Introduction: What Lies beyond Histories of Exceptionalism and Cultures of Authenticity

“New Orleans is a world apart,” notes a tourism website, “in many ways its own little citystate, part of the United States but at the same time so differ ent from every other place in the country.” Could anyone familiar with the city have escaped this truism that New Orleans is a land unto itself, and could any of us who have been enchanted with this place deny experiencing its singularity in profound ways? Within the specter of American exceptionalism, in which the United States is idealized as an immigrant country of hard workers and liberal dreamers— “a special case ‘outside’ the normal patterns and laws of history,” as Ian Tyrrell has argued— New Orleans resides as a thing apart, the exception to the exception.1 From the beginning of its existence as a juridically American locale, those both inside and outside the city have marked it off as anathema to broader patterns of urbanity, culture, politics, economics, and, indeed, Americanness. Placed in opposition to a nation perpetually driven by pro gress, New Orleans is the “city that care forgot.” It can also be the “Paris of the South,” the “northernmost Ca rib bean City,” and the “most African city in the United States.” That New Orleans can be all of these is what makes this place diff er ent from any other place, or the United States as a whole. Or so the story goes. The response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 is a useful barometer of exceptionalism discourse and the importance it plays in the city’s identity visàvis the nation. “Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this