Abstract
This article compares the HBO series Treme to an earlier television series that was also set in the Tremé neighborhood—Frank’s Place. I suggest that whereas for Frank’s Place, media scholars’ emphasis on the show’s representational practices of race and place was entirely appropriate, these questions are not sufficient to make sense of Treme. The latter enjoins media scholars to ask a different set of questions that examine both the show’s practices within the city as well as the city’s practices that implicate the show. Specifically, I suggest that the show requires an analysis of labor and hiring practices, tourism, and corporate social responsibility in the city. In so doing, I propose considering Treme not in terms of its representational practices, but rather, as a set of spatial practices bound up with the material production of city space as well as its citizen-subjects.
Introduction
Built by free people of color in the early 1800s, New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood is a key site for the city’s black culture, history, music, and traditions. In their recent HBO series, Treme (HBO 2010-), which takes its name from this historic neighborhood, David Simon and Eric Overmeyer pay tribute to both these practices as well as the spaces from which they emerge. In the series premiere, the episode begins with a depiction of the first second-line parade after Hurricane Katrina in memory of a key figure associated with Tremé’s history and culture, Austin Leslie, chef of the once famous restaurant Chez Helene. Leslie and his restaurant gained national, and even international, notoriety after Chez Helene was used as the model for the short-lived but critically acclaimed series Frank’s Place (CBS 1987-1988), for which Leslie also served as an advisor. This detail makes the closing scene of Treme’s first episode significant not only for what it reveals about post-Katrina New Orleans and how it pays tribute to the city’s culture, music, and history but also for the ways in which it speaks to and pays tribute to television’s history. Despite this brief intersection between these two texts, however, much has changed since the days of Frank’s Place.
In this article, I compare Treme to this earlier television series that was also set in New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood. I turn to an analysis of Frank’s Place, as a foil to Treme, to suggest that in the twenty-three years since Frank’s Place, changes in media culture, urban renewal and planning policies, and the role of cultural and creative industries in these practices have changed the role that television productions play in cities, and especially in New Orleans. Whereas for media scholars who critiqued Frank’s Place, the space of New Orleans was only tangentially figured, media scholars today are enjoined to figure the city space itself as a central actor in the workings of Treme. Centrally, what is at stake in the comparison of Frank’s Place to Treme is a question of the tools needed to do critical media studies of television in today’s changing cultural economy in cities. Specifically, I call for a need to move beyond analyses that center on how cities are represented on screen and to take into account the broader ways in which media participates in the production of material space in the city. To query the significance of Treme, then, I suggest viewing Treme in terms of a set of spatial practices, where the series is inextricably intertwined with the decisions and policies aimed at particular configurations of racialized spaces within the city and the material production of city space and citizen-subjects.
Given the relative paucity of blackness on television at the time and the long trend of stereotypical representations of blackness before then (Bogle 1989), it is unsurprising that the politics of representation figured centrally as the pressing political struggle in Frank’s Place. Whereas the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s produced a ghettoized black population through the engineering of new zoning policies and real-estate practices that explicitly problematized black bodies as a threat to property value (Hirsch 2000), in the 1980s and 1990s public policy aimed to cordon off what was represented as a dangerous and pathological black culture (Haymes 1995; Wilson 2006). Rather than being explicitly racialized, this latter era worked in code through inferential and colorblind discourses of race. It represented a shift in struggles over the dismantling of black public space to one over the re-signification of black public space and the disarticulation of it from sites of memory and practices of black vernacular culture and history (Haymes 1995; Davis 2006). Though practices of representation played a role in the previous era, during the 1980s and 1990s, this was the primary terrain through which relations between race and space were engineered.
In the current era, however, relations between race and urban space have been altered. With these changes, the role of television’s relationship to these spaces has been altered as well. While new urban renewal strategies in the past decade aim toward the “empowerment” of neighborhoods and spaces associated with racial Otherness, television culture is moving toward what Herman Gray (2005) and others have termed the “postracial,” where (often commodified) forms of racial difference appear as prolific and varied across a fragmented television landscape. These changes call into question whether media scholarship that posits television as a site of struggle over hegemonic productions of identity has the same purchase as it did during Frank’s Place.
