PerformingArchive · Performing the archive: The everyday construction of ‘french’ identity in New Orleans

Performing the archive: The everyday construction of ‘french’ identity in New Orleans

More than 200 years after ending its colonial ties to France, the city of New Orleans (United States) offers evidence of how identities are constructed through the repetition of behaviours directly linked to a place's specific history. This repetition can be considered a social performance that has intensified in New Orleans in the fifteen years after the social trauma of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Given the global challenges presented by large-scale migration (seen especially in Europe at the moment), the analysis of identity formation in relation to everyday life and international post-colonial relations merits critical study. The projet “Performing the archive: The everyday construction of ‘french’ identity in New Orleans” (PANO) re-examined identity and social imaginaries through a dialogue between contemporary and historical data, using the complicated link between New Orleans and France as a model for future researchers. Working with data from a long-term initiative on francophone identities in New Orleans, the project conducted experiments at The Historic New Orleans Collection. These experiments were used to explore how everyday life in New Orleans produces a peculiar “french” imaginary. The PANO project included four overall objectives: 1) Analysis of an everyday “french” identity and imaginary in New Orleans. The first objective focuses on analysing the ways that residents’ everyday life practices are consciously labelled ‘french’ in contemporary New Orleans. These practices contribute to the perpetual construction of a social imaginary. 2) Development of archival experiments based on the concept of the “infra-ordinaire”. Developed by French writer Georges Perec, the “infra-ordinaire” becomes the basis for experiments that place previously collected interview data in conversation with new research in the THNOC archives. Inspired by Perec’s creative approach to documenting everyday life, the experiments will use protocols for archival visits and ultimately to determine the selection of materials for an interactive, site-specific performance event. 3) Conduct archival research in New Orleans. The experiments developed in objective 2 are applied to archival documents pertaining to a New Orleans “french” identity/imaginary. The project's research design allows a constant movement between various New Orleans-based “french” imaginaries, thus generating an innovative dialogue that illuminates the performative role of archives and the constructed nature of the imaginaries themselves. 4) Development of an interactive, site-specific performance event and performance book to activate the archival research. The performance event brings the general public into contact with the archive itself, where the performance book suggests personal actions or perspectives for viewing others’ actions in relation to selected artefacts. The project’s conclusions are linked to the “french” imaginary of New Orleans, the infra-ordinary as a rich context of social analysis and the archive as both a site of history and a concept that invites creative intervention. To tell or read the story of “french” New Orleans is an effort to make visible its everyday production, to call attention to an imaginary caught in a feedback loop that thrives on remnants and reenactments of the past. The threads that connect what is “french” in New Orleans to what was “French” in New Orleans are imaginary, the link between the real and the imagined being less important than the act of weaving itself. “French” New Orleans captures only fragments of historically situated francophonies, while also representing an invitation to create an imaginary from everyday observations and gestures, both past and present, and thus an invitation to read, think or do the city. The ordinary offers a performative context in which imaginaries are created and re-created, and requires a project of attention, a project of focusing attention on the everyday as realm of experience rather than category of analysis. Our experience of the everyday and ordinary present happens in relation to the past and reflects our collective archival desire to look back to another time and space. The archive itself is a place where the meanings of its contents are shifty, sometimes imagined, sometimes even fictionalized, and often rely on the desires of the person consulting and interpreting the archival document. The archive’s contents are also reminders of its absences: there is more that has been erased or destroyed then what has been preserved.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union