New Orleans that privileges the mobile consumption of authenticity of viewer-tourist-philanthropists over the notion of authenticity as a social right for the poor and dispossessed cultural practitioners featured on screen to stake a claim in the right to the city (ZUKIN 2010, 27). Again, this constitutes asset stripping, as the ‘authenticity’ of New Orleans’ racialized culture that viewers are invited to ‘experience,’ and the affective surpluses produced out of both viewer and practitioner labors, are stripped for the privatized profit of the TV, tourism, and charity industries.

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It is precisely these immaterial and affective surpluses produced through ‘authentic’ encounters between viewers and New Orleans culture in situ that HBO hopes to be able to capitalize on, as it suggests to them, as Eric Kessler noted in the CTAM Summit panel, a form of passionate engagement that will translate into the show having a “long tail” (SIMON et al. 2010). That is, he hopes the kinds of passionate engagement that the show can help inspire will pay off in dividends far into the future, such as in the kind of viewer loyalty that can translate into accumulating audiences, drawing viewers into other shows, buying DVD’s, connecting on their multiple screen platforms and social media, buying merchandise related to the series like the Treme cookbook, and so forth. Each of these activities aims to capitalize on viewers’ affective surpluses, which, in the case of Treme, are theorized to produce a form of intensity – due to the ability to materialize the brand through viewers’ touristic experiences in, and charitable affectations toward, New Orleans – that, despite the show’s low viewership, HBO executives hope will provide precisely the kind of formula necessary for elevating the HBO brand in the midst of its post-broadcast uncertainty. However, I want to be careful here not to dismiss the particular forms of engagement that Treme elicits from viewers as merely a means of extracting surplus values that are transformed into dollars for HBO. There is also the potential that Treme is indeed tactically subverting HBO’s dominant, capitalist interests, as well as those of its viewers, by getting the network and its affluent viewers to donate when they otherwise wouldn’t, to causes they otherwise wouldn’t. Although, as I acknowledge in the following chapter, it is problematic that this is as far as viewers are asked to go in their political commitment and their political engagement, such that passionate engagement cannot be as clearly translated into political engagement as it can be into brand value, it is still important to acknowledge that this was still perhaps a meaningful engagement for a number of Treme viewers, as well as for HBO and its executives, that otherwise might not have happened. Still, based on David Simon’s rhetoric, one might presume that perhaps Treme got HBO to donate large sums of money, but that really wasn’t the case. The $500,000 in donations seems so infinitesimally small when compared to HBO’s, and Time Warner’s, bottom line. And, indeed, these donations primarily came from Simon’s own production company as well as in utilizing HBO as a platform to generate individual donations. The HBO name, brand, etc. was therefore just a platform for action, a branded interface, through which the affective surpluses of viewers could be directed in potentially more profitable ways, as the network aimed to capitalize on their passionate engagements with New Orleans. These donations also work within the corporatization of philanthropy, where corporate sponsors piggyback on their employees to claim corporate social responsibility by gathering data on and publicizing the charitable work of its employees. HBO similarly piggybacks on Treme as a kind of ‘charity case’ to garner immaterial brand and affective value to sell to its audiences who can then feel as though their subscriptions, purchases of DVD’s, etc. are worthwhile investments that are part of a larger cause. This is all a matter of managing and directing affect, which in part goes to these charities and to the city of New Orleans, but it also goes back to HBO.

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CONCLUSION This chapter argued Treme helps throw focus onto the new and innovative ways in which the television industry tries to capture the productive labor of audiences by demonstrating how place, and especially the practice of TV tourism and charity, can be harnessed as a means of extracting brand value through the productive and immaterial labor of viewers and their sense of connection to and experience in an ‘authentic’ place. Significantly, Treme invites viewers not just to go online and interact virtually, as has been discussed in scholarship on passionate engagement and TV branding previously, but also to participate in a material place as viewer-touristphilanthropists. Treme demonstrates one new strategy utilized by HBO in the postbroadcast era to produce more intense forms of passionate engagement in order to justify its brand value to its shareholders. Whereas previous scholarship has addressed TV branding in terms of transmedia storytelling and audiences’ online interactivites (e.g. BOURDAA 2014; CLARKE 2012; COX 2015; EDWARDS 2012; EVANS 2013; GILLAN 2011; HARTLEY 2009; IBRUS and SCOLARI 2014; JENKINS 2006; JENNER 2016; LAHEY 2016; LOTZ 2014; PIÑÓN 2014; WOOD and BAUGHMAN 2012), Treme illustrates the potential for considering the significance of viewers’ mobile interactions in a material place in HBO’s post-broadcast branding strategy. It must be acknowledged, however, that Treme constituted only one of HBO’s post-broadcast branding strategies, and it might as yet prove to be a failed strategy, as was perhaps signified by Treme’s shortened final season. In addition to potentially being a failed strategy, one could also argue that Treme is an exceptional and atypical example in HBO’s original programming and thus does not constitute a significant aspect of their overall branding strategy. Likewise, it could be argued that its practices of production in the city are unique and therefore uncharacteristic of other forms of television production’s spatialities. However, there is evidence to suggest that Treme is perhaps not so atypical, as a number of HBO’s other series also work to engage viewer affects in place as well. Many of HBO’s original programs, as well as various other networks’ programs, are filmed on-location in cities that evoke a sense of ‘authenticity’ and viewer connection to place, and numerous efforts to mobilize viewer engagements in these places have emerged. For example, like Treme, HBO’s hit series Girls (HBO 2012–) is filmed onlocation in New York City and features the city, and especially Brooklyn, as a kind of character. And like its predecessor, Sex in the City (HBO 1998–2004) – which also filmed in New York City – numerous efforts to experience the city through the show have emerged in the form of tourism. 9 In 2012, WNYC and The Guardian initiated a Google mapping of all of the New York City locations featured on Girls, soliciting contributions from viewers to help plot locations on their Google map and warning, “SPOILER ALERT: Looking at this map will reveal plot twists and turns

9

Even 10+ years after filming wrapped for Sex in the City, tours featuring the show’s sites and sounds like this one (Sex and the City Hotspots Tour NYC | Sex and the City Tour New York : On Location Tours n.d.)

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in the series.” 10 Like Treme for the New Orleans’ neighborhoods featured on the show, HBO’s extraction of value from viewer engagements in Brooklyn subsumes an affective surplus borne out of viewers’ connections to place to provide brand value to the network and the series. Similarly, in his discussion of filming the HBO series Looking (HBO 2014–2016) on-location in San Francisco, showrunner Michael Lannan suggested, he had “never seen the city he lives on camera … S.F. feels very different from any other city in America … It’s really important the show feels like it was embedded in the city” (MERICLE 2014). Thus, like Treme, Looking draws on a rhetoric of authenticity and enjoins viewers to consume a behind the scenes view of the city, promising to show them “new angles and locals only spots” where they can guess “which street characters walk down, which restaurants they eat in” (MERICLE 2014). Like Girls, online sites like Curbed have drawn on the collective intelligence of the web to map the shooting locations. Even HBO’s arguably most successful series in recent years, Game of Thrones (2011–), set in a fictional place, has engendered similar efforts amongst fans to map filming locations (PARIS 2014). In each of these examples, as well as for Treme, it appears as though viewers initiate the “mapping” of the city through the show. This kind of ‘grassroots’ rather than top down management of viewer interaction is precisely what HBO is looking for, as it is assumed to demonstrate a more ‘authentic’ form of passionate engagement that emerges from the viewers themselves. It is thus the immaterial labor of the viewer that ultimately produces the affective surplus that contributes to the brand value of HBO. And it is perhaps to this end that location and place serve as key matrices through which to stimulate this kind of interaction, as they draw upon viewers’ senses of connection to place to begin with as a way to lend meaning and affective connection to the series and network brand. These examples suggest that Treme is not necessarily an outlier, but, rather, can serve as a focal point for asking a different set of questions about contemporary branding practices and their relationship to viewer interactivity and passionate engagement that have, as yet, been largely underexplored. This chapter thus demonstrates how HBO inflects passionate engagement, a key rhetorical TV industry discourse, with a new matrix in its transmediated storytelling through which to extract value from viewers’ interactivities. This strategy promises to give viewers the experiences they see on TV, where struggling over the text, narrative, and characters goes further than manipulating the pre-received content from HBO and instead is actualized through viewers living out and making their own identity as part of that text, affectively emplaced in the city via practices of tourism and charity. And, indeed, the show calls upon the viewer to do precisely this; it interpellates the viewer not as an armchair tourist but as a citizen with a responsibility for getting to know, and to help, New Orleans on a more intimate level. But the series directs viewers to activate this citizenly responsibility in largely 10 Abbie Fentress Swanson, “Map: Where to Find the ‘Girls’ in NYC - WNYC,” WNYC, June 11, 2012, http://www.wnyc.org/story/215288-girls-mapped/; (VALINSKY 2012)

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neoliberal ways, through practices oriented more toward individual consumption than collective politicization, where the series’ transmediations of New Orleans’ ‘authenticity’ guide the viewer to interact with the city in and through HBO’s and Treme’s particular versions of ‘authentic’ New Orleans. This forecloses the potentially more radical political potentials that might be offered up from a show like Treme, where the narrative ostensibly focuses on collective social protest, the failed promises of neoliberal capital, and the declining social safety net. Ultimately, what I’ve hoped to have demonstrated is how Treme works to rebrand HBO in the post-broadcast era by capitalizing on place and the passionate engagements of viewer-tourist-philanthropists in a particular place. This adds to the ways in which the previous chapters have suggested Treme participates in the rebuilding and rebranding of post-Katrina New Orleans through its intersections with cultural policy and urban planning. That is, through the television industry’s connection to a particular place, it works to not only renew those places, but also to renew the television industry at this particular conjuncture as well. This suggests that the current conjuncture renders a perhaps more intimate connection between the television industry and the post-industrial city than has previously been considered in either television studies or urban studies scholarship.

