"The New Orleans Saints transformed themselves from worst to first in the National Football League (NFL), winning their first Super Bowl in franchise history five years after Hurricane Katrina. Observing New Orleans' unique celebratory culture, the media debated the team's success as symbolic of the recovery of the City. New Orleanians would disagree that this event, momentous as it was, connotes the work of recovering home is done. Instead, the Saints embodied a hopeful resilience. The team functioned as a conduit to the practice of celebratory memorial, for which New Orleans is known--mourning sorrow through festive celebration. Celebrating the Saints (and their Super Bowl Championship season) exemplified the second line tradition--the cultural performance of home as a shared, embodied knowledge of transcendence blending a visual, emotional, and kinetic experience of narrative, rhythm, food, community, and resistance. Thus, the meaning of the Saints' success exceeded football--it provided a vehicle for New Orleans' cultural aesthetic of home. Still, there exists a dissonance between legitimated narratives and narratives constructed from lived experience--specifically those of black women, erased not only from the center of the "Saints as recovery" narratives but from disaster recovery narratives in their entirety. Black women's accounts were ignored, despite expressed intergenerational bonds with the team as fans and consumers, their experiences rendered undetectable. Indeed, the Saints are an important thread in the fabric of the post-Katrina recovery story. However, understanding the Saints as the story is a problematic act of epistemic silencing enacted against black women recovering home in real-time, possessing relevant narrative and theoretical contributions. This dissertation is a theoretical exercise, blending visual study and a black feminist epistemological framework to interrogate the narratives of black women on-the-ground to understand the meaning of the New Orleans Saints 2010 Super Bowl victory to the post-Katrina recovery of home. The project was designed as an 18-month ethnographic study, combining archival research, participant observation, and photo elicitation interviews with 7 black women (ages 23-81). Five images that depicted the Saints phenomenon as well as themes from extant literature accompanied a semi-structured interview schedule to empower participants as experts and encourage self-authored narratives describing the meaning of the Saints to the post-Katrina recovery of home. Findings suggest that the Saints' success is integral in the recovery of home--as the embodiment of New Orleans unique culture of celebratory memorial as step toward healing."--Abstract.
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