The magic of port cities

Speakers
Keith Brannon, director of Public Relations, Tulane Communications and Marketing
Brian Edwards, dean of the Tulane School of Liberal Arts 

Brannon
Welcome to On Good Authority, the podcast from Tulane University, where we bring you leading experts to talk about issues of the day and ideas that shape the world. I'm your host, Keith Brannon. New Orleans is a magical city unlike any other. We're the birthplace of jazz, a culinary capital of the world, and a muse for generations of writers, like Tennessee Williams, Anne Rice, and Sarah Broom. It's a city whose cultural impact is outsized and legendary. How did all that come to be? And could the source of its magic have something to do with its location? Before it was founded as New Orleans, Native Americans called it Bulbancha, a Choctaw word meaning “the place of other languages.” It reflects the enduring nature of our area as a crossroads of waterways and culture. According to Brian Edwards, dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane, it's that start, as a port city, that gets to the heart of what makes New Orleans so special. Brian is leading a new initiative, exploring the idea that there's something about port cities that sets them apart, making them natural centers for creativity, culture, and vibrancy. But they're also uniquely fragile and threatened by climate change and modern life. His project explores the connection between three port cities, New Orleans, Naples, Italy, and Tangier in Morocco. Brian, welcome to On Good Authority.

Edwards
Thanks, Keith. Thanks for having me.

Brannon
What makes port cities so special?

Edwards
You know, port cities around the world it seems have certain characteristics in common, really both positive and negative. And we recognize that there's a sort of charisma or a romanticism to these ports. They are layered over time because of the very basic fact that they were in, you know, places people were stopping by with trade or for various on, during the sea trade and became very complex places, multilingual, multinational, and places of pleasure in certain ways, too. You know, that has negative and positive outcomes. But it also is something that seems to characterize port cities and distinguish them from other cities. I mean, cities are always hubs. Cities are always complex. And they frequently have people from all sorts of places, but port cities are a bit distinctive in this way.

Brannon
Why did you start with these three places? You know, from the outside, all three are significant tourist destinations. But how else do you see New Orleans is connected to Naples or Tangier?

Edwards
You know, some of it’s personal. I had spent a long period of my life and career working in Morocco, especially in Tangier, where I had done research, and back to my graduate student days and in my first book, I wrote a lot about Tangier. And in my time in Tangier, what I was really interested in was how it was separate from Morocco in certain ways. Of course, it's a part of the nation of Morocco now, but it had been an international city, it is a multilingual city. It was a city from the ’20s to 1956 when Morocco becomes independent and brings what was then the international city into its fold. And when I moved to New Orleans, in 2018, to become dean of the School of Liberal Arts, of course I knew New Orleans. I had been here several times, mainly through professional meetings and conferences. The more I spent time here, the more the exceptional aspects of New Orleans reminded me of Tangier. Somehow a place that of course is a part of the United States, at the end of the Mississippi River, but in other ways really connected to the sort of international or exceptional or out, inside-outside the nation that it's a part of. Naples, you know, I had spent some time as a as a visiting scholar on a Fulbright a few years earlier, had also reminded me of this sort of city. I mean, exceptional to Italy at different points in its history. Fascinating, complex, a bit a bit, you know, struggled with crime and poverty in certain kinds of ways. And in the, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, which also becomes important, the more I looked into Naples.

Brannon
Why is a project like this important to a school of liberal arts?

Edwards
Well, liberal arts, of course, is both a collection of disciplines, of academic disciplines, which really when you step one-half a step backwards, there are different ways of looking at the world, or even different ways of looking at some of the same things, the social and cultural expression of humans and different ways to understand and analyze what's going on in the world of the present or the past. At its heart, a liberal arts approach or education is interdisciplinary. Port cities are complex, you know, again, there, you're looking for a point of reference, or a vantage point, upon which to see so much that's going on. And if we look at, if we try to look at and understand, appreciate, or, or analyze what's going on in a port city, you really do need the tools of different disciplines. The other part of it, and the key part of it is this is, you know, the discovery about port cities is that one of the key aspects that they have in common is the struggle with environmental crisis. And as we'll talk about in a little bit, high levels of creativity. And so, this is a place where, you know, looking at environmental studies, the complexity itself interdisciplinary, but also really appreciating and understanding the ways in which creative artists, those who have incredible levels of cultural expression, emerge from or relate to the city that they live in is really in the, at the center of a liberal arts approach.

Brannon
And your hope for this project is that these conversations go beyond Tulane or other universities?