In what follows, I discuss how these shifts in television toward the postnetwork and postracial have coincided with changes in the cultural policy and urban renewal strategies of cities, and within the cultural economic and policy goals of post-Katrina New Orleans, in particular. Given these changes, I argue that Treme is productive of material, spatial practices that are played out at various levels of cultural policy, hiring and employment practices, and broader strategies of city and network branding that intervene into the current conjuncture where racial difference is figured in market terms as a provisionally included and marketable identity. Toward these aims, I first review scholarly debates around Frank’s Place before turning to an analysis of what has changed in television and city policy since this series. I then discuss Treme, where I consider the show’s spatial practices implicated in the production of tourism, local hiring and employment, and corporate social responsibility.
Frank’s Place
Frank’s Place dealt with the daily struggles of African Americans in New Orleans as they were played out in a neighborhood restaurant—the fictional Chez Louisiane based on the real restaurant Chez Helene in the Tremé neighborhood. The show detailed the daily life of a Brown University professor, Frank, who inherited a Creole-style restaurant in New Orleans from his father. The series was noted for the lack of a laugh-track and its sophisticated weaving of comedy and drama into a new genre—the dramedy—that figured compelling plots that were politically and socially relevant to the time. Popular and scholarly critics alike anticipated Frank’s Place as an important example of the future of blackness on TV in the post-Cosby era. Critics in the popular press heralded Frank’s Place for breaking TV’s color-line with nonstereotypical representations of blackness (Sanoff and Thornton 1987; Huck 1988). In this section, I review the scholarly debates that emerged around Frank’s Place, which emphasized the show’s representational cultural politics. This review highlights the concerns and assumptions of critical media scholars of television in the 1980s and how race and place figured into their analyses as primarily concerns about representation and identity. I aim to show that although the questions that scholars asked of the show were necessary at the time, Treme’s differential position in the city and contemporary television production requires a different framework for critique.
Media scholars who took up Frank’s Place overwhelmingly addressed the show in representational terms, particularly when considering the relevance of the show being set in New Orleans. Critics argued the show’s setting in New Orleans made it more than a “positive” image of blackness—its setting in a specific place of black culture, community, and history became a key factor in considering how the show challenged dominant representations. Herman Gray (1995) noted that the opening title sequence of the show, which was the result of pictorial and video footage taken during producers’ visits to the city and set to Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” placed “the viewer aurally and visually into the experience of black New Orleans. In representing this space and place, the producers foregrounded African American New Orleans, thereby situating the program’s location and identity within a particular African American formation. Frank’s Place is not just Anywhere, USA, populated by anonymous folk, but black New Orleans, with its own particular history and story” (20-21). For Gray, the power of New Orleans for Frank’s Place was therefore in its ability to represent—to symbolize and call forth a structure of feeling that could interpellate its viewers into a particular racial formation that was responsive to racial and class struggles. New Orleans had a productive power that made possible, through its coded visual and aural images, counterhegemonic readings and subject positions.
Mimi White (1991) and Horace Newcomb (1990) also took up Frank’s Place as an object of criticism, and they too understood New Orleans as a place of representation in the series that called forth racialized subject positions. White argued against Gray’s contention that the show’s significations called forth a structure of feeling of black culture and community. Instead, she suggested that the New Orleans figured in Frank’s Place was merely a contained and subdued foil to the Northeast. Newcomb, conversely, argued that the sense of place engendered by the setting in New Orleans was essential to Frank’s Place. Again, however, “place” for Newcomb was significant for its representational power; the “place” of Frank’s Place was not about its material location of production (which was L.A. and what Newcomb referred to instead as “space”) but, rather, its narrative construction of a particular sense of place that “reestablishes, with a new inflection, the regional meanings in which it is embedded” (32) and instructs viewers about what it means to live “here” (35). Ultimately, however, Newcomb’s point is that this sense of place is invoked as a backdrop and metaphor for the real question—which is Frank’s, the character’s, “place.” Thus, the show was about Frank coming to terms with his own place in the world and his struggle over blackness.
Although Newcomb, Gray, and White present differing interpretations of Frank’s Place, each invokes “place” in representational terms, where the city provides for the show a set of coded signifiers that are significant for the identifications and ideologies called forth in the audience and, especially, in how these relate to racial identity. Thus, media scholars who took up Frank’s Place were largely interested in how representations of New Orleans enabled a particular kind of representation of blackness. The city and its geography were read as primarily symbolic signifiers, which could indeed be subject to debate, but there was little material engagement with the city itself. What I want to argue, however, is that media studies’ investment in New Orleans as a “sense of place” (Newcomb 1990) is complicated by today’s cultural economy of television. Especially in Treme, the space of location for production is collapsed with the sense of place in the narrative construction. Its practices of production on the ground become constitutive of and help to shape its narrative of place. This alters the set of questions media scholars might ask about the role of place in the series.