CONCLUSION In the preceding pages, I hoped to have made the case that Treme brings into focus the complex and material ways that television can shape city space and life, particularly in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans. Treme demonstrates how the shifting terrain of post-broadcast and on-location television production, and the increasingly tactical approach to entrepreneurializing the creative city, positions television to work as a spatial practice. As such, I hope to have persuaded scholars to interrogate the dispersed and material ways that media participates in the production and reproduction of urban space. As a production shot entirely on-location, Treme invests itself in the city as a socially responsible corporate neighbor, and it invites viewers to materially engage in the city as well. It is therefore not only its text that instructs viewers or city residents on how to conduct themselves as citizens to redress the harms of Katrina. It is also its material practices that are emplaced in the city of New Orleans that enact these practical and technical means for residents and viewers alike to participate in rebuilding post-Katrina New Orleans. Theorizing media as a spatial practice therefore brings attention to the ways in which Treme’s practices in the city are embodied and embodying practices, and, in particular, how television production participates directly in not only representing space but also in governing, regulating, and organizing neighborhood space as habitus and locality. Although I am not suggesting that how Treme represents New Orleans as a place does not matter, I am arguing that the way in which its representations matter is perhaps distinct from how media, and particularly television, scholarship tends to theorize media’s relationship to cities. As I argued in Chapters 1 and 2, New Orleans’ aim to become Hollywood South, along with shifts in post-broadcast television and neoliberal creative cities strategies, position Treme to participate in New Orleans in ways that were unimaginable during earlier productions like Frank’s Place. The ‘place’ of New Orleans for Treme is not just a symbolic signifier that makes its way on screen and invites viewers to contemplate racialized forms of identity and ideology. Rather, Treme’s material interactions with and participations in New Orleans, bound up with producers’ aims at journalistic realism and the production of ‘authenticity,’ significantly influence what happens on screen. In other words, what happens, and has happened, in New Orleans matters in a way for Treme that it did not for Frank’s Place. Specifically, in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, I highlighted some of the ways in which this mattering comes into play in the production process, such as in Treme’s spatial practices of on-location shooting, local hiring, tourism, and charity. In each of these examples, I demonstrated how these are indeed practices tied to creating an ‘authentic’ representation of New Orleans on screen, but these practices also participate in the production of the ‘authentic’ city itself by implementing the post-Katrina rationalities of the New Orleans’ new Master Plan, discussed in Chapter 2. Moreover, Treme’s viewers are called upon to do more than

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contemplate and interpret representations of New Orleans, or to create affective commitments through interactively participating in transmedia storytelling, as well. In Chapter 5, I argued viewers are called upon instead to also actively participate and engage with the city more directly and materially, to interact in place, through tourism and charity. The HBO and Treme brands are thus positioned as vehicles for enabling that participation to be material, ‘ethical,’ and ‘authentic,’ where the series provides not just a “window to the world” but instead positions the HBO brand as a vehicle for viewers to forms ties of passionate engagement with a particular place. Taken together, this book has aimed to demonstrate how governing the post-Katrina city and those of the profit-making media industries are brought into productive alignment. That is, Treme’s spatial practices of production and those of its viewers are productive for both rebranding and rebuilding New Orleans in the wake of Katrina’s racial / class / spatial antagonisms as well as for rebranding and producing brand value for HBO in the post-broadcast era. These spatial practices of Treme, both in the form of passionately engaged viewer interactivities and in the practices of television production, call upon media scholars to ask a different set of questions of Treme than those that were asked of Frank’s Place, and those that continue to be raised with regards to media’s relationship to place and to cities in the present. These questions necessitate analyses that go beyond the text. Again, this does not mean that Treme’s text and its representational signifiers don’t matter. What it means is that Treme’s representations are also inextricably intertwined with its more material spatial practices of production. In order to discern the work of Treme’s text, then, I suggest that its representations must also be contextualized in its broader and more dispersed spatial practices in the city. I thus hope that in proposing to consider media as a spatial practice, this book contributes to a sharper focus on the relationships between media, race, and space at the current conjuncture, and in New Orleans in particular, where vernacular practices of the neighborhood are brought into alignment with the aims of global media industries, urban planners, cultural policy, agents of city government, and residents struggling over the right to return. Nevertheless, Treme represents just one example of HBO’s new branding efforts as well as the way in which New Orleans is utilizing the media industry to rebuild and rebrand itself. Treme is perhaps an exception in the way in which media interacts with cities and in HBO’s line up. It is indicative of an immersion in city space that is perhaps unlikely to be replicated in other cities and in other programs. However, I would argue in response that it is perhaps precisely Treme’s irreproducibility that is of significance. That is, in an era in which cities are starting to eschew the “best practices” approach of the creative city in favor of more indigenous forms of entrepreneurializing creative neighborhoods as creative placemaking, and the TV industry too is looking for new ways to revolutionize its potentials for unique and immersive experiences in an increasingly mobile industry, Treme emerges as perhaps the leading example of how site-specificity and spatial practices of production can work as a distinguishing factor in branding both the city and the network. Indeed, a number of television shows have emerged that are filmed on-location and where the site of filming is also centrally at stake in the narrative, constituting

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a kind of character struggled over in the narrative, but also struggled over in terms of the direct impacts that filming has on those spaces and places as well. Although place has constituted a core backdrop and even sometimes a key character in television series before Treme, the shift the series highlights in on-location production and the foregrounding of place and authenticity, bound up with spatialized production practices, is a somewhat novel practice that warrants more scholarly attention. For example, Orange County was a place that was made famous by a range of television shows that emerged in the early 2000s – e.g. The OC (Fox 2003–2007), The Real Housewives of Orange County (Bravo, 2006–present), and Laguna Beach (MTV, 2004–2006) – and these shows helped to rebrand and promote the area (see FLETCHALL et al. 2012). Although most of the filming for The OC took place in Los Angeles County because it was cheaper to film there, the two reality programs listed here were filmed largely in sites and locales that would be deemed ‘authentic’ to the particular groups each show sought to highlight, i.e. wealthy socialite women and wealthy teenagers, respectively. These reality programs were perhaps precursors to a show like Treme, along with other programs like Top Chef and The Real Housewives franchises as well, seeking to capitalize on affective sensibilities of place, filming in particular cities and using those cities as part of its name, brand, and featuring filming locations to highlight the ‘authenticity’ of place. Since Treme’s airing, numerous other programs have emerged, not only on reality TV but in scripted fictional television as well, that are filmed on-location and foreground the city name in its title, such as Nashville (ABC 2012–2016; CMT 2016–present), Atlanta (FX 2016–), and Portlandia (IFC 2011–), as well as the short-lived Detroit 1-8-7 (ABC 2010–2011) and Dallas (TNT 2012–2014) (a remake of the long-running primetime soap by the same name that aired on CBS from 1978–1991, which had been filmed in L.A.). The titles of these shows signify the importance of place, and cities in particular, to the show’s branding and connectivity to viewer affects. Like Treme, these shows are about this place, about the particularities of these cities, and place is directly at stake in the narrative, constituting a kind of character. But the place is materialized in more direct and material ways as well due to the location of filming. Like Treme, where and how these shows film matters, not just for the narrative, but for the places, neighborhoods, and residents of those places themselves. And like Treme as well, each of these cities, is invested in attracting film and television production to help embed the creative industries. It bears mentioning that Atlanta and Nashville are also tied to the music industry, where Atlanta’s hip hop and Nashville’s country music industry are given new life through their connectivity to the profitable potentials of the TV industry. Each of these shows, then, also plays a role in materializing and entrepreneurializing ‘authentic’ culture in ways that exceed its representations and narrative. As a journalist for the online film and television trade magazine, Deadline, reported from an interview with Donald Glover, showrunner for Atlanta, Glover grew up in Atlanta and talked at length about his special connection to the city he calls “a very special place.” The city, he says, absolutely influenced the tone of the show. “I know it’s going to be very easy for people to say ‘it’s a black Mecca,’ and it is, but I just think that it’s the most American place,” he said. “Everybody there is like ‘Yo, I got a verse’. Everybody

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Conclusion is trying to make something from nothing.” On his approach to the characters, Glover said, “I believe everybody has a situation, and I wanted to show real people in real situations … I wanted to make it a regional thing.” (N’DUKA 2016)

Glover seems to suggest that, like Treme, filming on-location enabled him to draw from the real, to capitalize on the living labor of everyday Atlantans as a means of constituting an authentic series that would resonate not through stereotype, i.e. “Black Mecca,” but with a more locals-only, regional feel. As Glover’s comments suggest, each of these cities are marked as well by significant histories of race and class that are tied to their respective city’s histories of racial struggle and justice, as well as to particular neighborhoods as they were effected by practices like real-estate redlining, cultural zonation, gentrification, and policing. Likewise, the filming practices of each of the productions play a direct role in intervening into these racialized neighborhood spaces in the present. Portlandia, for example, films primarily in North and Northeast Portland, which are the city’s historically Black neighborhoods. Filming there has not only opened up these neighborhoods to renewed bouts of gentrification through the promotion of these spaces as hip and ‘authentic.’ The more mundane activities of filming have also positioned the Portlandia production to inscribe signifiers and practices of whiteness more directly onto neighborhood spatiality and embodiment (MORGAN PARMETT 2018). Series like Nashville, Portlandia, and Atlanta suggest a trend in contemporary, on-location television production that figures place, the city, and particular neighborhoods in potentially new ways. Their spatial practices of production are bound up with their filming, and the ways in which these come to bear on the narrative and its representations of place, city governance and the production of citizen-subjects, and the branding and production of the television industry’s affective economics requires an attention to these series’ practices beyond the text. If we are to understand the broader ways in which television constitutes place and space, and the particular ways in which its practices intervene into the contemporary city, I hope that my analysis of Treme in this book has helped to pave the way for offering up some tools and insights that can be brought to bear on parsing out these relationships. Treme and New Orleans offer important case studies, not just for how they symbolize broader practices of media in cities, but, rather, also in how they constitute an exemplary process through which future media industries might operate. Due to Katrina, the rebuilding and urban planning frenzy in post-Katrina New Orleans is an important site for testing strategies for how post-industrial cities will survive in the so-called new economy. The storm has, perhaps tragically, enabled the city to see its recovery as a way to overcome FLORIDA’s (2002) and other economists’ criticisms of the city as a ‘left behind’ failure unable to keep up. Given the fact that one of the primary strategies for doing so is to invigorate its cultural economy, with a particular focus on the film and TV industries, New Orleans will serve as a model for other cities who are similarly understood as ‘left behind’ in the new economy. However, although New Orleans may indeed serve as a model for the future development of other post-industrial cities, it is also a sort of aberration in comparison to other cities in the U.S. It is precisely its uniqueness and the struggles