Edwards
From the very start, this project has been multisided and about conversation. You know, to to understand the complexity of any one city, you need to bring together folks who are not just academics, but also artists, community organizers, people who understand social phenomena and so on. Architects, planners, curators, and that's what we, that's what we've done in each of the cities. What's really amazing, and we actually started in Tangier, and I went out, once the city that I knew I felt I knew pretty well. But when the the idea started to get more provocative, I went back to Tangier with my Moroccan collaborator on this project and started interviewing people at the port, people who worked at the port, urban planners, and artists over there, community organizers. And trying to see if there was, if this was just an abstract idea, or if it had some basis in what was happening on the ground. I found myself, in talking to people in Tangier, giving examples from New Orleans. Talking to them, when they were telling me about their cultural festivals, telling them about Jazz Fest. When they were showing me areas that they were redesigning in the old city of Tangier, talking about the French Quarter of New Orleans, and so on. And they were amazed and really fascinated. I came back to New Orleans and was telling folks here – again curators, artists, academics – about things in Tangier. And there was a sort of light bulb moment when cities that don't really talk to each other, or people who are based in those cities don't talk to each other, realize that a conversation, an interdisciplinary conversation if you like, across these two sites would just produce a kind of conversation that could really amplify everything. Then you bring in a third term, Naples, and I had certain network already on the ground there, including some folks from Naples who had come to New Orleans to visit us here at Tulane, and on visiting scholar kind of programs, and asked if they would like to get involved with what we were talking about.

Brannon
So you actually brought scholars to Naples. Was it over the summer?

Edwards
Yeah, in the late spring of last year, 2022, I brought 15, not just scholars, but also curators and artists from New Orleans and from Tangier to Naples, actually to a small island off of Naples, an island called Procida near Capri. And along with folks from Naples, the city of Naples over to the island, we had a set of meetings and conversations about port cities. Had everyone kind of present their city to the other, to the rest of the group, with the idea that we were discovering whether or not this idea had any validity or to learn together. And really to have the artists and the curators talk to the academics and vice versa. And it was incredibly productive. Then we brought everybody to, back into the city of Naples and started meeting with museum directors, also the head of a cultural center there, some theater people based in Naples, telling them about our project. And in every case, it was almost as if the project started to grow, not only because there was a sort of uptake by people who didn't know about it and somehow it resonated with them. But also, because it's a project that is built on the idea that one, that people learn from each other, that learn from dialogue, that learn from exchange, which is something that's been really important to me. And I think it's something that really resonates here in New Orleans. We're a very relational place, we say, but actually when you see it on the ground or see it in motion, it really is exciting.

Brannon
And, you know in this conversation, I see you've mentioned artists many times. What is it about being a port that shapes or inspires culture and intense creativity?

Edwards
Well, that's a great question. And it's something that we recognize, we notice, and we're trying to figure out why it seems to be. I mean, maybe there's a simple answer to it, is that creative people like to be in dynamic, exciting, interesting cities. I mean, it may be as simple as that. What is the case for the cities, the three cities that we're talking about now – Tangier, New Orleans, Naples – is that they have incredible levels of creativity, both at different points in times, you know, world famous artists, writers, literary movements, that are associated with them. Filmmakers, great film traditions, you can think about the number of really interesting movies or plays or novels set in these cities by people who are living in them, and all of them, if you happen to know any of those. But, but also what I call everyday creativity. I mean, we joke, those of us who live in New Orleans, that everyone seems to have a costume closet or find any excuse to get dressed up in costume. But that's really actually interesting, having lived in a lot of cities, including, you know, big cities like New York and Chicago, which are very culturally, you know, sophisticated and culturally rich cities. You don't feel that same level of everyday kind of participation in a creative place. That is what it means to live in a highly creative city. And it's really interesting to me, that port cities, and there are several others that we're already kind of scouting for the next part of this project, are also global cultural capitals. And New Orleans is a global cultural capital, despite the population size, it's a world cultural capital, where the level of creativity is at the very highest, you know, the highest level. And that has something to do with the folks who are drawn here and what emerges from this incredibly sophisticated, layered, multilingual, multicultural city.

Brannon
And it's that that mix of cultures that are part of our history. Is that part of what drives a culture that's very different from the rest of the country it's a part of?