Specifically, whereas debates around Frank’s Place in media studies scholarship showed no discussion of broader questions of cultural policy or the city’s relationship to cultural production, these are central to understanding Treme. For example, there was no discussion about the labor and hiring practices of the show, nor was there a discussion of the show’s relationship to the struggles of New Orleans’ musicians. Though Gray (1995) and Reeves and Campbell (1989) heralded Frank’s Place for its commitment to authentically black music, and New Orleans’ music in particular, neither these scholars nor the show directly engaged with the ongoing struggle of New Orleans’ musicians for work. Scholars writing about Frank’s Place also did not mention debates over the city’s and community’s efforts at urban renewal in Tremé that were taking place concurrently with the running of the series. These efforts, which would have affected the fictional Frank’s Place in its real-life material form, were aimed to counteract the effects of the building of the I10 highway and its Claiborne Avenue bridge, which ran directly through Tremé and led to the destruction of many blacks’ homes, businesses, and the neighborhood’s public green space (Crutcher 2010). 1
Although these are issues that hypothetically could have been taken up by media and television studies at the time, it is also the case that to take up these as central issues to understanding Frank’s Place would not have made that much sense. Given that Frank’s Place aired before the landmark 2002 tax incentive legislation that helped establish New Orleans as “Hollywood-South,” questions about local hiring, city policies, urban renewal, and so forth would not have helped scholars to understand the significance of the series for the city. 2 At the very least, the entrance into these debates would have necessarily taken place through the text and not through the broader spatial practices of the series in the city. This differs significantly for Treme, however, where the show not only commentates on urban renewal efforts after Katrina through its text but is also heralded by the city as a component to that very same revitalization through stimulating the economy through TV production. These practices seep into the narrative, as the show’s ability to hire and contract out local performers, extras, and personalities help to create what producers hope is an “authentic” representation of everyday life in post-Katrina New Orleans. Therefore, I argue that there are differences between the kinds of questions that are required of media scholars today than of the past, and what stands between them includes two decades of changes in policies, culture, and economics in both cities and in media that distinguish Treme from its predecessor.
Between Frank’s Place and Treme: What’s Changed?
I suggest there are three significant cultural, economic, and political factors that have intervened between Frank’s Place and Treme: the emergence of postracial and postnetwork media culture; cultural policy changes in city policy; and cultural economic policy in New Orleans. With regards to the postracial and postnetwork in contemporary media culture, Herman Gray (2005) notes that today’s media representations of difference are prolific, and these representations can be diverse rather than stereotypical. As Banet-Weiser and Gray (2009) suggest, media today tends toward the postracial, where racial and ethnic difference works as a neoliberal technology of governing: “media operates as a primary site where the defining logic is the proliferation of difference, a proliferation that operates at the level of markets, niches, identities, and experience and that functions to celebrate and encourage difference as a way of expressing one’s unique position in the cultural world” (17-18). These practices tend to elide historical struggles over racial justice and instead posit racial identity as a commodified and consumable lifestyle. Indeed, as George Yúdice (2003) argues, racial and ethnic Others are increasingly called on to see their difference as a cultural and economic expedient rather than as a barrier to entry into the market.
What scholars have referred to as the postnetwork era (Lotz 2007, 2009; Spigel and Olsson 2004) has played a central role in the production of these shifts toward a postracial media culture. Whereas the network’s cancellation of Frank’s Place left the series with nowhere to go since producers saw cable networks as unable to support the series’ high cost of production, Treme’s on-location filming and cinematic quality of production can essentially only air on a cable network like HBO. Treme is marked by its relationship to the HBO brand and identified with “edgy,” “quality” programming and an attentiveness to the cultural creativity of its auteurs (Leverette, Ott, and Buckley 2008). Being further articulated to the David Simon brand that was solidified in his critically acclaimed series The Wire (HBO 2002-2008), Treme is associated with HBO’s market for politically charged social commentary aimed at an educated liberal audience. This is, after all, the network that produced Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (HBO 2006) that critiqued governmental failure in the Katrina crisis. Essentially, there is now a potential “market” for a show like Frank’s Place. Yet, it is not clear that this means that television has become more conducive to counter-hegemonic representations or that postracial and postnetwork media culture is a victory for racial justice. Instead, what it suggests is that the stakes of the debate have changed. Media scholarship that posits television as a site of struggle over hegemonic productions of identity may not have the same purchase as it did during Frank’s Place. Instead, critique might attend to how proliferations of racial difference on television are put to work as technologies of power that are productive of citizenship and practices of governing in broader terms (Banet-Weiser and Gray 2009, 18).