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it has given way to that Treme tries to capture. Yet, it does so in a particular conjuncture in which cities have adopted urban renewal strategies premised on the promotion of local and ‘authentic’ culture, where local culture is seen not only as a strategy of economic investment and urban renewal but also as a strategy for marginalized cultures to gain access to resources and validation of their cultural history and identity (DÁVILA 2004a; YÚDICE 2003). Treme stands as an important example for throwing into relief the stakes in this particular configuration also, then, because it helps to produce New Orleans as a space that is offered up as a model for other cities, and for HBO’s brand identity, precisely because of its un-reproducibility. This emphasizes that viewing television production as a spatial practice does not present a universalizing theory, but, instead, calls for an attention to the specific and particular practices of television productions and their tactical negotiations of space and place within both spatial and historical conjunctures. AFTER TREME It is still unclear what the ultimate consequences of Treme’s material practices will mean for the Tremé neighborhood, New Orleans more generally, and for the future of HBO in the long term. Whether or not Treme will indeed have a “long tail” like The Wire and therefore produce brand value for HBO or the city, as producers and film boosters in the city promise and hope, is still as yet to be determined. Therefore, the implications of Treme’s dispersed interventions, both in its production oriented practices and in the practices it calls forth from viewers, into post-Katrina New Orleans is also still up for debate. Ultimately, however, this book has suggested that Treme’s practice of political and ethical responsibility is marked by somewhat of an ambivalence, in that it is both largely circumscribed by a precarious subscription to corporate social responsibility while at the same time offering a set of spatial, and narrative, practices that might be politicized to invoke an ethics of neighboring and neighborhood that can make a call for the right to return. On the one hand, Treme’s entrepreneurialization of neighborhood space, local culture, and indigenous practices through its spatial practices of production provided vital resources to residents and business owners that has, in the past, neither been given readily by the city and state nor by private corporate investment or philanthropy. Cultural institutions like the Backstreet Cultural Museum, local meeting places, restaurants, bars, and music venues, and the cultural workers to make and remake these places, therefore received both financial benefit and cultural validation through their connection to the show. The series therefore played a role in rebuilding vernacular neighborhood space in ways that would have otherwise been excluded or denied by the dominant rebuilding strategies by corporate and govern-

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mental agencies. Likewise, Treme played an important role in cultural revitalization, especially of the music industry (RAWLS 2011). 1 Their practices perhaps present a welcome shift to an emphasis on indigenous forms of local culture from the more spectacular and commodified cultural promotions of Bourbon Street and the like. Moreover, the Treme production team’s commitment to socially responsible practices of production, at least in theory, demarcate it from many of the Hollywood productions that moved into New Orleans. In the case of productions like Memphis Beat (TNT, 2010–2011), which staged New Orleans as Memphis, for example, these productions have little at stake in terms of how they are seen by residents in the city. They are thus less likely to feel the same kind of responsibility toward the particular spaces and places in which they film than does a production like Treme who depends upon these spaces and its individuals to help promote its ‘authentic’ narrative of space, place, and culture. As a number of folks from the Treme crew went on to work on other television productions, like American Horror Story: Coven (FX 2013–2014) or NCIS (CBS 2014–), there is a hope that the kind of socially responsible filming that was attentive to including marginalized individuals and neighborhoods, and responding to some of their concerns, might be brought into those productions as well (M. Lambert, locations manager, personal communication, March 23, 2014). Yet, Treme’s spatial practices also posed some serious problems. It is unlikely that the benefits of the show’s hiring and labor practices, especially those that focused on local cultural workers, for example, is something that will extend beyond the show to benefit a larger portion of musicians and other cultural practitioners in the city. Even during its filming, it was largely the musicians that were employed by the show who were offered more gigs both in and out of the city. Though there may be greater desire for New Orleans-based and -styled music since Treme wrapped, the show has not produced many tangible benefits but for a few select musicians (RAWLS 2011). Moreover, though the series hired a number of local crew workers, the majority of the above-the-line workers were non-New Orleanians. Producers also stated that they had a difficult time finding experienced below-the-line local workers because there was so much production going on in the city. This points to the need for expanding the educational and training opportunities for local film production, but in the face of sweeping cuts to higher education programs throughout the state (MOLLER 2011), it is unclear how this could be achieved. Though the producers’ charitable donations to training and technical programs to help fertilize local film production like the New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC) might be admirable, I am doubtful that relying on this kind of corporate ‘social welfare’ will provide any long-term or meaningful solution to employment shortages or a lack of educational opportunities. 2 In this sense, there seems to be 1 2

The potential benefit for musicians associated with the show is also bolstered through a crosspromotional tour, organized by Danny Melnick of Absolutely Live, where musicians featured on the show tour the country under the HBO and Treme brand names (GALLO 2011). See also MAYER and GOLDMAN (2010) for a discussion of the problems and failures of film and TV production in New Orleans in terms of labor and hiring practices, especially as they are related to the failure of tax incentives to produce a home grown local production culture.

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few meaningful ways that the series helps to promote the establishment of the kind of local, homegrown film production culture that can benefit a broader array of individuals and organizations both financially and culturally rather than returning most of the profits back to Hollywood. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Treme has not built any permanent production facilities in New Orleans, but, rather, has only built temporary facilities for staging a few scenes which it takes down after production (E. Overmyer, personal communication, March 15, 2011). Thus, while producers claim that giving back to the community is important and that one of the significant ways that they can give back is in helping to bring up crew and facilitate future production in the city, they provide few tangible or sustainable means for doing so. Indeed, this is the hallmark of neoliberal philanthropy, as it provides a ‘hands up’ to entrepreneurialism rather than a ‘hand out’ to social entitlement. Moreover, in the particular case of the Tremé neighborhood, a concern is that the show’s relationship to practices of tourism and both its promotion of and implication in materially cultivating and entrepreneurializing vernacular cultural practices contribute to gentrification. Indeed, a recent report from the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) showed that a number of the city’s neighborhoods, including parts of Tremé, that used to be majority-Black are now occupied by majority-White populations (LABORDE 2016). This is especially a concern in light of the series’ links to the city’s urban planning strategies that aim not at providing more affordable housing but, rather, in entrepreneurializing the poor into creative artists. As ZUKIN (2008) notes, culturally and artistically based strategies for urban renewal are often implicated in driving out the kinds of local culture that made neighborhoods like Tremé distinct in the first place. This becomes a particular concern in light of Treme’s subscription to a discourse of authenticity, where it might give way to practices that aim to “consume authenticity” (ZUKIN 2008) through television inspired tourism and ethical consumption evoked by HBO. These practices risk erasing the histories and struggles out of which authentic culture is borne by posing culture as a marketable commodity and lifestyle choice. Thus, while Treme’s desire to create authentic and inclusive representations suggests a laudable effort toward arguing in favor of the right for all citizens to return, it also risks preventing that very same return by participating in practices that can potentially make those spaces to return out of financial reach to the displaced. This potential is precisely a key reason why going beyond analyses of representations are essential to assessing the critical implications of the series. We must also question to what extent the text’s ‘authentic’ representations are bound up with the series’ material spatial practices that have other, potentially more insidious, consequences and might directly impact the possibilities that residents have to claim a right to the city and a right to return. Additionally, the show’s emphasis on local and vernacular forms of culture aligns with recent policies both nationally and in New Orleans that assume entrepreneurializing local culture will be key to new phases of urban renewal. This emphasis has the tendency to view culture through the lens of an economic rationality, where cultural practices are assumed to be worthwhile because they can produce a return on investment (YÚDICE 2003). A key question that emerges from this logic

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is what happens to those forms of culture that do not seem to create a return on investment? Though the show seems to aim at showcasing forms of cultural practice that had hitherto been left out of this calculating logic, it nonetheless participates in the rendering of culture as valuable through a kind of economic rationality. Indeed, the show very much depends upon the capacity for these cultural practices to produce an economic value in terms of the production of audiences and brand value for HBO. Treme to some extent subsumes, or at least extracts, value from the local, cultural practices it features on the show. These practices are linked to a neoliberalization of space that plays a role in constituting what SHARON ZUKIN (2010) has called the “hybrid city,” where big box stores exist alongside immigrant street vendors and more vernacularly local forms of culture. Treme seems to be precisely this kind of hybrid, as a global media corporation invested in preserving the very local vernacular practices of a culturally ethnic and diverse neighborhood. To an extent, then, the media neighborhood as hybrid city is constitutive of a neoliberalizing of city space into a set of intersecting zones, where BACH (2011, 104) notes that these forms of intra-national, and I would add intra-city, zoning “institutionalizes differential treatment of the population” and is henceforth “one way for states to regulate the (bio)political as well as the economic.” Thus, while Treme might lead to the incorporation of some new cultural practices and spaces in the city, like Tremé, as places of value and cultural export, it also threatens the further exclusion and displacement of the poor who fail to entrepreneurialize. Yet, it is perhaps in these spaces of failed entrepreneurialism where elements of the possibilities for excess might also exist. That is, the spaces and practices that cannot promise a return on investment are also thus not easily captured and made monetizable by HBO. It is perhaps therefore in these spaces where new forms of contestation to the neoliberal city and the media neighborhood might be formulated. However, as these exclusions are also immanent exclusions, these spaces also risk capture as sites of potential for the extraction of future value, and future mediation. Nevertheless, it is also worthwhile asking to what extent Treme’s production of a media neighborhood and its spatial practices might be politicized toward alternative ends. The series’ claim to authenticity is indeed itself political – claims to authenticity are never innocent, but they presume a particular and located view of what and who is and is not authentic. New Orleans has a long and complicated history of utilizing rhetorics of authenticity to sell its cultural assets for consumption, and, more often than not, those claims serve the interests of those in power rather than the poor. The question is, then, to what extent can Treme’s spatial practices be made to make a claim to authenticity that inaugurates an alternative claim to the city and neighborhood spaces in ways that carry forth its textual arguments regarding affordable housing and the right for all residents to return? In other words, in what ways might authenticity, as a spatial practice, also be deployed for social justice? ZUKIN (2010, 26) argues, If authenticity is a state of mind, it’s historic, local, and cool. But if authenticity is a social right, it’s also poor, ethnic and democratic. Authenticity speaks for the right of a city, and a neighborhood, to offer residents, workers, store owners, and street vendors the opportunity to put down roots – to represent, paradoxically, both origins and new beginnings.