Edwards
You know, if you talk about a port city, of course, there's two things that are coming together both the specific place in relationship to water, the landmass itself, and then what is built by humans around that city, right. So it's important, you said in your intro, that before the French kind of, you know, established a settlement here at New Orleans, this particular spot between the lake and the bend in the river, the native peoples call it “place of other tongues” or “place of many tongues,” right, which has something to do with the fact that people, I mean, one interprets or tabulates the the coming together of people from different nations or different peoples in this place, again, because of the landmass. Why would why would there be a city at this place? And for all of the environmental unsustainability of a location, there's also clearly a long set of attractions to the landmass, right. And then you build a port, and now with the expansion of the port, we can talk about that in a moment. Similar thing with Tangier, where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet is a tremendously important place. And it's both a place that dictates why the city is where it is, and and centuries of settlement well before the Arabs. Well even before the the Amazigh, what is translated as the Berber people, you have settlements at Tangier, perhaps not surprisingly, like between the Strait of Gibraltar and this northernmost part of Africa. And so, that kind of cultural complexity, yes, the Spanish is a huge, Spanish influence much, much, much later, right? And then a French influence. There's at the moment of Tangier as an international city, there's a council of nations, there's, at one point there are four simultaneous postal systems running in Tangier, multiple currencies accepted, multilingual, you know, place. When I lived in Tangier as a graduate student, I used to remark that there were sentences that were speak, being spoken in four different languages as people code-switched. It is the most multilingual city I've ever lived in, and people don't even think of it that way, right.

Brannon
All three of these cities have had their moments in history but have been somewhat left behind. The era of sea voyages as the major mode of transportation for people has obviously changed. You mentioned that 1956 marks the turning point for these cities with the rise of shipping containers. Here in New Orleans that has, in a sense, separated us from the river and the port.

Edwards
Yeah, it's really interesting for historians, or cultural historians, to talk about turning points, right, and to talk about the invention of the container ship, or the container, as a way of transporting goods is a certainly a perverse way to talk about geopolitical history, right. We think about wars, we think about presidents, we think about economic movements, and so on. But what's really interesting about the container ship, and actually look, going to today, there's actually more sea trade in terms of objects, commodities today than there was in, earlier you know, before the arrival of the container ship. The container ship, you know, that box or the container box, container box that goes loaded into a, you know, an enormous ship. Taken off, put onto a train, goes on or goes and becomes, immediately becomes the cargo for a truck without being unloaded, absolutely transforms global sea trade and makes it expand quite dramatically. However, at the same time, the people, the human element to sea trade, changes in ports. So if you live in New Orleans today, you live in Tangier today, or live in Naples today, you're not seeing this, you don't have this, you don't see the workings of the port the way you might have in an earlier period of time. It's only the 19th century when people were unloading ships, and you had, what are the impacts of that? You had around the port, the growth, you know, of bars, red light districts, certain kinds of restaurants, certain kinds of boarding houses, and so on, that led to a lot of the complexity that we're talking about. And think of other places, you know, Barcelona, Marseille, Dakar, Beirut, you know, this is true in a lot of other global ports. So what does it mean today? If if you're living in a port city today, and you're thinking about this, you don't often see that working. It's invisible to you, or at least it's hidden, or it's put to the side, right. You go up Tchoupitoulas and you can't even really get at it. And yet it has so much to do, we think, I argue, this project explores, with why the cities are the way they are. So in some ways, what we're starting to discover in the project is to try to bring back or, or help understand what it means to live in a port city. What it means to live with the vestiges, if you like, of a certain period of trade that operated differently in the past. Paradoxically, it has grown more, but it's less visible to us.

Brannon
It's the, it becomes more of a distribution center, rather than something that's human-centered. The people have been taken out of the equation to some degree.

Edwards
Absolutely, the number, the number of people who, who are involved with the expansion of the global trading commodities through port cities is much fewer. They're operating machines, they're operating cranes, they're, you know, there's a lot of robotics involved. And, and yet, these port cities that we talk about are so much built around the history of that human interaction from complex, multilingual places. You know, and the people who stay, the people who leave. I mean, you think about, this is another aspect of port cities, which is really very relevant today, which is that they're often the places where epidemics or diseases come together, for obvious reasons. People come together from different places, and they, you know, think about during COVID-19, you know, the cruise ship, right. And if, you know, of course, that's a modern version of what had happened for centuries around port cities. People bringing things in and taking things out. And they weren't always just commodities. They're often ideas and often sometimes, you know, viruses and so on.

Brannon
Is that intermodal culture magic something that really can't be replicated now? I mean, I can't see anyone discussing, you know, the magic of major airports cities or Amazon hubs in 100 years from now.

Edwards
You know, I find walking through major international airports really fascinating. And I find, you know, as I move from one gate to another, even if I'm not at that moment traveling to another country, I look at the gates, where the planes are going to, where the planes just dropped off from. And for a moment, I'm in a very complex, multinational space. But it doesn't last, right? You're not living there. Famously, airports are transit zones and complex places, but temporarily so. And so, in some ways, when you talk about a major international airport, you have a sense of that, but not the base to the long-lasting aspects of it.

Brannon
But when you're in O'Hare, you don't feel like you're in Chicago?

