15. Happy Yardi Gras! Playing with Carnival in New Orleans during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Carnival season in New Orleans is a playful time. People of all ages play with words as they come up with themes for floats, costumes and throws (small gifts thrown to spectators). They play with materials and crafting skills as they make these items. They play with personas, roles and hedonic pleasures as they participate in the parades and parties that culminate in Mardi Gras day. With the 2021 parades cancelled, New Orleanians set about re-imagining carnival for pandemic times, playing with its structures to be able to celebrate at a safe distance. The idea that most captured their imaginations was the Krewe of House Floats, a Twitter joke that accidentally inspired thousands of households to decorate their homes as parade floats. Drawing on anthropological and geographical approaches to play and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over seven carnival seasons, I analyze the continuities and ruptures of playful carnival practices that were manifest in the creations and testimonies of people who participated in this phenomenon, also dubbed ‘Yardi Gras’. Like regular carnival, the house floats reflected uneven access to resources, materials, and know-how. Unlike regular carnival, they featured less satire and more whimsy, and often paid tribute to beloved local cultural icons. They also resituated carnival in domestic and neighbourhood space and sociality, temporarily reversing a trend toward centralization, and were a product of pandemic-specific temporality. Because carnival is re-made every year through improvisation and responsiveness to current events, resourcefulness and creativity are built into its social structure. I argue that this is what enabled its playful reconfiguration.