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Ralph Ellison once wrote that the rules of performance in American culture are jazz-shaped. This book explores the Afro-creole core culture of New Orleans as the mainspring of this energizing music. Much of the cultural capital of the city is buried in a complex, tripartite racial history, which threatens the binary logic of North American racism with all sorts of sensual transgressions. Its jazz-derived culture combines elements of African, French, Spanish and Anglo-American cultural practices which in their fusion have created a unique propulsive energy: Second line parades, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indians, Cajun and creole foodways, minstrelsy, dance, ragtime and jazz will be interpreted as the result of a set of historical circumstances unique to this Caribbean metropolis of the senses.

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Berndt Ostendorf studied History, philosophical Anthropology and English at the universities of Freiburg, Glasgow and Philadelphia. From 1976 to 1980 he was Professor of American Studies at the Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe University Frankfurt and from 1981 to 2005 Professor of North American Cultural History and director of the Amerika Institur at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. Ostendorf also was visiting professor at the University of New Orleans, Harvard University, University of Massachusetts and Venice International University.

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