Laugh—cry, eat—drink, dance! Tracing belonging through cartographies of joy

Abstract

This article explores joy, identity, and belonging at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival through an ethnographic project inviting festgoers and staff members to draw, sketch, or map their experiences and journeys through festival landscapes. Building on scholarship in visual, humanistic, and post-humanist anthropology, we view map-making as an emergent strategy for performative epistemology, a way of making and thinking together. In a festival with a strong visual culture that centers African American music and cultural heritage, drawings often reflect racialized landscapes and subjectivities. Maps reveal the centrality of affect in festival experiences while affording insights into what makes joy complicated. For some, festival sociality brings those tensions to the fore while making it possible for others to imagine a world otherwise.