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Can Treme participate in producing authenticity not as a state of mind, i.e. as a lifestyle to be consumed, and instead as a right? A right to return, not just for some, but for all? Can Treme’s media neighborhood therefore also be productive of an ethical practice of neighboring, not to protect the sanctity of the neighborhood culture for its inhabitants, but for those who have no neighborhood, no culture, to speak of, a neighborhood that has an infinite claim (BADIOU 2003; ZIZEK 2005)? Again, looking more concretely at the series’ spatial practices in the city is significant – if we only look at its representations, then the only possibility that the series has in producing authenticity is as a mindset, even if that mindset is grounded in arguments about affordable housing (as in the storyline of Albert Lambreaux and the agitation over the demolition of the city’s housing projects). As a spatial practice, in contrast, the series can participate more concretely in struggles over a rhetorically materialist deployment of authenticity. It can play a role in making a claim for whose authenticity matters when, where, and how. In other words, the spatial practices of Treme can play a role in struggles over the right to return as well as in broader struggles over the right to the city and the neighborhood. To date, however, Treme’s producers have shied away from taking more direct forms of intervention in social struggles, perhaps because many of them see themselves as outsiders. Instead, they see their role primarily as storytellers who communicate the active struggles of communities and neighborhoods fighting for social justice. These are communicated through representations of struggles over second lines gaining permits to the city; racism, police brutality, and police corruption; agitation over the closing of the housing projects; fights for keeping open Charity Hospital and efforts to secure health care for all; real estate speculation, corruption, and demolition; as well as the ongoing and underlying narrative communicating a right to return for all New Orleanians. Materially, Treme largely seems to only see its role in these struggles on the ground in terms of its ability to intervene through practices of philanthropy and charity within the rubric of corporate social responsibility, as discussed in Chapter 5. But this kind of understanding of its spatial practices and its political implication in the city primarily as a kind of privatized social welfare is incredibly precarious and fails to account for the ways in which the series’ spatial practices have already implicated it in these struggles over city space. Instead, I suggest media productions should recognize that they are indeed political actors who have a stake in the production of and struggle over city space. As such, I suggest on-location television productions ought to participate in the production of neighborhood as a site of not only neoliberal governance, but also as a site of an ethical encounter, where one encounters the Other as a neighbor (RICOEUR 1965) and in the production of neighborhood as a space of locality. According to APPADURAI (1996, 178–179), neighborhoods are “the actually existing social forms of which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized. Neighborhoods, in this usage, are situated communities characterized by their actuality, whether spatial or virtual, and their potential for social reproduction.” Neighborliness, as MAYOL (1998) contends, is governed by both propriety as well as tactical appropriation; it is thus productive of precisely the kind of pedestrian rhetoric referred to by DE CERTEAU (1984). Thus, like the media screens studied by MCCARTHY (2001) that take

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on site-specific purposes, Treme, and other on-location television productions, ought to take responsibility for the specific way in which they, as a kind of neighbor in itself, must adapt to the propriety, contexts, and practices of the neighborhoods into which it intervenes and the specific ways in which it tactically appropriates that context. Treme’s commitment to authenticity, social responsibility, and to being a good neighbor distinguishes the production from many others in the city. These aims significantly impact the alliances it makes with its neighbors and other members of the community. It creates possibilities for creating spaces for solidarity between the production and its neighbors, where the possibility for tactical alliances over issues of concern might be formed, such as with the struggles of Mardi Gras Indians, Baby Dolls, and so forth. I am arguing for Treme, and future TV productions who model themselves after its example, seeing these alliances as potential political alliances, not only as potential places for philanthropy and charitable forms of corporatized social welfare or storytelling. Moreover, Treme’s invitation to its viewers to immerse themselves, physically, in New Orleans might also hold potential as well. The producers have stated that the show is not meant to be easily deciphered by its viewers – it is written more with residents of New Orleans in mind. This means that viewers have to do quite a bit of work in order to follow the show. Indeed, as the Pop Pilgrims note, to really get Treme you’d have to move there (MODELL 2011). The series therefore makes demands on its audiences that are infrequently a component of everyday television viewing. They perhaps point to a kind of ethical obligation on HBO’s predominantly white, affluent viewers to step outside of their comfort zones and materially immerse themselves in an unfamiliar culture. Although the kinds of interactions and forms of community that Treme builds might be circumscribed by their filtering into brand value for HBO, so too is there a potential for an ethical surplus that cannot be captured by the series. When viewers, both in the city and outside of the city, navigate the streets of New Orleans’ neighborhoods to seek out those connections, there are also potentials that those connections can be translated into political lines of solidarity. If considered in the context of acting within the neighborhood as a neighbor, I do not think it is easily assumed that these alliances can only benefit HBO or Treme, where individuals and neighborhoods are merely duped into handing over forms of ‘hip’ racialized and ethnic culture for profit or in consuming authenticity. Alliances can also be put to work toward constituting the neighborhood as something like the common, 3 where the multitude, in effect, take the power that capital seeks to harness to create new spaces and temporalities to constitute an “ever more common 3

Formulated through the Autonomia movement in Italy in the 1970s, “the common” emerged as a way to theorize the collective potentiality embodied in what MARX (1973) referred to as living labor and the general intellect. Capital, as MARIO TRONTI (1966) suggests, is parasitic on this collective potentiality, and as labor becomes increasingly flexible and service-based, it depends more and more on the immaterial, creative, and communicative capacities of social individuals in an attempt to subsume and harness these potentialities for the benefit and profit of capital (Hardt and Negri 2000; LAZZARATO 1996; TERRANOVA 2004; VIRNO 2004). The common, which reemerged in recent years as a response to the increasing flexiblization of post-Fordist

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context” (NEGRI 2004, 185). According to NEGRI (2004), the common imposes a resistance to measure, or a “negation of the limit that exclusion imposes on the common … the unlimited (apeiron), against the limit (peras) of exclusion and of measure; it is an absolute opening against the closure of the common and the pervasion of its teleology” (NEGRI 2004, 202). NEGRI refers to a kind of opening or dilation of the common. Such an opening might be glimpsed in the networks of care that emerged in New Orleans directly after Katrina, in, for example, the revitalization of neighborhood organizations. These alternative structures of care respond to the lack of governmental support in helping survivors to return and rebuild. In effect, they represent the multitude taking its constitutive power and putting it to work elsewhere, and it is precisely this power that programs like the Neighborhood Participation Program as well as HBO seek to harness. Yet, the resources, networking, and alliances that can be formed between these organizations as well as to other neighborhood organizations and viewers, both locally and globally, through spatial practices provided by Treme can also be harnessed by neighborhoods and viewers in building the common. Neighborhoods can appropriate their common existence as media neighborhoods and sites of potential mediation to make demands for new spaces for collectivization. As HARDT and NEGRI (2000) argue, what is particularly difficult in the present culture and economy is precisely the lack of any outside to which to escape to, as the totality of social life becomes constitutive of an immanent form of biopolitical production. What is needed is not to find spaces outside, i.e. in vernacular and uncreative spaces and practices or in resisting mediation altogether – because, indeed as Treme shows, these spaces are spaces for potential and future extraction of value – but, rather, to find spaces of contestation and critique from within. So too, viewer interactivities and the production of a kind of ethical responsibility of viewers to New Orleans can evolve in unpredictable ways that are not easily harnessed by HBO. Treme might therefore produce an excess that is indeed produced within the culturally economistic logic of neoliberal expedience, but it might also offer something of a potential subjectivity and space from which a critical standpoint (WEEKS 2011) might be formed. Further research, particularly ethnographic research, on the impacts of Treme on the daily lives of residents, neighborhoods, neighborhood organizations, and viewers might bear out a further extrapolation of what some of the political potentials and excesses of Treme can be. Nevertheless, the producers I spoke to were all rather modest with regards to the show’s potential impact on the city, practices of production in the city, and on its viewers, both good and bad. As Lolis Eric Elie noted, I think we’d be delusional to think that one show that comes on 3–4 times a week for 12–20 weeks a year depending on re-runs, we can’t win that battle, we are hoping to stem the tide, and hoping to help create a new paradigm that may grow … our job is to tell stories. (personal communication, March 15, 2011) capital, theorizes how political movements can resist capital’s harnessing of collective potentiality to create new forms of collective life.

