Marc D. Perry

“Black Trades” examines the racial remapping of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans through interwoven currents of African American cultural production, memory, structural violence, and consumptive economies of culture, bodies, and space. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and relationship-building across various communities and traditions of African American culture-making and performance, “Black Trades” explores the ways blackness is commercially trafficked within the city’s tourism-based cultural economy and how local actors creatively navigate this landscape. By examining a neoliberal duality of market consumption and social disposability, the project illuminates how racialized economies both shape and are shaped by Black cultural practices and performance in contemporary New Orleans.