My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 171

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Across the country, Professor Jules
Allen’s images connect with the bands’
flourish and precision as explicit forms
which embrace his signature style of
photographing on the backbeat.
In post-Katrina Second Lines, funeral
parades, and regional festivals, Allen
documents community and personal
reconstruction as a process with a
resonant visual aspect. Penetrating old
boundaries, black marching bands
offer geographic and culturally specific
opportunities to erase barriers and
celebrate heroism. The bands mark
change. They also drive and clarify it.
The music is important, expressing the
inexpressible. It surrounds, perturbs,
knows no borders. It crosses the tracks,
disturbing the old social order. Within
whirlwinds of incomprehensible assault
and changes in besieged communities,
the way to go on living is to recognize
the familiar architecture carried within
us: the warmth, the cultural anchors,
liberating ideals, and the resilience
to release old ways. Contemporary
parades have a new urgency, openly
political themes, direct and powerful
messages. They help us build coherence
within the disrupted world. Out of the
rupture marches renewal.