UC Santa Cruz recently interviewed Eric Porter, Professor of History and American Studies, and Lewis Watts, professor of Art, about their new book, New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition. Using both visual evidence and the written word, Watts and Porter pay homage to the city, its region, and its residents, by mapping recent and often contradictory social and cultural transformations, and seeking to counter inadequate and often pejorative accounts of the people and place that give New Orleans its soul.
Porter describes the ambitions of the work, noting that “New Orleans Suite is not merely a book about Katrina … Through Lewis’s photographs and my written sections, we consider how the storm was both a transformative force and a vehicle that enabled longstanding processes to come into view.”
Read the full interview and see photographs from the book at UC Santa Cruz Newscenter.