There is a close link here between postracial media culture, which has produced a proliferation of consumable sites of difference, and changes in city policy that have shifted urban renewal priorities to areas that had hitherto been cordoned off as excluded ghetto spaces. As Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard (2007) argue, the neoliberal city is expected to be an entrepreneur of itself as well as to cultivate entrepreneurial skills of its inhabitants. As the economy increasingly turns to one of service rather than industry, labor and production must be flexible and customized. Cities are expected to compete with each other on a global scale to attract investment and tourism to maintain their labor base (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Hackworth 2007; Hall and Hubbard 1998; Peck and Ticknell 2002; Sassen 2001). For New Orleans, this has manifested itself in a shift from oil-based industry to tourism and branding the city with the promise that New Orleans can provide a memorable and meaningful experience, especially with regards to its holy trinity of food, music, and architecture.
Moreover, as cities compete for investment, tourism, and the production of a viable labor pool in the “new” economy, they have turned to urban branding campaigns and urban renewal projects that focus on the revitalization and promotion of local culture at the level of the neighborhood. 3 As Sassen (2000) argues, globalization has made the subnational sphere the most significant site of economic production and activity because business and financial centers are located at the city level, and household, community, and neighborhood have reemerged as key sites of economic activity. Richard Florida’s (2002, 2005) work on the creative class thesis has been highly influential in policy and planning circles toward these aims to maximize the productive potentiality of local neighborhood spaces. He argues that if cities are to compete in today’s economy, they need to attract the creative class who desire diversity and local urban culture rather than suburban enclaves or large-scale themed environments that had been the focus of urban renewal in the 1980s and 1990s. Many city planners have embraced Florida’s thesis and utilize branding techniques that promote their city’s local culture, and in order to do so, much of the focus has been on revitalizing particular neighborhoods through indigenous and creative cultural practices.
As Dávila (2004) and Yúdice (2003) argue, these forms of renewal call on neighborhoods to mobilize not only for economic reasons—that is, to help be an economic regenerator for the city or for their own communities—but also for cultural and social reasons. That is, neighborhood cultures and communities are called on to self-maximize and enterprise their creative capacities as a means of gaining political validation and empowerment for marginalized cultures in a way that is understood to resolve racism and injustice. As such, urban branding is more than a commodification of urban culture and is also a form of cultural governance (Moor 2007). Given these changes, the representation of local and vernacular cultures and neighborhoods on television has different stakes today than during Frank’s Place. These changes point to a complex imbrication of culture and economy that complicates questions media scholars might ask regarding the potential for representational practices of vernacular culture to produce counterhegemonic aesthetics and challenge dominant ideology, as they become bound up with market logics and governing rationalities. This makes it difficult to understand Treme’s representations on-screen outside of its broader relation to these cultural policy changes in cities, and, especially, to the cultural economic and policy dynamics within New Orleans.
Prior to Katrina, New Orleans had started to enact specific policies that would help to stimulate its cultural economy. Film and television figured as central pieces in this puzzle. In 2002, the state passed the 2002 Louisiana Motion Picture Tax Incentive Act, a landmark legislation that gave sweeping tax credits to film and television producers to encourage on-location filming. The City of New Orleans had already been aiming at cultivating a local film and television infrastructure since at least the 1990’s (Mayer and Goldman 2010). City policies, public/private partnerships, and incentives were later enacted to spur education and employment in the film and TV industries as well as the building of infrastructures for pre- and postproduction services (Blumenfeld 2007; White 2008). Since the enactment of these policies, there has been much debate as to their efficacy and, especially, of the tax incentives’ ability to produce a local, home-grown film and TV sector, to provide meaningful employment, or to produce an economic return for the city (Mayer and Goldman 2010; Christopherson and Rightor 2009).
