Who Dat?: Race and Its Conspicuous Consumption in Post‐ K atrina N ew O rleans

This article explores the fraught neoliberal refashioning of post‐ K atrina N ew O rleans in relation to concurrent modes of racialized inclusion and exclusion. I suggest an intensification of market forces during this period has hastened a privileging of certain acceptable, often gendered forms of blackness tied to their performance‐centered market consumption while simultaneously rendering others criminal and/or violently disposable. Such racial regulation, it is argued, is tantamount to a kind of “contractual blackness” within N ew O rleans' neoliberalized landscape that delineates commercially assimilable and therefore “good” black subjects from deviantly “bad” and hence expendable ones. The article follows with explorations of how some A frican A merican working class men mediate these duel economies of consumption/disposability through varying performative strategies of black possibility and alterity.