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15. Happy Yardi Gras! Playing with Carnival in New Orleans during the Covid-19 Pandemic

  • Martha Radice (author)
Chapter of: Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation(pp. 319–342)

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Metadata
Title15. Happy Yardi Gras! Playing with Carnival in New Orleans during the Covid-19 Pandemic
ContributorMartha Radice (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0326.15
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0326/chapters/10.11647/obp.0326.15
Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightRadice, Martha;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2023-06-01
Long abstractCarnival season in New Orleans is a playful time. People of all ages play with words as they come up with themes for floats, costumes and throws (small gifts thrown to spectators). They play with materials and crafting skills as they make these items. They play with personas, roles and hedonic pleasures as they participate in the parades and parties that culminate in Mardi Gras day. With the 2021 parades cancelled, New Orleanians set about re-imagining carnival for pandemic times, playing with its structures to be able to celebrate at a safe distance. The idea that most captured their imaginations was the Krewe of House Floats, a Twitter joke that accidentally inspired thousands of households to decorate their homes as parade floats. Drawing on anthropological and geographical approaches to play and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over seven carnival seasons, I analyze the continuities and ruptures of playful carnival practices that were manifest in the creations and testimonies of people who participated in this phenomenon, also dubbed ‘Yardi Gras’. Like regular carnival, the house floats reflected uneven access to resources, materials, and know-how. Unlike regular carnival, they featured less satire and more whimsy, and often paid tribute to beloved local cultural icons. They also resituated carnival in domestic and neighbourhood space and sociality, temporarily reversing a trend toward centralization, and were a product of pandemic-specific temporality. Because carnival is re-made every year through improvisation and responsiveness to current events, resourcefulness and creativity are built into its social structure. I argue that this is what enabled its playful reconfiguration.
Page rangepp. 319–342
Print length24 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • Carnival Play
  • House Floats
  • Pandemic Re-Imagining
  • Playful Creativity
  • Social Ruptures
  • Resourceful Improvisation
  • Yardi Gras
  • Domestic Sociality
  • Cultural Tributes
  • Pandemic Temporality
Contributors

Martha Radice

(author)
Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University

Martha Radice is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on the social, spatial, and cultural dynamics of cities. Her current ethnographic research, a contribution to the anthropology of joy, explores new-wave carnival culture in New Orleans, Louisiana, especially as it relates to sociability, material culture, urban space, and the politics of race. Like her previous projects and her PhD in Urban Studies, it is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dr Radice is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a past president of the Canadian Anthropology Society.

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