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The emphasis on this job, as telling stories, was echoed by Eric Overmyer, who suggested, “We are good for the city, but that’s not our mission … I think it would be giving us too much credit to say more than that” (personal communication, March 15, 2011). Yet, to realize the full potential of their impact, they would need to go beyond getting viewers to “take out their wallets” for a good cause, and get their hands dirty, where they might see themselves as taking responsibility to do more than just represent struggles for justice and partake more directly in actively participating in them. David Simon’s response to critics of Treme’s producers’ involvement with historic preservation groups that attempted to prevent the demolition of blighted houses in the Central City neighborhood (used in the series’ Season One opening credits) demonstrates very clearly the precariousness of its form of social welfare. However, it also offers lessons for how productions like Treme might reposition themselves in more politicized terms in ways that can be harnessed toward a more active engagement in the city and in constituting an ethics of neighboring. Originally contacted by historic preservationists regarding the issue, David Simon, Eric Overmyer, and Nina Noble (another executive producer of Treme) sent a letter to the Mayor asking the houses not be demolished, suggesting they were significant in part because they had achieved iconic status by being linked to the television series. In their letter, which was published through a link in The Times-Picayune, Simon, Overmyer, and Noble argued, It has come to our attention that the city plans to demolish these buildings. Our hope is that a way can be found to renovate and not destroy them. These houses have appeared around the globe in advertisements for the show and the DVD set. In that way, they have attained something of an iconic status. New Orleans has successfully restored other similarly dilapidated rows of shotguns (see the 600 block of Gen. Taylor for but one example). What a powerful message it would send about the resiliency and recovery of the city for this block to be restored and transformed into desirable homes for returning residents. We urge you to work with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Builders for Hope or a similar organization to rebuild these houses and return them to commerce. (quoted in KRUPA 2011a)

Mayor Mitch Landrieu claimed he did not receive the letter until a day before demolition was scheduled, and he went ahead with the demolition, arguing, And so people show up at the last minute and say, “Oh, please don’t” … We’re moving on in the city of New Orleans. We’re making action. We’re making decisions that we think will restore the vitality of the neighborhood and, at the end of the day, the safety of the neighborhood. (KRUPA 2011b)

Treme’s involvement in the issue spurred a significant debate amongst policymakers, historic preservationists, and residents regarding the role of Hollywood and film production in city policy. In response to this debate, Simon suggested, “We were in no way trying to insert ourselves into policy … We were just saying that if this could have a better outcome than a vacant lot and some housing units could have been saved and rehabbed, we were ready to help,” again restating that the houses were significant to Treme only insofar as they helped to tell the story of “the burden and the promise of this great city, the threat of collapse and the hope of renewal” (quoted in KRUPA

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2011b). He thus emphasized the point that the producers were not trying to “get into a political fight” (KRUPA 2011b). Yet, The Times Picayune’s readers disagreed, posting comments such as “If HBO wants these houses saved, they should spend their money and efforts on renovating the buildings” (KRUPA 2011c). Readers’ comments seemed to suggest that the city’s support for the film industry already implicated Treme in city politics and therefore in having a responsibility to the city. One reader argued, for example, “Take some of your film tax credit money and donate it to the city if you care so much … This compelling story, our collective lives, are fodder for ratings and profit” (quoted in KRUPA 2011c), suggesting that Treme’s burden to the city was more than to tell a story. Other readers took the opportunity to suggest that Treme should also be contributing to the city’s production resources, suggesting “Hey HBO: Soundstage, ever heard of such a thing? Build your own; you charge enough for your television services to be able to afford it!” (quoted in KRUPA 2011c). Another reader argued, “You want blighted homes? Go build some on a sound stage. We've built dozens of those for your use. And you can also get Louisianans some work by starting such a project” (quoted in KRUPA 2011c). While most readers disagreed with Treme’s actions, some defended them, arguing, for example, “Instead of talking about how the show is getting rich off all their ‘tax credits,’ try taking a look at all the money that production brings to the city” (quoted in KRUPA 2011c), which still suggests that Treme is implicated in the city in ways that go beyond its story telling. Moved to respond to these comments, Simon posted his own comment, arguing, With Treme as with The Wire, the producers decided that because the subject matter deals with actual urban dynamics, it would be worthwhile if we could figure out ways to leverage the presence of the production to raise funds and awareness for charities and non-profits. It is often fun to do so. And considering that the film industry is indeed an industry for profit like any other, it often feels pleasantly subversive to do so. But … It is not our primary purpose and certainly no responsibility. (quoted in KRUPA 2011c)

Though Simon claimed that the series had no “responsibility” to the city, the number and vehemence of the comments on the website very clearly demonstrated that residents thought otherwise, regardless of whether they embraced or chastised Treme’s impacts. Nevertheless, despite efforts of both historic preservationists and critics alike to hold Treme accountable and responsible for its broader practices in the city, Simon’s comment demonstrates that corporate social responsibility is a voluntary effort that takes place at the whims and fancies of particular producers. The response to Treme’s involvement in the historic preservation and demolition issue, however, also points to the potential for Treme to have reconsidered its relationship to the city, the neighborhoods in which it films, as well as its relationship with its neighbors. Although I am not arguing either in favor of or against historic preservation – as it is often implicated in both practices of gentrification as well as tactical responses to corporatized development to preserve culture – what I am arguing for is the collective response by viewers, readers, and citizens to call forth a broader accountability and responsibility for filmic production and spatial

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practice in the city. Although some of the readers comments in response to the historic preservation and demolition issue seemed to subscribe to a kind of neoliberal rationality or privatized response to social problems (i.e. if Treme wants historic preservation, they should do it themselves), the comments also suggested that Treme should have been accountable to the city and its residents (i.e. it should not merely tell stories and profit from those stories), particularly by building infrastructure and taking its role as a neighbor seriously. Rather than not trying to get into a political fight, Treme might have instead took up the political fight, and neighborhoods might have harnessed their newfound potential as sites of mediation and visibility as mechanisms for holding Hollywood and its productions accountable for their actions. In raising these ethical quandaries and potential stakes of Treme, I hope it is clear that I do not mean to suggest that Treme merely exemplifies another form of neoliberalism that commodifies culture. Rather, what I hoped to have emphasized is a more ambivalent tone, such that the case of Treme points to just how nuanced and complicated the practice of cultural production is in the current era. Treme’s spatial practices bring into focus the tension between the collapse of more vernacular, tactical practices of resistance with the more commercialized strategies of creative industries and the consequences of drawing upon the global culture industry to support and revitalize local cultural practice. Indeed, the series does not merely commodify culture, but rather works from, with, and through some of the same logics, discourses, and signifiers that have rendered culture as a space of resistance. I think it would be remiss to argue that the vernacular practices of the Tremé are merely being co-opted into or subsumed into a creative cities strategy that must be struggled or resisted from the outside. Yet, Treme is also circumscribed within an industrial logic of public-private partnerships and the marketing of these spaces of resistance for the purposes of both profit and empowerment. Given the complexity of how these forces of culture as resistance and culture as market intertwine, the show does not easily lend itself to either being criticized for how it perpetuates the commodification of culture or heralded as a space of struggle for counter-hegemonic resistance. Rather, it sits somewhere at the crux of an intersection between these forces, perhaps signaling the need for a shift in how we conceptualize both commodification and resistance at this conjuncture. On February 7, 2017, up to seven tornados touched down in Southern Louisiana and through New Orleans, causing a 10-mile swath of damage (ORTIZ and SIEMASZKO 2017). The neighborhoods most affected were in Eastern New Orleans, including Gentilly and parts of the 9th Ward. In neighborhoods still recovering from Katrina, with blighted homes continuing to dot the landscape, the tornados reaped another devastating blow to segments of the population, mostly Black and poor, that the government still seems to willfully neglect and abandon. How will communities, neighbors, private industries, and the government respond in these tornados wake? What will be the role of the city’s film and television industry, which, when the tornados touched down, were filming all over the city, in various locations, on numerous productions? Notably, however, it was not reported that any filming crews had been disrupted by the tornados. I am not sure what this means about

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Treme’s long term influence on both city policy and its relation to more marginalized neighborhoods, or on the filming industry in New Orleans. But, undoubtedly, the vulnerability of New Orleans’ neighborhoods, both before and after the storm, continues, as does the city’s appetite for attracting Hollywood productions. My hope is that this book has provided some food for thought into what the responsibilities might be for these productions to address that vulnerability, as well as some traps they might fall into in seeking that redress. “USELESS” CRITICISM? Treme suggests that in order to come to terms with these shifts and intersections, media scholars need to look beyond the text and representations of space, place, and race to fully come to terms with the complexities of television’s relationship to contemporary cities. TV is doing more than creating a sense of place and concomitant identities generated on screen. Treme points to imbrications of media practice in the space, culture, and everyday life of cities. An important contribution that this book has made, therefore, is in calling attention to the need for media scholarship on urban space to consider a broader array and diversity of sites, encounters, actors and so forth as well as the broader aims, institutions, and sites of power often considered outside of the purview of media studies. The broader institutions, practices, and aims I argue for considering include discourses and practices of urban planning, zoning, land use, tourism boards, historic preservation, cultural policy, philanthropy and corporate social responsibility, city and network branding, and global and local activism. I also call for considering how these discourses and practices are implicated in local cultural practice, identity, struggles over city space and the right to the city, gentrification, and other site- specific issues that emerge in relation to specific places, histories, and cultures when television comes to town. Theorizing media as a spatial practice therefore means attending to the everyday, quotidian practices of media in specific sites, places, cities, and neighborhoods, as an everyday production of and progressive appropriation of place. In calling for these broader analyses of media practices in space and place, it is important for media scholarship to also attend to the way in which media becomes implicated in how space is regulated, governed, and practiced as well as how it brings into contact, and sometimes alignment, a variety of institutions, forces, and powers. In so doing, media’s spatial practices can also be understood as technology of governance. Treme, in particular, calls attention to how these spatial practices in cities implicate racial identities and politics not only through its representations, but also through the ways in which they work to govern, regulate, and intervene in city space and forms of, and contestations of, neoliberal citizenship. So too, Treme calls upon me to be self-reflexive about my own imbrications in these issues in terms of academic scholarship and its political and material commitments. In Season 1, Tulane English professor, Creighton Bernette, criticizes the University for, in the wake of budget cuts, supporting “useless” cultural studies programs at the expense of supporting programs in Engineering. He argues, “Let’s

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not learn how to actually do anything … Let’s just sit and contemplate the glory of me in all my complexities. Who am I? I am black, Jewish woman, hear me roar!” He suggests to a graduate student, who is fearful that the English department might face cuts as well, “We’re useless. We’re safe” (MCKAY 2010). Perhaps Treme’s production team might make similar criticisms against this project as well – as useless contemplation that doesn’t actually do anything. And, to be fair, they would have a point. I suspect too that many of its writers were indeed English majors and that therefore Creighton’s comment is also a moment of their own self-reflexivity. But my hope too is that this project has also gone beyond the kind of self-referential media criticism that has so often pervaded media studies, endlessly contemplating the meanings of various texts for how it impacts our own identities and place in the world. I do not mean to discount this work as useless. My feelings are actually quite the contrary to those of Creighton Bernette – I think this is important work that has real, material impacts for how we understand ourselves as social and political agents. It is precisely this kind of work that fomented my critical consciousness as an undergraduate and influenced my interest in cultural studies. Nevertheless, I too wonder if our criticism might ask additional questions, to consider, as GROSSBERG (2006, 22) contends, “That the ways in which culture matters are themselves changing” (17) and to therefore “look at the relations among the various actors, institutions, practices and discourses at the intersection of political, economic and cultural life.” My hope, then, is that this project will enjoin media scholars, producers, and policymakers alike to question the broader and more material ways in which media is a practice that does in fact, for better or worse, “actually do something” in the cities they inhabit and represent.