Regardless of the efficacy of this strategy, however, the cultural economy, and particularly the creative and cultural industries that support film and television production, has become even more a guiding rationality and strategy of revitalization since Hurricane Katrina. One difference Katrina made is in the role to be played by marginalized forms of culture and neighborhood spaces. Cultural economic policy documents after the storm, in contrast to those before, put neighborhood spaces and diverse creative and culturally vernacular practices at the forefront of the city’s cultural economic strategies—as the key sites on which the city’s cultural and economic future will be staked. 4 This is likely due to how Katrina problematized the city’s racial, class, and spatial politics of exclusion that had deathly consequences. 5 These changes also reflect the enormous upsurge of neighborhood organizations in the city following Katrina, especially in marginalized areas, and the efforts of city government to incorporate these neighborhood organizations into a system of governance. 6 In the city’s new Master Plan, the strategy that banks New Orleans’ future on the film and TV industries works in conjunction with a revitalization and activation of creative and entrepreneurial spaces in the city’s most marginalized and historically black neighborhoods, which includes the Tremé. It is not surprising, then, that whereas Frank’s Place made no mention of the particular neighborhood that served as its setting, Treme takes its namesake from that very same neighborhood. Such a shift speaks to how television in the current era is imagined as both a potential for the celebration of local and vernacular culture and as an economic generator for these spaces.
Treme: A Spatial Practice in the Neighborhood
Given the shifts in television culture, urban renewal and cultural policy, and cultural economic policy in New Orleans discussed above, the stakes of television’s uptake of New Orleans has changed, and the questions that critical media scholars need to bring to Treme are different than those that Gray, White, and others brought to Frank’s Place. Treme’s title foregrounds the fact that this place is not just any city in America, nor is it just any black neighborhood in New Orleans; it is the Tremé neighborhood—a historic neighborhood that is little known to much of white America, but that has a wealth of history, memory, and struggle associated with various racial justice movements (Crutcher 2010). 7 While it is possible to analyze this relationship between the show and the Tremé neighborhood in terms of Gray’s (1995) African American “structure of feeling,” the fact that Treme is filmed on-location means that the city has a relationship to the show that goes beyond what it provides aesthetically and ideologically. Instead, Treme takes an active role in rebuilding efforts, and city policies are directly aimed at trying to solicit and promote these practices through tax incentives, city planning, and other forms of cultural policy. Treme becomes an active agent, working on the ground, to literally, not just symbolically, produce and plan city space in ways that have implications for the racialized constitutions of city space. It is in this sense that I refer to Treme as a spatialized, material practice, where I focus specifically on the show’s relationship to tourism, labor and hiring practices, and its philanthropic corporate social responsibility. In these examples, race, and blackness in particular, figures not so much as an identity struggled over through the construction of a sense of place (Gray 1995; Newcomb 1990) in the show’s narrative. Rather, racial difference is presented as a set of cultural practices as marketable resources that can be put to work toward the aims of city renewal and citizen empowerment through the show’s material practices of production. In what follows, I aim to show how the show’s utilization of marginalized and vernacular signifiers of racial identity and history are put to work in more material terms to promote and manage the entrepreneurial and creative capacities of New Orleans’ citizens. In other words, race, and black cultural practice in particular, is drawn on to make possible both the production of an “authentic” show as well as to enable the renewal and rebuilding of the city and, especially, the Tremé neighborhood.
One of the ways Treme works as a spatialized, material practice is through redrawing the city’s tourist map. This happens both on and off screen. On screen, the show’s narrative revolves around certain places in the city, inviting the viewer to become familiar with many places that were not on the tourist maps during Frank’s Place. Whereas the possibilities for Frank’s Place to rewrite the tourist map were relatively limited given that it featured a limited set of locations that were all filmed on-set in L.A., each episode of Treme to some extent works as a kind of advertisement that offers a different kind of tourist map—one that continues to feature some of the old standards and the city’s holy trinity of food, music, and architecture, but it adds to this spaces that had hitherto been excluded for their association with the black underclass and spaces of danger. An episode in which the character Davis, a white D.J. and musician that lives in Tremé but has Garden District roots, meets some Wisconsin missionaries in New Orleans to help “save the city” by rebuilding in the Lower Ninth Ward, makes this point poignantly. When asking Davis to provide them with information on where to go to hear music, he sends them to discover “the real New Orleans” and, more specifically, Bullet’s Sports Bar, located in Mid-City. As viewers, we too are invited, through the show, to discover “the real New Orleans” that is “off the beaten path.”
