Narratives Of Hurricane Katrina In Context

This book analyzes six key narratives of Hurricane Katrina across literature, film and television from the literary fiction of Jesmyn Ward to the cinema of Spike Lee. It argues that these texts engage with the human tragedy and political fallout of the Katrina crisis while simultaneously responding to issues that have characterized the wider, George W. Bush era of American history; notably the aftermath of 9/11 and ensuing War on Terror. In doing so it recognizes important challenges to trauma studies as an interpretive framework, opening up a discussion of the overlaps between traumatic rupture and systemic or, “slow violence.”

In this book, Powell examines the ways that identities are constructed in displacement narratives based on cases of eminent domain, natural disaster, and civil unrest, attending specifically to the rhetorical strategies employed as barriers and boundaries intersect with individual lives. She provides a unique method to understand how the displaced move within accepted and subversive discourses, and how representation is a crucial component of that movement. In addition, Powell shows how notions of human rights and the "public good" are often at odds with individual well-being and result in intriguing intersections between discourses of power and discourses of identity. Given the ever-increasing numbers of displaced persons across the globe, and the "layers of displacement" experienced by many, this study sheds light on the resources of rhetoric as means of survival and resistance during the globally common experience of displacement.

When and under what circumstances are disaster survivors able to speak for themselves in the public arena? In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative, author Kate Parker Horigan shows how the public understands and remembers large-scale disasters like Hurricane Katrina, outlining which stories are remembered and why, as well as the impact on public memory and the survivors themselves. Horigan discusses unique contexts in which personal narratives about the storm are shared, including interviews with survivors, Dave Eggers's Zeitoun, Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, and public commemoration during Hurricane Katrina's tenth anniversary in New Orleans. In each case, survivors initially present themselves in specific ways, counteracting negative stereotypes that characterize their communities. However, when adapted for public presentation, their stories get reduced back to those stereotypes. As a result, people affected by Katrina continue to be seen in limited terms, as either undeserving or incapable of managing recovery. This project is rooted in Horigan's experiences living in New Orleans before and after Katrina, but it is also a case study illustrating an ongoing problem and an innovative solution: survivors' stories should be shared in a way that includes their own engagement with the processes of narrative production, circulation, and reception. When survivors are seen as agents in their own stories, they will be seen as agents in their own recovery. Having a better grasp on the processes of narration and memory is critical for improved disaster response because the stories that are most widely shared about disaster determine how communities recover.

When and under what circumstances are disaster survivors able to speak for themselves in the public arena? In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative, author Kate Parker Horigan shows how the public understands and remembers large-scale disasters like Hurricane Katrina, outlining which stories are remembered and why, as well as the impact on public memory and the survivors themselves. Horigan discusses unique contexts in which personal narratives about the storm are shared, including interviews with survivors, Dave Eggers's Zeitoun, Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, and public commemoration during Hurricane Katrina's tenth anniversary in New Orleans. In each case, survivors initially present themselves in specific ways, counteracting negative stereotypes that characterize their communities. However, when adapted for public presentation, their stories get reduced back to those stereotypes. As a result, people affected by Katrina continue to be seen in limited terms, as either undeserving or incapable of managing recovery. This project is rooted in Horigan's experiences living in New Orleans before and after Katrina, but it is also a case study illustrating an ongoing problem and an innovative solution: survivors' stories should be shared in a way that includes their own engagement with the processes of narrative production, circulation, and reception. When survivors are seen as agents in their own stories, they will be seen as agents in their own recovery. Having a better grasp on the processes of narration and memory is critical for improved disaster response because the stories that are most widely shared about disaster determine how communities recover.

A vital reckoning with how we understand the basic categories of cultural expression in the digital era Digital and social media have transformed how much and how fast we communicate, but they have also altered the palette of expressive strategies: the cultural forms that shape how citizens, activists, and artists speak and interact. Most familiar among these strategies are storytelling and representation. In A Theory of Assembly, Kyle Parry argues that one of the most powerful and pervasive cultural forms in the digital era is assembly. Whether as subtle photographic sequences, satirical Venn diagrams, or networked archives, projects based in assembly do not so much narrate or represent the world as rearrange it. This work of rearranging can take place at any scale, from a simple pairing of images, undertaken by one person, to the entire history of internet memes, undertaken by millions. With examples ranging from GIFs and paintings to museum exhibitions and social movement hashtags, Parry shows how, in the internet age, assembly has come to equal narrative and representation in its reach and influence, particularly as a response to ecological and social violence. He also emphasizes the ambivalence of assembly—the way it can be both emancipatory and antidemocratic. As the world becomes ever hotter, more connected, and more algorithmic, the need to map—and remake—assembly’s powers and perils becomes all the more pressing. Interdisciplinary, engaging, and experimental, A Theory of Assembly serves as a playbook of strategies and critical frameworks for artists, activists, and content creators committed to social and environmental justice, ultimately arguing for a collective reenvisioning of which cultural forms matter. Cover alt text: Letters from the title appear in a jumble, each colored in a blue-orange gradient. Readable title and author sits below the jumble.

This book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured as ambivalent sites of resistance and social bonding. Following Sara Ahmed’s rereading of happiness, other authors such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, or Henry Giroux are mobilized to interrogate films, memoirs, and novels that deal with precarity, alienation, and inequality. The monograph contributes to enlarging the archives of unhappiness by changing the focus from prescribed norms and happy endings to unruly practices and unhappy beginnings. As the different contributors show, unhappiness, precarity, vulnerability, or failure can be harnessed to illuminate ways of navigating the world and framing society that do not necessarily conform to the script of happiness—whatever that means.

Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast in 2005, leaving an unparalleled trail of physical destruction. In addition to that damage, the storm wrought massive psychological and cultural trauma on Gulf Coast residents and on America as a whole. Details of the devastation were quickly reported—and misreported—by media outlets, and a slew of articles and books followed, offering a spectrum of socio-political commentaries and analyses. But beyond the reportage and the commentary, a series of fictional and creative accounts of the Katrina-experience have emerged in various mediums: novels, plays, films, television shows, songs, graphic novels, collections of photographs, and works of creative non-fiction that blur the lines between reportage, memoir, and poetry. The creative outpouring brings to mind Salman Rushdie’s observation that, “Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that tells itself stories to understand what kind of creature it is.” This book accepts the urge behind Rushdie’s formula: humans tell stories in order to understand ourselves, our world, and our place in it. Indeed, the creative output on Katrina represents efforts to construct a cohesive narrative out of the wreckage of a cataclysmic event. However, this book goes further than merely cataloguing the ways that Katrina narratives support Rushdie’s rich claim. This collection represents a concentrated attempt to chart the effects of Katrina on our cultural identity; it seeks to not merely catalogue the trauma of the event but to explore the ways that such an event functions in and on the literature that represents it. The body of work that sprung out of Katrina offers a unique critical opportunity to better understand the genres that structure our stories and the ways stories reflect and produce culture and identity. These essays raise new questions about the representative genres themselves. The stories are efforts to represent and understand the human condition, but so are the organizing principles that communicate the stories. That is, Katrina-narratives present an opportunity to interrogate the ways that specific narrative structures inform our understanding and develop our cultural identity. This book offers a critical processing of the newly emerging and diverse canon of Katrina texts.

Hundreds of manuscripts, interviews, and transcripts were collected from students and other residents who were willing to share their personal stories of the disaster. UNO compiled all of the submissions and created The Katrina Archive, which is currently housed at the University of New Orleans library. Voices Rising is a small sampling of this greater collection.