Edwards
Absolutely. Absolutely. You feel, yes, you're in this special zone. You’ve passed through security, you've passed through customs, perhaps, and passport control. Sometimes the legal space, the legal status of those spaces is different than the city that surround them. So they, they're interesting, but for a moment, right. The thing about living in a port city, is that we, we’re living constantly within that complexity. We may not see it at every moment, but you feel it, you know. I mean, New Orleans is such a remarkable city because it also marks it. If, if you're in the French Quarter, you know, of course, in some ways, this is for kind of tourist consumption. But you see that layered palimpsest of names, right. So, you know, in Spanish, this name of this city was so and so and has this French name. I love these kinds of layers of history and language that come together.

Brannon
This idea that cities must reinvent themselves to stay relevant is also an important part of your project. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Edwards
Yes, port cities, they're struggling under some of the similar crises, including environmental crisis, in the sense that the changing climate is an existential threat to them. We feel that more immediately. But also, the ways in which the economy of port cities, as you mentioned at the top of the interview, is really over reliant on tourism and hospitality. We don't want New Orleans, or these other cities, to end up being museums of their former cultural richness. And the fact that so many people come to New Orleans looking for some version of it in the past is something that we're working against, in a sense. The premise of the project is that creative people, including community organizers, artists, and activists, and so on, as well as academics, have a variety of approaches, and possibly solutions, to these very complicated problems, right. To diversify, the opportunity to diversify the economy of New Orleans, was actually a ship that sailed in some ways. But in fact, we're trying to restart some of those conversations. The creative industries of the city, which is something we care a lot about, it brings back to your earlier question about why liberal arts, the creative economy of the city is something that needs to be more central to the future of it. So the port cities project is not merely a museum piece. It's not an academic exercise. It's something in which we're trying to bring a different range of participants to think together to develop and propose solutions to the future of this city and others. And the idea that cities can learn from this set of of creative people, and that cities can learn from creative people in other cities, is the basis upon which the idea of a multisided project is built.

Brannon
And as a native son of New Orleans, I feel the need to come to her defense, because we're not just about shipping. We're also building rockets to the moon and to Mars.

Edwards
Exactly, Keith. The fact that innovation is a potential future for New Orleans is exactly the point of a creative city, or a port city as a creative city. It's not merely about the kinds of cultural products that we've talked about – music and cooking and food and art and so on – but also about the next generation of innovation. What that might look like, whether it's space travel, whether it's, you know, the next generation of business products, and so on. Creative cities reinvent themselves and thrive in new historical conditions, or new economic conditions, by leveraging their creativity. That understand that innovation is not merely the realm of business, but it is the place when business, liberal arts can have approaches, creative industries come together. And New Orleans has such a long history. It's such an old city within the United States. And I have a great confidence that these sorts of conversations are about thinking about its next century or more.

Brannon
We can’t end this episode without talking about a significant part of what makes these three places special – the amazing food. We've got gumbo and beignets. Napoli pizza is a religious experience. Tangier has tagine, couscous, and incredible Moroccan cuisine. If you had a single day in each of these three cities, what would you do and what would you eat?

Edwards
Well, first of all, if I had a single day in each of these cities, I would come back a lot heavier because I would eat all day in all three cities. You know, New Orleans, I'm not going to tell this audience, but this is a great food city. Yes. And I would probably, you know, start with beignets and move through a whole lot of meals in this city, from po’boys to the great restaurants and chefs that we got here. In Tangier, I'll tell you one thing that is one of the most beautiful experiences in that city is a café that's called Café Hafa, which just means “the cliffs.” And it looks out upon, really upon the sea. And it's built into the sea. And I would just simply have mint tea in Morocco, maybe with some cornes de gazelle, which is an almond paste kind of cookie that's shaped in the, in the form of a horn of a gazelle. And gazelle in Arabic culture is considered the most beautiful of animals, so it's a beautiful kind of cookie. And yes, I probably would have a tagine, which is a kind of way of cooking in an earthenware pot and kind of a bubbling thing, and some of the great seafood that comes from Tangier. In Naples, I would just pig out on pizza and pasta. And I would go to, I would go to some of those rival pizzerias that Naples is famous for, you know, Stella Pizza along the along the water along the corniche, and then Sorbillo in the in the old city, and probably have an Aperol spritz or a Negroni, which is my favorite cocktail. That would be my day. And you see I'd come back very, very full, and I would have a hard time sleeping because I'd over-eat.

Brannon
Well, all of that sounds amazing. Brian, thanks for joining us here today and helping us think about port cities in a new way. 

Edwards
Keith, thanks so much for inviting me and for this great conversation.

Brannon
Thank you for listening to this edition of On Good Authority. For more episodes, please visit tulane.edu/on-good-authority. If you like our show, please subscribe using your favorite podcast app.