Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City

This book pursues two meanings of the phrase, "sustaining New Orleans." One is the perpetuation of the images and ideas and tales of New Orleans sustained in public memory--local and not--through a range of activities and media, widely read literature notable among them. The other references the concept sustainability understood here to mean the struggle to balance the competing demands of social justice, environmental health, and economic growth. This book argues that these two definitions of sustaining New Orleans are mutually constitutive. It further argues that widely read literature set in the city, through its engagement with urban folkways that shape and reshape public memory, has participated, for good and ill, in the framing of the city's problems, the proposed solutions to those problems, and the perceived effectiveness of those solutions.