27 Oct The Year Before the Flood
Ned Sublette
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Author and musician Ned Sublette will present a talk based on his new book,The Year Before the Flood. Written a year before Hurricane Katrina, Sublette’s memoir is a companion volume to his acclaimed history of the city, The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (2006). By turns irreverent, joyous, darkly comic, passionate, and polemical, The Year Before the Flood juxtaposes New Orleans’ crowded calendar of parties, festivals, and parades with the murderousness of its poverty and its legacy of racism. Along the way, Sublette opens up windows of American history that illuminate the present: the trajectory of Mardi Gras from pre-Civil War days, the falsification of Southern history in movies, the city’s importance to early rock and roll, the complicated story of its housing projects, the uniqueness of its hip-hop scene, and the celebratory magnificence of the participatory parades known as second lines.
Sponsored by the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, the College of Creative Studies, and the IHC’s Oil + Water series.