Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of change, this book celebrates a musical world full of passion, energy, cowboy hats and boots, banging bass, horse trailers, joy, and dazzling dance moves. Author Burt Feintuch captures an important American music in the process of significant—and sometimes controversial—change. Creole Soul draws us into conversations with zydeco musicians from Texas and Louisiana, most of them bandleaders, including Ed Poullard, Lawrence “Black” Ardoin, Step Rideau, Brian Jack, Jerome Batiste, Ruben Moreno, Nathan Williams Jr., Leroy Thomas, Corey Ledet, Sean Ardoin, and Dwayne Dopsie. Some of the interviewees represent the contemporary scene and are among today’s most popular performers along the Creole Corridor. Others are rooted in older French music forms and are especially well qualified to talk about zydeco’s origins. The musicians speak freely, whether discussing the death of a famed musician or describing a memorable performance, such as when Boozoo Chavis played the accordion while dripping blood on stage shortly after a freak barbeque-building accident that sliced off parts of two of his fingers. They address the influence of rap on today’s zydeco music and discuss how to pass music along to a younger generation—and how not to. They weigh the merits of the old-time zydeco clubs versus today’s casinos and African American trailrides, which come complete with horses and the loudest zydeco bands you can imagine. In Creole Soul, zydeco musicians give an unprecedented look into their lives, their music, and their culture.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the citizens of New Orleans regroup and put down roots elsewhere, many wonder what will become of one of the nation's most complex creole cultures. New Orleans emerged like Atlantis from under the sea, as the city in which some of the most important American vernacular arts took shape. Creativity fostered jazz music, made of old parts and put together in utterly new ways; architecture that commingled Norman rooflines, West African floor plans, and native materials of mud and moss; food that simmered African ingredients in French sauces with Native American delicacies. There is no more powerful celebration of this happy gumbo of life in New Orleans than Mardi Gras. In Carnival, music is celebrated along the city's spiderweb grid of streets, as all classes and cultures gather for a festival that is organized and chaotic, individual and collective, accepted and licentious, sacred and profane. The authors, distinguished writers who have long engaged with pluralized forms of American culture, begin and end in New Orleans—the city that was, the city that is, and the city that will be—but traverse geographically to Mardi Gras in the Louisiana Parishes, the Carnival in the West Indies and beyond, to Rio, Buenos Aires, even Philadelphia and Albany. Mardi Gras, they argue, must be understood in terms of the Black Atlantic complex, demonstrating how the music, dance, and festive displays of Carnival in the Greater Caribbean follow the same patterns of performance through conflict, resistance, as well as open celebration. After the deluge and the finger pointing, how will Carnival be changed? Will the groups decamp to other Gulf Coast or Deep South locations? Or will they use the occasion to return to and express a revival of community life in New Orleans? Two things are certain: Katrina is sure to be satirized as villainess, bimbo, or symbol of mythological flood, and political leaders at all levels will undoubtedly be taken to task. The authors argue that the return of Mardi Gras will be a powerful symbol of the region's return to vitality and its ability to express and celebrate itself.

“Stuffed with doable recipes, from breakfast right on through to dinner, dessert, and cocktails . . . packed with the flavor and soul of the city.” —The Christian Science Monitor In Tremé, jazz is always in the air and something soulful is simmering on the stove. This gritty neighborhood celebrates a passion for love, laughter, friends, family and strangers in its rich musical traditions and mouth-watering Southern food. Infuse your own kitchen with a Taste of Tremé by serving up its down-home dishes and new twists on classic New Orleans favorites like: Muffuletta Salad Chargrilled Oysters Crawfish and Corn Beignets Shrimp and Okra Hushpuppies Chicken and Andouille Gumbo Roast Beef Po’ Boy Creole Tomato Shrimp Jambalaya Bananas Foster Including fascinating cultural facts about the music, architecture and dining that make up Tremé, this book will have your taste buds tapping to the beat of a big brass band. “Explores one of the most famous neighborhoods of New Orleans through recipes, photographs, vignettes, and quotations . . . a celebration of everything that New Orleans has to offer, including food, music, architecture, and more.” —FaveSouthernRecipes

The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written. Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America's foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature.

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project. Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

"New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories provides essays on the unparalleled recognition New Orleans has achieved as the Mecca of mealtime. Devoting each chapter to a signature cocktail, appetizer, sandwich, main course, staple, or dessert, contributors from the New Orleans Culinary Collective plate up the essence of the Big Easy through its number one export: great cooking. This book views the city's cuisine as a whole, forgetting none of its flavorful ethnic influences--French, African American, German, Italian, Spanish, and more"--Page 2 of cover.

This luxurious photography book on New Orleans restaurants celebrates the city's love affair with food. From the legendary Tujague's to the down-home Uglesich's, these beloved establishments are shown off in all their glory for residents and visitors alike. From the antebellum legacies of grand old restaurants like Antoine's, Commander's Palace, and Bruning's to the newcomers like Jacques-Imo's, Bayona, and Clancy's, not to mention the legion in between, the countless stories of establishments dedicated to the je ne sais quoi of dining form part of the essential history of New Orleans. This rich mix of history and evocative photographs documents an unparalleled majesty of the senses, a decadent revelry in the past, and the daily marking of pleasure. Kerri McCaffety is the first-place winner of the 1999 Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Award for a self-illustrated article. The New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association named McCaffetyis first book, Obituary Cocktail, Book of the Year for 1998. Her second book, The Majesty of the French Quarter, was called 'a vision to behold' by Gambit literary reviewer Julia Kamysz Lane, and 'easily one of the most handsome coffee table books in years' by the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger . The New Orleans Times-Picayune referred to her third book, The Majesty of St. Charles Avenue, as 'fit for royalty.' Her writing and photojournalism appear in publications including the Oxford American, Town and Country, Historic Traveler, Colonial Homes, Southern Accents, Travel Leisure, Metropolitan Home, and the Seattle Times.