Congo Square

Congo Square is the proper title of my creative project, derived from the historically recognized birthplace of jazz in New Orleans, LA. Despite the inherent difficulties of identifying the exact moment that jazz was created, historical consensus points to this area near the French Quarter, now named Armstrong park, where slaves in the French occupied Louisiana territory could congregate, play music, and exchange goods. What interests me most in appropriating the title of Congo Square has little to do with the specificity of the origin of jazz music, or, for that matter, the specific historicity of black cultural production; rather, I am interested in what Congo Square represents, metaphorically and mythologically in the black social and cultural imagination, as well as how the colonized subject (in the form of the black other) used this physical and psychological space.