Source: Project Muse

The academic journal Project Muse, published in collaboration with John Hopkins Univ Press, has devoted its fall issue to New Orleans. Here's the summary from the Preface, "What is Disaster?":

One of my favorite moments in this volume occurs when Johari Jabir turns to Mahalia Jackson’s performance in the film Imitation of Life (1959). Near the end of Douglas Sirk’s famous Technicolor melodrama, Jackson, a New Orleans native, performs the old spiritual “Trouble of the World” in a way that refuses subordination within the film’s central narrative. In Jabir’s account, Jackson succeeded in evoking Black New Orleans funeral rites in the face of a film industry that was aggressively indifferent to African American life and death. “When Mahalia enters the film with her New Orleans dirge interpretation of ‘Troubles of the World,’” he argues, “we are reminded that at any moment, centuries of historically repressed crying, ‘weeping and wailing’ buried deep in the souls of black folk, could erupt and consume all the elements . . . [of ] whiteness, wealth, and status” otherwise celebrated in the film. In the wake of Katrina, when a virtual “commemoration industry” has arisen to remember New Orleans and reconstruct its cultural heritage, Jabir invites us to “take another listen” to the way “Mahalia Jackson made it part of her art to tell the truth about the ‘troubles of the world.’”

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