After the Storm: Envisioning a Future
for New Orleans Culture and Community

Nick Spitzer, Creator and producer of public radio's American Routes
Mellon professor in the humanities, Tulane University
Professor of folklore and cultural conservation, University of New Orleans
"After the Storm: Envisioning a Future for New Orleans Culture and Community through Music and the Building Arts"
Thurs., Nov. 10, 2005
3:00 pm -- please note unusual time
569 Hamilton Hall
UNC Campus

Playing musical examples, audio clips and speaking about...

New Orleans' cultural landscape as expressed in architecture, music, food, rituals and public celebrations is identified as much a part of the Caribbean as the American South. The historic and ongoing creolization of French, Spanish, African, African-Caribbean, Native and English-speaking American cultures has set the city and region apart in America while offering a model for better understanding similar less explicit processes in the nation as a whole. This is a moment of peril for one of the world's great city/states of arts--one where, rare in America, the vernacular cultural expressions of communities are central rather than marginal to civic identity...and the economy. If New Orleans is to again be a monument of living culture of significance to America and the world, local musicians and craftsmen and their cultural expressions must be paramount in the city's restoration, re-inhabitation and rebirth. The most prominent aspects of public culture that express New Orleanians' deepest sense of themselves and their communities writ large are found in the realms of work (the building arts) and play (music and celebratory occasions). Without these expressions and the individuals and intact neighborhoods central to their realization, it will be difficult for the city to find cultural continuity essential not only to family and community life, but to the future of the economy and civitas of New Orleans as we have known it and might improve upon it.

Nick Spitzer is a folklorist known for his work with community-based cultures of the Gulf South, American vernacular music and musicians, documentary media, and cultural policy. He is professor of folklore & cultural conservation at the University of New Orleans, and served as Mellon professor in the humanities at Tulane University. Nick Spitzer is best known to many as the creator, producer, and voice of American Routes, a weekly two-hour program devoted to vernacular music, musicians and cultures. The program is distributed to over 225 stations by Public Radio International (PRI). American Routes is produced in New Orleans' French Quarter--with support from the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, the CPB and America's Wetland: the Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana. More information at the American Routes website at http://www.americanroutes.org/

Spitzer received the Benjamin Botkin Lifetime Achievement Award in Public Folklore from the American Folklore Society in 2002. In 2004 he was awarded the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers' Deems Taylor Award for excellence in broadcasting. In 2005 he received the New Orleans Mayor's Arts Award. During this recent tragic period, Nick has been a regular commentator for Nightline, NPR, BBC, ABC News and the New York Times and regarding cultural and community rebuilding in New Orleans.