A Conversation with Ned Sublette
by Habitus · 09/16/08
For musician and historian Ned Sublette, New Orleans is a city of global significance that is also “an alternative American history in itself.” His book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, is a painstaking and imaginative recreation of the city’s first hundred years. By carefully decoding the influences that shaped it, he has created a vivid portrait of the city we know today.
Sublette approaches the history of New Orleans largely though its music, and he hears in the city an expansive dialogue that reaches back to Europe and Africa and across the Americas. “The whole history of New Orleans is Diasporas,” he tells us—a place where myriad cultural inputs were preserved, integrated, and exported to the world.
Some people call New Orleans the least American city. Your book illustrates that the city is deeply singular, but also profoundly connected to the history and culture of the nation, the region, and the world.
I think it’s the most American city. It’s as fundamental to the history of the nation as Philadelphia or Boston or New York. New Orleans is the logical outcome of competing international forces, meeting in a peculiar geography.
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