This rewriting of the tourist map continues off-screen. On HBO’s website, we are invited to a tour of the city with Wendell Pierce, who plays a struggling musician, Antoine Batiste, on the show. Pierce gives viewers an intimate view of the “real New Orleans” that helps to explain the significance of specific city spaces, such as the Backstreet Cultural Museum, Congo Square, and Frenchman Street. To an extent, these are places that are significant to the show, but “Walking With Wendell” also gives viewers a tour of places that are obliquely or indirectly related to the show’s narrative, such as Congo Square. This means that while this intertext can be viewed as helping viewers to make sense of the show’s narrative on-screen, it also extends beyond the show to engage viewers with material spaces in the city and invites them to familiarize themselves with these spaces as potential tourists, both virtual and actual. Dave Walker’s (media critic for the Times-Picayune) weekly blog post coordinated with each episode of the show that serves to “explain it all” from episode to episode works toward this as well, where each post explains specific references in the episode that might be oblique to out-of-town, and even some in-town, viewers. 8 A significant portion of his entries details the spaces and places featured in the show that are hyperlinked so users can link to maps, websites, or other articles that can help materially move one to that place.
A number of more explicit means of drawing tourists to Tremé have emerged since the show’s airing as well, with the emergence of various Tremé walking tours. For example, the Preservation Resource Center in coordination with the New Orleans African American Museum (the latter of which is located in Tremé) now advertises a “Faubourg Tremé Walking Tour,” where visitors are given a map and a detailed walking guide to important current and historical spaces in the neighborhood. Visitors can choose between self-guided and guided walking tours, and organized private groups can schedule a bus tour (Preservation Resource Center 2011; Waddington 2011). The Guardian also published a version of a walking tour of the neighborhood after the premiere of the series. Similar to the Preservation Resource Center’s tour, The Guardian’s tour directs tourists to places of historical significance in the neighborhood but adds to these sites that are featured on the show, such as the restaurant Lil Dizzy’s (Shoard 2011).
It is clear from these examples that the power Treme has to spur tourism is imagined to be at a much greater scale than Frank’s Place. Whereas the latter was noted largely for generating tourism to a single place, Chez Helene, Treme’s embeddedness in a multiplicity of lived spaces in the city, and in the neighborhood in particular, make its production of a kind of “television tourism” at a much greater scale and magnitude than was ever possible for Frank’s Place. What is significant is that Treme’s rewriting of the tourist map resonates with, but perhaps more importantly helps to give life-force to, efforts by city and state government that aim to entrepreneurialize and render more resourceful neighborhoods like Tremé. The series’ very emphasis on the Tremé neighborhood helps to give value to that space in the city, and through its various practices that help to spur tourism, it becomes imagined as a vital force for helping capitalize on that value as a means of revitalizing the area. Here, the significance of the series for issues of race goes beyond its representations of racial identity on screen and among its viewers and instead is also bound up with its material and productive capacity to reconfigure the spatialized production of race at the local level. The vernacular practices and spaces associated with the history of racial struggle are reproduced as sites of television tourism that promises both social and economic benefits in the wake of receding social welfare and city, state, and federal funding for revitalization efforts.
In addition to efforts to revitalize the area through tourism, Treme’s employment practices also promise a cultural and economic boon to the neighborhood. The producers have stated that they are committed to a local production team, and there are efforts to make use of the various infrastructures of pre- and postproduction provided locally in the city (Vandelay 2010). Most visibly, though, Treme provides employment to a range of cultural workers, especially musicians, whose difficult struggle to make a living in the city began well before Katrina. Many locally based musicians play themselves in the series, often playing at venues or on streets where one can regularly see them play if they are in New Orleans. These efforts to hire not only black but local cultural workers makes Treme significantly different from Frank’s Place. Treme becomes directly productive in aims to both promote and revitalize the New Orleans music scene. Going beyond just featuring this music on the show, as Frank’s Place did, Treme is hiring these practitioners, providing them with regular employment and helping them to network into other potential gigs. Treme plays a material role in the production of a key segment of the labor force, and in so doing, is also playing a role in the production of spaces of vernacular creativity (Edensor et al. 2009) that aligns with the city’s aims of entrepreneurializing these city spaces.
Finally, Treme’s spatial practices in the city are also bound up with the prevalence of discourses of “corporate social responsibility” that employs material practices of corporate philanthropy and volunteerism as primary means of rectifying social injustices. For Frank’s Place, during which corporate social responsibility was not a widespread discourse, televisual responsibility for rectifying social injustice was understood largely in terms of representational practices. At the time, “quality” television was considered a responsibility on the part of producers and writers, as indicated by Tim Reid, who saw the show as having a responsibility for representing blackness more ethically. The ethic of responsibility that the creators of Frank’s Place held is best summarized in the following quote from an interview with Reid, where he argued “television has a responsibility to ‘uplift values around the country and instill moral respect. . . . If we don’t dream, create fantasies, motivate, activate, then who’s job is it?’ he asked. ‘If creators are allowed to take shows like ‘Frank’s Place’ . . . who knows what we can come up with’” (Hanauer 1988). The responsibility for racial and political struggle thus defined therefore lends credence to media scholars’ attentiveness to the show’s text—it was the primary avenue through which one could make sense of the kind of political work the show aimed toward. Thus, although the show is credited with helping to produce an alternative representation of New Orleans, one that was potentially counterhegemonic as Gray argued, the producers of Frank’s Place did little, or at least did not publicize, what they did for the city materially. This was not seen as a responsibility on their part.