TREME EPISODES AND FEATURES REFERENCED BAILEY, R. (2011, May 22): Slip Away. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. DICKERSON, E. (2010, April 25): Right Place, Wrong Time. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. DICKERSON, E. (2011, June 12): Can I Change My Mind. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. HALL, A. (2012, October 28): I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. HEMINGWAY, A. (2011, April 24): Accentuate the Positive. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. HEMINGWAY, A. (2012a, September 23): Knock with Me-Rock with Me. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. HEMINGWAY, A. (2012b, November 25): Tipitina. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. HOLLAND, A. (2010, April 11): Do You Know What It Means. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. HOLLAND, A. (2011, June 26): That’s What Lovers Do. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. JONES, S.C. (2010, May 23): Smoke My Peace Pipe. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. MCKAY, J. (2010, April 18). Meet de Boys on the Battlefront. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. PELACANOS, G. and K. ALEXANDER (2012): Audio Commentary, “Poor Man’s Paradise.” Original air date November 18, 2012. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. PIERCE, W., A. HEMINGWAY and B. LEYH. (2013): Audio Commentary, “Knock with Me, Rock with Me.” Original air date September 23, 2012. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. SIMON, D. and N. KOSTROFF NOBLE. (2013): Audio Commentary, “Tipitina.” Original air date November 25, 2012. Treme. New Orleans, LA: HBO. Treme: Beyond Bourbon St. (2011): Season 1 DVD Features. HBO. Walking with Wendell. (2012): Season 2 DVD Features. HBO.

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INDEX f denotes figure; t denotes table “Accentuate the Positive” (Treme episode), 96 Adams, V., 154–155, 156, 158 affective economics, 144–145, 154 affective surpluses, 144, 148, 150, 154, 164, 165 affordable housing, 72, 75, 76, 115, 136, 139, 140, 175, 176, 177 Andrews, Troy (“Trombone Shorty”), 111 Appadurai, A., 26–27, 107, 177 armchair tourism, 131 Armstrong, Louis, 44, 51, 105 Armstrong Park, 71, 73–75, 74f, 77, 128, 134 Arts District, 68, 71 Arts Tourism Partnership, 69 Arvidsson, A., 149 asset stripping, 145, 164 Atlanta (FX series), 171–172 authentic neighborhoods, 34, 67, 134 authenticity: Treme production commitment to, 100, 101, 103, 109, 112, 116, 130, 176, 178; discourse of, 130-133 150, 164, 175; as spatial practice, 176; transformation of into cultural resource, 98 Autonomia movement, 178–179n3 Baby Dolls, 113, 113n4, 118, 178 “back-a-town,” 126 Backstreet Cultural Museum, 133, 135, 136, 152, 153, 163, 173 Banet-Weiser, S., 52–53, 150 Barthelemy, Sidney J., 105 Batiste, Antoine (character in Treme), 18n3, 19, 19n4, 136, 152 Batiste-Williams, LaDonna (character in Treme), 18n3 Bernette, Creighton (character in Treme), 12–13, 14, 17, 18n3, 19n4, 183–184 Bernette, Toni (character in Treme), 18n3 Big Freedia, 120 biopolitics: of disposability, 78; racialized dimensions of, 64n3 biopower, 91 Black cultural practices, 69, 77, 126, 127

Black culture, 41, 73, 75, 79, 114, 117, 123, 127–128, 134, 136 Black public space, 42, 66 Blackness: cable television networks use of, 52–53; desire for, 127; in Frank’s Place, 46, 50–51; future of on television, 43– 44; pathologizing of, 65; paucity of on television, 41; politicization of, 127 Bounce music, 23, 111, 120 Bourbon Street, 14, 136, 174 Bourdieu, P., 32, 34 Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC), 57n9, 80n13, 81, 81n14 Bullet’s Sports Bar, 112, 137 Bush, George H., 75, 78, 79 Bywater, 134, 151 cable television: as tourism, 150; in postbroadcast era, 52; use of Blackness by, 52–53 Cable Television and Marketing (CTAM) Summit (2010), 147, 149, 150, 152, 156, 158, 161n8, 165 “Can I Change My Mind” (Treme episode), 95 Canal Place, 68 Central Business District, 68, 71, 126n1 Central City, 158, 180 Charbonnet, Louis, 139 charity: as neoliberal solution to disaster, 156; charity TV, 154–160 Charity Hospital, 115, 177 chefs, Treme’s focus on, 18n3, 107, 111, 116, 163 Chez Helene, 41, 43, 44, 46–47, 47f, 48, 61 Chez Louisiane (fictional restaurant based on Chez Helene), 43, 44, 61 Christopherson, S., 56, 67, 99 cities: as in business of culture, 64–65; hybrid city, 176; neoliberal cities, 61, 66; new revival in, 66. See also creative cities, city space citizen brand, 159, 160 City Beautiful movement, 63, 72

208 City Planning Commission, 80n13, 81n15, 82, 89, 90 city space, Treme’s relationship to, 15, 16, 24, 25, 33, 34, 39, 41, 58, 169, 170, 176, 177, 183 Claiborne Avenue, 28, 48, 72, 73, 77, 87, 133 Cohen, Andy, 162–163 Committee to Save Tremé and Armstrong Park, 77 Common Ground, 156 “the common,” 178–179, 178–179n3 Congo Square, 36, 128–129, 152 Connick, Harry, Jr., 21, 114 Contemporary Arts Center, 67–68 corporate social responsibility, 53, 58, 159, 160, 161, 165, 169, 173, 174, 178, 181, 183 Couldry, N., 25, 29–30, 145 creative cities, 35, 37, 61, 62, 66–67, 67n6, 71n11, 86, 93, 120, 121, 134, 139, 169, 182; and the creative class, 54, 56, 67, 71n11 creative culture(s), 14, 17, 18, 32, 62, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 92–94, 134 creative industries, 21, 41, 55, 58, 62, 67, 67n6, 83, 88, 96, 113, 118, 120, 121, 171 creative places/creative placemaking, 62, 86, 111, 115, 170 Crutcher, M.E., 28, 87 cultural economy, 21, 22, 32, 41, 46, 55, 56, 57, 62, 87, 88, 92, 104, 114, 134, 143, 156, 161 Cultural Economy Initiative, 21 cultural labor, 55–56n6, 117, 118 cultural practices: in back-a-town neighborhoods, 126; commodification of, 117– 118; Treme as extracting value from, 121; Treme’s entrepreneurialization of, 38, 58, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 127, 140, 173, 175 Cultural Products Districts Legislation, 21 cultural zonation, 64, 172 culture: cities as in business of, 64–65; entrepreneurialization of, 69, 138, 140; expediency of, 88; local and vernacular cultures, 55, 57, 113, 175; as object of consumption, 127; potentially productive qualities of, 64–65; as resource, 66, 117; role of in neoliberalism, 138; as way of life, 92 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (film), 13n1, 155 Curtin, M., 50, 148

Index Dávila, A., 37, 55, 138, 163 Davis, M., 66 De Certeau, M., 30–31, 34, 121, 177 Desautel, Jeanette (character in Treme), 18n3, 107 Dirty Dozen Brass Band, 77–78 disaster capitalism, 20, 79, 90, 154 disaster pornography, 138 disaster tours, 129, 137, 138 Disneyfication, 68 district councils, 89–90 district planners, 89–90 diversity: as central to entrepreneurial endeavors, 86; media corporations and, 53– 54 “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” (song), 44, 51 Dr. John, 48–49, 96 Elie, Lolis Eric, 103, 108, 110, 118, 133, 135, 138, 139, 179 embedded filmmaking, in Treme, 111, 112, 116 Empowerment Zone Program, 72, 75–76 entrepreneurial: and cultural tourism, 87, 138, 140; entrepreneurializing diversity, 86; entrepreneurialization of culture, 36, 69, 93, 114, 138, 140; entrepreneurializing the creative city, 169, 170; framing of art and culture, 65; media industry and entrepreneurializing creative neighborhood spaces/practices, 55, 57, 62, 82, 83, 96, 105; media neighborhood as entrepreneurialization of neighborhoods, 16; entrepreneurializing neighborhoods, 35, 37, 61, 63, 97; and philanthropy 175; relationship to neoliberalism, 36, 54, 61n2; New Orleans’s efforts at entrepreneurializing arts and culture, 69, 72, 86, 88, 89, 92, 94, 108, 124; post-Katrina entrepreneurial subject, 115; post-Katraina urban planning and entrepreneurialization, 82, 93; spaces of failed entrepreneurialism, 176; Treme as entrepreneurializing neighborhood spaces and cultural practices, 38, 58, 108, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 127, 140, 173, 175; equity, as central discourse in Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030, 20, 62, 63, 82, 83, 84–85, 89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97 Esplanade Ridge, 158 Fantasy City, 65, 68 FEMA, 79

Index film commission, 70-71, 105, 105n2, 135 Film New Orleans, 21, 104–105, 105n2, 106, 110 film production: as economic generator, 69; as marketing technique, 69; as means of generating profit off of cultural practices, 96; New Orleans’s efforts to attract, 16, 62; economic effects on cities, 158 Florida, Richard, 54, 71n11, 85, 172 food culture, Treme’s focus on, 116 Foucault, M., 15–16n2, 33, 34, 91 Frank’s Place (TV program): commitment of to authentically Black music, 48; commitment of to maintain Black crew, 48; critics’ take on, 43, 44; debate in media studies about, 44–46; description of, 43; as filmed on set in Los Angeles, 48, 55, 98; as dramedy, 51; politics of representation, 42, 43, 44; sense of authentic in, 44, 48; space of New Orleans in, 41; Treme contrasted to, 41–59 French Quarter, 11, 14, 27, 29, 57n8, 63, 67, 71, 72, 87, 88, 93n22, 94, 124, 126, 126n1, 127, 129, 134 Game of Thrones (HBO series), 167 Garden City movement, 63 Garden District, 11, 57n8, 67, 71, 88, 93, 124, 126, 134 gentrification, 16, 24n12, 39, 67n6, 68, 76, 77, 79, 80, 87, 121, 124, 125, 133, 136, 139, 140, 172, 175, 181, 183 Girls (HBO series), 166, 167 Giroux, H.A., 11, 36, 78, 79 Goldberg, D.T., 36 Gotham, K.F., 127, 129, 130 grassroots planning, 31, 32 Gray, H., 44, 45, 46, 48, 52–53, 58 Great Mississippi River Flood (1927), 11, 126 Greenberg, M., 65, 69, 161 “green-dot map,” 81 Guardians of the Flame, 95, 96, 111, 112 habitus, 32–33, 34, 97, 107, 111, 116, 119, 169 Hannigan, J., 65 HANO (Housing Authority of New Orleans), 175 Hardt, M., 179 Harrah’s Casino, 68, 77, 117, 118 Harris, D., 91 Harrison, Donald, Jr., 96, 111

