These sources require the modern historian to consider the cultural bias of the authors, who in this case are mostly from the northern United States or England. However, the accounts of international travellers and visiting journalists provide some excellent clues into the social geography of early New Orleans Mardi Gras, especially since these authors are more likely than locals to comment in detail on precisely those elements of local cultural practice that are unfamiliar to them. Early forms of Mardi Gras celebrated in Louisiana are not as well-documented as the krewes, with their parades and balls, from 1857 onwards. However, Mardi Gras has been celebrated in some form in Louisiana since it was first colonized by the French in the late 1600s-in fact, the two French Canadian explorers who first established a European colony in the area landed seventy miles south of New Orleans on Shrove Tuesday and named their new settlement the Pointe du Mardi Gras. The narrative of Mardi Gras history is often rather misleadingly framed as a history of the Mardi Gras krewes-their public parades and exclusive, private masquerade balls. (The Krewe of Comus also rather infamously quit parading after the city ordinance that required the desegregation of all Mardi Gras krewes in the early 1990s, while the other krewes-many of them founded in the late 1800s and early 1900s-at least officially opened their ranks to all races and continue to parade to this day.) In addition to the old-line Carnival krewes predominantly populated by upper-class white men, women and Black New Orleanians have established krewes, which will be discussed later in this post.
Journalist James Gill, in his 1997 history of race and Mardi Gras, titled Lords of Misrule, recounts that Comus and the other krewes to follow were founded primarily by Anglo-American and a few wealthy, white Creole men, most of whom were loyal to the Confederacy in the looming Civil War. This practice dates to the first formal Mardi Gras parades, first performed by the Krewe of Comus in 1857.
Mardi Gras in New Orleans stands out among Pre-Lenten celebrations for featuring its local elites being crowned as Kings and Queens-unlike most other carnival celebrations, in which the poor or marginalized typically masquerade as royalty.
#BLACK LIGHT COLOR PARTY NEW ORLEANS FREE#
Particularly when so many of the most famous Pre-Lenten festivals take place in former slave-holding colonies of the Americas, it is likely that the participation of enslaved people and free people of color in these carnival celebrations differed considerably from the dominant narrative throughout the celebration’s centuries-long history.
While this kind of role reversal-what scholars have termed “social inversion”-undoubtedly has been a central part of Pre-Lenten festivities throughout their long history, many historians recently have sought to bring more nuance to the discussion of Carnival. Pre-Lenten festivals, such as the famous carnavale of Venice, Italy, the carnivals throughout Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and of course, New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, are often described-and idealized-as “festivals of inversion.” Historically, as moments in which the populace were invited to indulge themselves in the earthly pleasures they would soon give up for the forty-day period of Lent preceding Easter, Pre-Lenten carnivals also quickly became moments for “permissible” social transgression-men could dress as women, women as men, the rich masquerade as poor, and the poor crowned as kings and queens for a day.
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