Conversely, Treme’s producers, in concert with HBO, engage in numerous practices that are philanthropically aimed at material spaces in the city. It has staged events to benefit the Musician’s Clinic (associated with the rebuilding project in the Holy Cross neighborhood, Musician’s Village) and the Roots of Music educational program (Walker 2010a), the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (the high school from which a number of its local workers and actors, including Wendell Pierce and writer Lolis Eric Elie, graduated) (Walker 2010b), the Make It Right Foundation (Brad Pitt’s rebuilding project in the Lower Ninth Ward) (House of Blues 2010), as well as various others. In addition, the show donates to or “gives back” in some way to each of the neighborhoods in which it films, by, for example, donating to a local community center or rebuilding organization or hosting a community-building barbeque. While I have no doubt that producers hope that these charitable practices will pay off with favorable views of neighbors about filming practices in their neighborhoods and to less irritation over the inconveniences it engenders, what is interesting about these less publicized practices is that they are rationalized in terms of the show’s responsibility as a corporate citizen and member of the community that has benefited from the goodwill of these neighborhoods (L. Schweigman [associate producer], personal communication, 2011). HBO’s and the series’ investment in the city demonstrates a rationality of responsibility to not only its representations, but they also claim to be acting as a responsible corporate citizen by helping to fund the city’s rebuilding.
As Treme just finished up filming only its second season, it is as yet unclear what the consequences of Treme’s material practices will mean for the Tremé neighborhood and for New Orleans more generally. On one hand, by producing a new tourist map that emphasizes local culture and indigenous practices in and around the neighborhood, the show provides vital and necessary resources to residents and business owners that has, in the past, neither been given readily by the city and state nor by private corporate investment or philanthropy. Important cultural institutions like the Backstreet Cultural Museum and local meeting places, restaurants, bars, and music venues therefore receive both financial benefit and cultural validation through their connection to the show. Likewise, musicians featured on the show are more likely to get gigs, and the financial benefits they receive from the show enable them to say no to other gigs that they might otherwise be forced to take (Rawls 2011). 9 These practices perhaps present a welcome shift to an emphasis on indigenous forms of local culture from the more spectacular and commodified cultural promotions of Bourbon Street and the like. Moreover, Fee-Nah-Nay, Tremé’s production company, and the HBO Treme production team’s commitment to socially responsible practices of production, at least in theory, demarcate it from many of the Hollywood productions that have moved into New Orleans. These productions, such as Memphis Beat (TNT 2010-present) which stages New Orleans as Memphis, have little at stake in terms of how they are seen by residents in the city and thus are less likely to feel the same kind of responsibility toward the particular spaces and places in which they film.
Yet all of these practices also pose some serious problems as well. The show’s productive shift to an emphasis on local and vernacular forms of culture aligns with recent policies both nationally and in New Orleans that assume entrepreneurializing local culture will be key to new phases of urban renewal. As many critics have argued, this emphasis has the tendency to view culture through the lens of an economic rationality, where cultural practices are assumed to be worthwhile because they can produce a return on investment (Yúdice 2003). A key question that emerges from this logic is what happens to those forms of culture that don’t seem to create a return on investment? Although the show seems to aim at showcasing forms of cultural practice that had hitherto been left out of this calculating logic, it nonetheless participates in the rendering of culture as valuable through a kind of economic rationality. Indeed, the show very much depends on the capacity for these cultural practices to produce an economic value in terms of the production of audiences and profits. 10 Moreover, in the particular case of the Tremé neighborhood, a concern is that the show’s relationship to practices of tourism and its highlighting of vernacular cultural practices will contribute to gentrification. As Sharon Zukin (2008) notes, it is precisely the combination of these factors that often leads to the extinguishing of those elements that made these kinds of local cultural neighborhoods distinct, as rent increases and those who were responsible for the production of culture are driven out of the neighborhood (732-35).