209 HBO: “Behind-the-Scenes” extras, 151; as branded interface, 153; branding of, 143, 144, 145, 150, 159–160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170; in crisis, 145–147; and David Simon, 147–148; donations from to New Orleans charities, 156, 165; gains to from its representations of authenticity, 117; and Whiteness, 118; “It’s not TV” slogan, 143, 145, 147; in post-broadcast era, 49; post-Soprano’s business and marketing strategy of, 51, 143, 147; as rebuilding New Orleans, 143, 158 heritage tourism, 87, 123 Hidalgo, Nelson (character in Treme), 19n4 Historic New Orleans Tours, 133 historic preservation: holistic approach to, 87; Treme’s producers involvement with, 180–182 Hollywood North, Vancouver, British Columbia, as, 98, 99 Hollywood South, New Orleans as, 20, 49, 50, 56, 98, 169 Holmes in New Orleans (TV program), 22 homeplace, 36 homo oeconomicus, 35 hooks, b., 36 Housing Policy Act (1949), 66 Hurricane Betsy (1965), 11, 126 Hurricane Katrina: as creating affective surplus, 155, 156; destruction caused by, 11; as drawing attention to urban planning efforts and cultural policies, 80; as human-made disaster, 13; news framing of, 11; racial and class antagonisms as made manifest during, 135–136; revelations from, 12; Treme as posing governing solutions to the injustices made manifest by, 34; waves of creative work generated by, 22n6 “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say” (Treme episode), 105 Iberville housing projects, 113n4 If God Is Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise (documentary), 13n1 “Inside Treme” (Official Treme blog), 152 Intellectual Property Building, 93 Interstate-10 (I-10 or Interstate Ten), 48, 72, 73, 77, 87, 133 J&M Recording Studios, 105, 106, 138 jazz: and branding, 128; funeral, 24, 41, 126, 150; music industry, racial antagonisms in, 128n2; revival, as way to rebuild New

210 Orleans, 113–114; touristification of, 128; JazzFest, 113 Jazzland Project (1997), 69, 128 Jenkins, H., 51, 148 Johnson, V., 51 Katey Red, 120 Kessler, Eric, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156, 160, 165 Klein, N., 20, 154 “Knock with Me – Rock with Me” (Treme episode), 105, 111 Kornhauser, Mari, 13 K-Ville (TV program), 13n1 Lambert, Mickey, 103 Lambert Plan, 80n13, 81, 81n15 Lambreaux, Albert (character in Treme), 18n3, 95, 139, 151, 177 Lambreaux, Delmond (character in Treme), 18n3, 95, 96, 98, 116, 137 Landrieu, Maurice (“Moon”), 68 Landrieu, Mitch, 21, 180 Lee, Spike, 13n1, 52 Leslie, Austin, 41, 44 Lil Dizzy’s restaurant, 133 Livers, Karen, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 135 living labor, 38, 97, 110, 111, 119–120, 172, 178n3 local hiring: impacts of, 97; Louisiana’s definition of, 109n3; in Treme, 108–118, 159 local neighborhood culture, as focus in American city planning, 63–64 Looking (HBO series), 167 Louisiana Motion Picture Tax Incentive Act (2002), 55, 109n3 Lower Garden District, 93 Lower Ninth Ward, 98, 132, 137, 138, 151, 157–158n6 Lukinbeal, C., 26, 100 Make It Right Foundation, 21, 132, 157– 158n6 Manovich, L., 31 Mardi Gras Indians, 24, 24n10, 71, 77, 95, 105, 110, 111, 113, 114, 118, 121, 126, 137, 150, 151, 163, 178 Marigny, 71, 71n11, 134, 158 Marsalis, Wynton, 21, 114 Marx, Karl, 178–179n3 Mayol, P., 34, 177

Index Mayor’s Office of Cultural Economy, 21, 104, 106, 135 McAlary, Davis (character in Treme), 18n3, 105, 106, 115, 116, 133, 137, 151 McCarthy, A., 25, 26, 177–178 McCollum, Virginia, 104, 111, 116, 119, 120, 158 media: depictions of New Orleans in postKatrina context, 22; and convergence, 51; as expedients to rebuilding, 23; as forms of cultural technologies of governing, 33; and the production of space, 25; partnership with and relationship to cities, 65, 169; role of in post-Katrina rationality, 20, 21; role of in post-Katrina urban planning, 32; role of in urban planning and renewal, 64; as spatial practice, 169, 183 media capitals, 50, 99 media geography, 25 media industry: creative culture and, 92–94; as entrepreneurializing creative neighborhood spaces/practices, 62, 82, 83, 96 media neighborhood, 16, 34, 38, 82, 91, 94, 97, 101, 118–121, 176, 177, 179 media pilgrimage, 145 media production: and neighborhood revival, 106; and neighborhood engagement, 120; and struggles over city space, 177; study of, 30 Memphis Beat (TNT series), 174 mobile privatization, 26 mobile production, 50, 99 Montana, Allison (“Tootie”), 105 Moores, S., 29 Morial, Dutch, 115 Morial, Jacques, 19, 111, 115 Morial, Marc, 69, 75, 76, 115 Morley, D., 29 Mother’s Lounge, 113, 151 Moynihan Report, 75 multiculturalism, 23, 37, 66, 84, 91, 127, 128n2 Municipal Auditorium, 72, 73 musicians, 114; struggles of in New Orleans, 48–49; and Treme, 174 Musician’s Village (Habitat for Humanity), 22, 114 Nagin, Ray, 21, 57n9 Nashville (ABC and CMT series), 171, 172 NCIS (CBS series), 174 Negra, D., 22 Negri, A., 179

Index neighborhood: according to Appadurai, 177; centrality of as rationality of Plan for the 21st Century, 85–92; concept of, 63; as economic and social space of potential value, 97; as potential site of value for future production, 106; as synonymous with citizen, 80 Neighborhood Development Foundation (NDF), 75 neighborhood habitus, 32, 34, 97, 107, 111, 116, 119 Neighborhood Participation Program (NPP), 57n10, 89, 89n19, 106 Neighborhood Planning Office, 75 Neighborhood Revitalization Trust Fund, 75 neighborhood space, 17, 34, 37, 38, 54, 57, 62, 63, 64, 67, 78, 82, 83, 89, 90, 97, 106, 108, 111, 119, 121, 135, 139, 140, 169, 172, 173, 176 neoliberal cities, 61, 66 neoliberal racism, 36, 53 neoliberalism: defined, 35; emergence of American neoliberalism, 35; as inherently racialized, 36; and ‘post-racial’ politics of race, 35–37; roll back neoliberalism, 64 New Century New Orleans Master Plan, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 92 New Orleans: as birthplace of jazz, 128; emphasis on film and television industries as key components of cultural economy and recovery, 21; as at forefront of soliciting media industries, 67; as grossly behind in rebuilding process, 79; as Hollywood South, 20, 49, 50, 56, 98, 169; “holy trinity” of food, music, and architecture in, 14, 54, 127; increase in filmmaking in, 98; jazz revival as way to rebuild, 113–114; marketing and branding of as city of culture, 69; media depictions of in post-Katrina context, 22; and media production and rebuilding, 34, 170; as model for other cities, 172; postKatrina city planning, 80–83; postKatrina cultural policy in, 62; and creative economy in rebuilding, 55; racial mixing in, 125–126; rebranding of, 94; rebuilding of post-Katrina, 12, 13, 20; representations of in Frank’s Place, 46; shift from oil-based industry to tourism, 54; on television, 18–25; tourism in before Katrina, 125–140; two faces of, 126; ‘Whitewashing’ of, 79; World Industrial

211 Cotton Exposition (1884), 127; World’s Fair (1984), 68, 129 New Orleans African American Museum of History, 76, 133 New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, 41n1 New Orleans Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (NOCVB), 134 New Orleans Film and Video Commission, 70, 71n10 New Orleans Film Festival, 71 New Orleans Film Society, 71 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, 128 New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, 156, 157 New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation (NOTMC), 70, 134, 136 New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC), 174 New Urbanist theories, 61, 85–86 Newcomb, H., 44, 45–46 niche tourism, 161 Noble, Nina, 107, 180 on-location production practices: and affective connection, 145; increase of, 50, 99, 145; examples of scripted fictional television and, 171; impacts of, 100; role of, 177; in Treme, 15, 16, 97, 101–108, 101f, 102f, 159 Ouellette, L., 33, 159, 160 Overmyer, Eric, 14, 29, 97, 103–104, 109, 110, 147, 155, 157–158n6, 161n8, 163, 180 Panama Exhibition (1930), 127 paper bag parties, 46n3 passionate engagement, 144, 145, 147–154, 156, 159, 161–166, 167, 168, 170 Perseverance Society Hall, 105 philanthrocapitalism, 154, 155 Pierce, Wendell, 19–20, 21, 105, 111, 151– 152, 157, 161n8 Pitt, Brad, 21, 132, 155, 157–158n6 place: in Treme, 100; and television industry, 145; theorizing Treme as spatial practice, 25–34; place-based engagement, 144 Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030 (the Plan/Master Plan), 57, 62–63, 82–83n16, 82–94, 96, 97, 104, 106, 111, 114, 115, 169 Plessy vs. Ferguson, 28 Pontchartrain Park, 19, 157, 157–158n6

212 Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corp., 19 Pop Pilgrims: A Travel Show for Pop Culture Enthusiastics (web series), 153, 178 Porter, E., 113, 128 Portlandia (IFC series), 171, 172 post-broadcast era: branding of TV in, 147– 149; HBO in, 144; impact of on television, 49–51; post-racial media culture and, 54; television in, 148, 149 post-Katrina rationality, 20, 62, 63, 82, 85, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 109, 124 post-racial media culture, 49, 51–52, 54 post-racialism, 38, 42 Preservation Resource Center, 133 production practices: as kind of culture industry, 100; as technologies of racialization, 35 production studies, 30 quality of life, in Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030, 90–91 race: and ‘authenticity’, 58; marketization and privatization of within media culture, 53; neoliberalism and the ‘post-racial’ politics of, 35–37; relations of with urban space, 42 racial identity, 46, 52, 58 Rampart Street, 134 Regis, H.A., 77 Reid, Tim, 41n1, 43 “Right Place, Wrong Time” (Treme episode), 137 Rightor, N., 56, 67 Riverwalk Marketplace, 68 Rock ’n Bowl, 151 Rogan, Davis, 116 roll back neoliberalism, 64 Roots of Music, 156, 157 Rose, Nikolas, 33, 63, 89n18, 90 Rouse, James, 75 Ruffins, Kermitt, 111, 112 runaway production, 55–56n6, 70n9, 99, 100 Sakakeeny, M., 117, 118 Sassen, S., 54, 66 Schweigman, Laura, 110, 157, 157–158n6 second-line parading, 24, 24n11, 77, 112, 113, 114, 126, 127, 150 sentiment analytics, 149 Sex in the City (HBO series), 166, 166n9 Simon, David, 14, 18, 52, 95, 97, 123, 130, 136, 138, 147–148, 150, 151, 153, 155,

Index 156, 158, 159, 161, 162–163, 165, 180, 181 Skull and Bones Gang, 133 “Slip Away” (Treme episode), 95 Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, 106, 113 Sonny (character in Treme), 18n3 The Sopranos (HBO series), 143, 145, 146 Souther, J.M., 128, 129 spatial practice(s): according to De Certeau, 30–31; in location shooting, 95–121, 169; media as, 169, 183; television as, 169; television production as, 16, 39; theorizing Treme as, 25–34, 58, 150, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183 Spigel, L., 26, 50 St. Augustine Church, 28, 133, 136 St. Bernard housing projects, 139 St. Louis Cemetery, 153 Storper, M., 99 Storyville, 113n4 A Streetcar Named Desire (film), 98 structure of feeling, 58 Talarico, Annie (character in Treme), 18n3 tax incentives, 20, 21, 46, 49, 55–56, 58, 67, 70n9, 88, 92, 98, 99, 104n1, 108, 109, 145, 155, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 174n2 Telecommunications Act (1996), 160 television: as economic generator, 57; and local and vernacular culture, 57; and post-racialism, 42; as productive of spatiality, 25, 26, 169; shifts of in post-broadcast era, 42, 49–51; as spatial practice, 169 television production: and on-location production practices, 99; as post-Katrina urban renewal and rebuilding, 121; as mobile and dispersed, 46; as means of generating profit off of cultural practices, 96; New Orleans’s efforts to attract, 16, 62; practices of, 15, 16, 17; problems and failures of in New Orleans, 174n2; public service role of, 17; as tied to urban renewal, 62, 63 “That’s What Lovers Do” (Treme episode), 96 Thomas, L.L., 127, 130–131 Thomas, Oliver, 19n4, 111, 115, 115n5, 152 The Times Picayune, 77, 81, 139, 152, 180, 181 “Tipitina” (Treme episode), 18, 95, 107 Tipitina Foundation, 156 tomb of the unknown slave, 133 Top Chef (TV series), 116, 117, 162, 171

Index tourism: cable television as form of, 150; disaster tours, 129, 137, 138; expansion of to new cultural heritage destinations, 88; guided tours, 136; Katrina tourism, 129; in New Orleans and Tremé before Katrina, 125–129; niche tourism, 161; post-Katrina tourism, 130; potential of film industry to produce, 161; Segway tour, 132, 132f; street level tourism, 123, 138, 151; television as bound up with discourses of, 123; tours highlighting of historic social justice struggles, 136; Treme tourism, 123–141, 150 153, 154, 160, 161, 163; utilization of jazz for, 128; walking tours, 131, 132, 133–134, 136, 138, 153 Tourism, Arts, and Entertainment Office, 70 tourist gaze, 123, 130, 131, 136 touristic mystification, 130, 137 transmedia storytelling, 144, 149, 150, 153, 166, 167, 170 Tremé: abandonment of, 78; concerns about post-Treme, 175; culture of, 72; decision to title Treme after, 14–15; description of, 14, 28–29, 72; disregard for cultural history and practice in, 72–73; as Enterprise Community, 75–76; geographical boundaries of, 28; as historic district, 76; historic preservation efforts in, 87; map of, 27f; population of before and after Katrina, 29; portrayal of, 57–58; postKatrina, 79; as a ‘problem’ space prior to Katrina, 62; tourism in before Katrina, 125–129; as birthplace of jazz, 28–29, 36, 88; urban renewal efforts/projects in, 72–73, 75, 77, 87 Treme (HBO series): and affective surplus, 155; as aiming to promote and revitalize New Orleans’s music scene, 108; as invested in neighborhood as locality, 27; as being ‘real’, 95; central argument put forth by, 13, 19; commitment of, 14, 15, 24–25; as contrasted to Frank’s Place, 41–59; as cultural intermediary, 106; debate on tax incentives by, 162–163; as demonstrating social forces of convergence, 51; description of, 14; embedded filmmaking in, 111, 112, 116; as embedding media in New Orleans, 120; as engaged action, 156; as failing to garner sizable audience, 147, 156, 159, 163; as fictionalized documentary, 111; as filmed on-location, 98 (See also on-location production practices); as form of

213 charity, 160; as harnessing culture, 107; as helping to create convergences between film/TV industries and music industries, 114; as helping to stimulate creative labor force, 110; hiring of extras for, 112; irreproducibility of, 170, 173; as Katrina media, 13–14; as networking with local neighborhood organizations and community groups, 106–107, 110– 111; New Orleans as character in, 14; overarching narrative of, 95; as participating in rebuilding of New Orleans, 15– 16, 58, 158; production expenditures of in State of Louisiana, 104n1; production headquarters of, 93; and production of neighborhood as locality, 107; production practices of, 17, 46 (See also local hiring; on-location production practices); as rebuilding HBO, 143; relationship of to tourism, 123–141; scholarship on, 23; significance of interactions between place and production in, 100; space of New Orleans as to, 41; specialty casting in, 112; as stimulating economy, 49; as synecdoche, 29; theorizing of as spatial practice, 25–34, 108; total tax incentive credits claimed by, 108–109, 109t; as tourist text, 123, 130-131, 150, 151; transformation of neighborhood space by, 121; viewer-inspired blogs, 152–153; viewers’ engagements with, 31; as written for New Orleans residents, 153, 178 Tremé, Claude, 28 “Treme: Beyond Bourbon Street” (featurette), 151 Tremé Community Center, 77 Tremé Community Improvement Association, 77 Tremé Community Special Purpose Grant, 76 Tremé Development Corporation, 76 Treme Explained blog, 152–153 Tremé Street Festival, 77, 78 Treme tourism, 123–141, 153, 154, 160, 161, 163 Tremé Villa, 76 Trouble the Water (documentary), 13n1 Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), 80n13, 81, 81n15 Uptown, 57n8, 67, 71, 88, 126, 158 Urban Arts Training Program (1997), 69 urban branding campaigns, 54 urban entertainment destinations, 65

214 Urban Land Institute, 81 urban planning: history of, 31, 63–64; as increasingly taking up logic of tactics, 31– 32; post-Katrina, 80–83, 97 urban renewal: creative cities approach to, 66; examples of, 67–69; focus of on empowering marginalized communities, 36; shifts in priorities of, 54, 55; television production as tied to, 62; during time of Frank’s Place series, 48; Treme as commentating on, 49; Treme as form of, 97; See also media industry, television production, Treme Vancouver, British Columbia, as Hollywood North, 98, 99 Vaughn, Steve, 151 Vaughn’s, 151 Walker, Dave, 147, 152 walking tours, 131, 132, 133–134, 136, 138, 153 “Walking with Wendell” (featurette), 151– 152

Index Walt Disney Corporation, 22, 65 Warehouse District, 67, 68, 71, 93, 119, 134 West, Kanye, 79 When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (documentary), 13n1, 52 White, M., 44, 45, 46 White flight, 64, 126, 127, 139 Whiteness, production of in modern urban planning, 64, 68, 69 Whitewashing, 79, 90, 121, 123 Williams, R., 26, 45n2, 92 The Wire (HBO series), 14, 18, 19, 23, 52, 146, 147, 157, 173, 181 World Industrial Cotton Exposition (1884), 127 World’s Fair (1984), 68, 129 WWOZ radio station, 153 Yúdice, G., 52, 55, 66, 88 zoning, in Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030, 90–91 Zukin, S., 64, 82–83n16, 175, 176

Termed ‘Hollywood South’, New Orleans is the site of a burgeoning cultural economy of film and television production. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this production plays an important role in the city’s rebuilding. Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television takes the HBO series Treme, filmed on-location in New Orleans, as a case study for exploring relationships between television production and raced and classed geographies in the rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans. Treme demonstrates how city efforts to attract film and television production collide with the television in-

dustry’s desire to create new forms of connection for increasingly distracted audiences through the production of “authentic” connections to place. Down in Treme explores what is at stake in these collisions for local culture and struggles over the right to neighborhood and city space. By putting post-broadcast television studies, critical race theory, and urban studies into conversation, Down in Treme provides a poignant case study that enjoins scholars to go beyond the text to consider how media industries and production practices intervene into the contemporary media city.

www.steiner-verlag.de Franz Steiner Verlag

ISBN 978-3-515-12181-1

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