In addition, it is unclear whether the benefits that go along with the show’s hiring and labor practices of local cultural workers is something that will extend beyond the show to benefit a larger portion of musicians and other cultural practitioners in the city. Even now, it is largely the musicians that are employed by the show who are offered more gigs both in and out of the city. Although there may be greater desire for New Orleans–based and –styled music, the show has not produced many tangible benefits but for a few select musicians (Rawls 2011). Moreover, though the series has hired a number of local crew workers, the majority of the above-the-line workers remain non–New Orleanians. Producers also state that they have a difficult time finding experienced local workers because there is so much production going on in the city (L. Schweigman [associate producer], personal communication, 2011). This points to the need for expanding the educational and training opportunities for local film production, but in the face of sweeping cuts to higher education programs throughout the state (Moller 2011) it is unclear how this could be achieved. Although the producers’ charitable donations to training and technical programs to help fertilize local film production might be admirable, I am doubtful that relying on this kind of corporate “social welfare” will provide any long-term or meaningful solution to employment shortages or a lack of educational opportunities. 11
David Simon’s recent response to critics of the involvement of Treme’s producers with historic preservation groups that attempted to prevent the demolition of blighted houses in the Central City neighborhood (used in the series’ season one opening credits) demonstrates very clearly the precariousness of this form of social welfare. Moved to respond to comments posted to the story that ran on The Times Picayune’s website where readers both heralded the producer’s efforts at making a material impact on the city’s historic preservation as well as chastised him for preventing anti-blight efforts, Simon argued, “With Treme as with The Wire, the producers decided that because the subject matter deals with actual urban dynamics, it would be worthwhile if we could figure out ways to leverage the presence of the production to raise funds and awareness for charities and non-profits. It is often fun to do so. And considering that the film industry is indeed an industry for profit like any other, it often feels pleasantly subversive to do so. But . . . it is not our primary purpose and certainly no responsibility” (Simon on nola.com 2011). Although Simon claimed that the series had no “responsibility” to the city, the number and vehemence of the comments on the website very clearly demonstrated that residents thought otherwise, regardless of whether they embraced or chastised Treme’s impacts. Nevertheless, despite efforts of both historic preservationists and critics alike to hold Treme accountable and responsible for its broader practices in the city, Simon’s comment demonstrates that corporate social responsibility is a voluntary effort that takes place at the whims and fancies of particular producers. 12
Relatedly, there is the question of what happens when Treme leaves? Will its hiring practices, emphasis on rewriting the tourist map, and practices of corporate social responsibility be enough to make its impact on the production of city space and the revitalization of neighborhoods like Tremé last beyond its finale? Or will it only linger in the city long enough for it to glean a profit, at which point it will pack up and take all its resources with it, leaving Tremé to fend for itself and hope that the show’s temporary “social welfare” was enough for it to make it on its own? In raising these questions, I do not mean to suggest that Treme merely exemplifies another form of neoliberalism that commodifies culture. Rather, what I hoped to have emphasized is that the case of Treme points to just how nuanced and complicated the practice of cultural production is in the current era. Indeed, the series does not merely commodify culture, but rather works from, with, and through some of the same logics, discourses, and signifiers that have rendered culture as a space of resistance. Yet it is also circumscribed within an industrial logic of public–private partnerships and the marketing of these spaces of resistance for the purposes of both profit and empowerment. Given the complexity of how these forces of culture as resistance and culture as market intertwine, the show does not easily lend itself to either being criticized for how it perpetuates the commodification of culture or heralded as a space of struggle for counterhegemonic resistance. Rather, it sits somewhere at the crux of an intersection between these forces, perhaps signaling the need for a shift in how we conceptualize both commodification and resistance at this conjuncture.
I do not have enough space here, nor is it my explicit purpose, to fully consider these questions, but I hope that gesturing to these potential stakes of Treme makes clear that its implication in city space is quite different from that of Frank’s Place. As such, it calls on media scholars to consider Treme not only as a practice of representation but also as a spatialized, material practice whose off-screen practices are just as, if not more so, important than its material on screen. Critical media scholarship needs to take seriously how the show is bound up with the production of city space through hiring practices, filming practices, on-location shooting, tourism, efforts at corporate social responsibility, charity, and other spatially materialist concerns. As such, I argue for viewing Treme as a set of spatial practices bound up with the material production of city space as well as its citizen-subjects, in historically contextual terms at this moment, where vernacular, cultural practices meet global media production in the neighborhood.
Footnotes
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.