After Katrina

Anna Hartnell

Description

Through the lens provided by the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, After Katrina argues that the city of New Orleans emerges as a key site for exploring competing narratives of US decline and renewal at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Deploying an interdisciplinary approach to explore cultural representations of the post-storm city, Anna Hartnell suggests that New Orleans has been reimagined as a laboratory for a racialized neoliberalism, and as such might be seen as a terminus of the American dream. This US disaster zone has unveiled a network of social and environmental crises that demonstrate that prospects of social mobility have dwindled as environmental degradation and coastal erosion emerge as major threats not just to the quality of life but to the possibility of life in coastal communities across America and the world. And yet After Katrina also suggests that New Orleans culture offers a way of thinking about the United States in terms that transcend the binary of national renewal or declension. The post-Hurricane city thus emerges as a flashpoint for reflecting on the contemporary United States.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Is This America?”

Part I: American Time

1. New Orleans and Empire: Legacies from the “Age of Revolution”

2. New Orleans and Americanization: “Progress,” “Decline,” and Tourism in the Twentieth Century

Part II: Katrina Time

3. Documenting Katrina: The Return of the “Real”

4. Resisting Katrina: The Right to Return

Part III: New Orleans Time

5. New Orleans and Water: Remapping Ecologies of the Gulf South

6. New Orleans and the Nation: Legacies from the Future

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• 21st century
• Ethnic studies
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 janvier 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438464190
• Langue: English

Extrait

AFTER KATRINA
AFTER KATRINA
RACE, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
Anna Hartnell
Any royalties earned by the author as a result of the sale of this book will be donated to Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, a non-profit that promotes affordable housing in New Orleans.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hartnell, Anna, author.
Title: After Katrina : race, neoliberalism, and the end of the American century / by Anna Hartnell.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031489 (print) | LCCN 2016054551 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464176 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781438464190 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: New Orleans (La.)—Social conditions. | Hurricane Katrina, 2005—Social aspects—Louisiana—New Orleans. | African Americans—Louisiana—New Orleans (La.)—Social conditions. | New Orleans (La.)—Environmental conditions. | Social change—United States. | United States—Race relations—Political aspects. | Neoliberalism—United States. | Capitalism—Social aspects—United States. | United States—Social policy—1993– | Environmental policy—United States.
Classification: LCC HN80.N45 H37 2017 (print) | LCC HN80.N45 (ebook) | DDC 306.09763/35—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031489
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Bart, Maddy, and Luke
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Is This America?”
Part I: American Time
1. New Orleans and Empire: Legacies from the “Age of Revolution”
2. New Orleans and Americanization: “Progress,” “Decline,” and Tourism in the Twentieth Century
Part II: Katrina Time
3. Documenting Katrina: The Return of the “Real”
4. Resisting Katrina: The Right to Return
Part III: New Orleans Time
5. New Orleans and Water: Remapping Ecologies of the Gulf South
6. New Orleans and the Nation: Legacies from the Future
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped me write this book, which has been on my mind since the late summer of 2005. While the perspectives on New Orleans offered here are undoubtedly those of an outsider, many “insiders” have kindly helped me shape them. So, first and foremost, I must thank the many wonderful friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who I have met on my numerous trips to New Orleans between April 2008 and October 2014. Linetta Gilbert, formerly of the Ford Foundation, cofounder of the Declaration Initiative, and long-time New Orleans resident, has been a friend to this project from the beginning. Benjamin Morris has lent this project his time, knowledge, and enthusiasm. Catherine Michna has been a tirelessly supportive friend and colleague who has generously introduced me to a wide variety of people and ideas, in ways that have enormously enriched my understanding and appreciation of New Orleans.
Huge thanks to all the people who have given up their time to talk to me about their invaluable work in the city, and whose interviews inform this book: Carol Bebelle of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center; parent advocate and education activist Ashana Bigard; the ecologist Michael Blum of Tulane University; Reverend Donald Boutte of St. John Baptist Church, New Orleans; New Orleans geographer Richard Campanella of Tulane University; the filmmaker Luisa Dantas of JoLu Productions; Mai Deng of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation; Abram Himelstein of the Neighborhood Story Project; Hannah Krieger-Benson of the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MaCCNO); Darryl Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club; jazz musician and scholar Brice Miller; Bill Quigley, the social justice lawyer based at Loyola Law School; Ashley Shelton of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation; Nick Slie of Mondo Bizarro; Audrey Stewart of Loyola Law School’s Katrina Clinic; visionary architect David Waggonner of Waggonner Ball; the award-winning writer Jesmyn Ward; and Mary Williams of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.
I owe a huge debt to the English Department at Tulane, which has been welcoming to and supportive of my work for a number of years. Special thanks to Molly Rothenberg for making me a Visiting Scholar there in 2010. Huge thanks also to Mike Kuczynski, for renewing that status for a three-month visit in the autumn of 2013, and for extending the hospitality to my husband, Bart Moore-Gilbert, who was able to take advantage of Tulane’s amazing resources in order to conduct his own research on Palestine and postcolonialism. Thanks also to Joel Dinerstein of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane, which kindly hosted the conference I organized in November 2013, “After Katrina: Transnational Perspectives on the Futures of the Gulf South.” Thank you to the many inspiring participants of this conference, in particular the two keynote speakers, writer and activist Kalamu ya Salaam and Richard Campanella. I am indebted to Rich’s scholarship and guidance during the course of writing this book, which I imagine he would probably disagree with in many respects, but which I hope nonetheless pays quiet tribute to his meticulous and illuminating contributions. Finally, the Gulf South Center then supported my work again in 2014 by offering me a Global South Fellowship which enabled me to return to the city and complete the research for this book.
Thank you to a network of supportive friends and colleagues in the UK and beyond who have in various ways engaged with and helped me with this work, especially Rick Crownshaw, Zara Dinnen, Danielle Fuller, Barnor Hesse, Cedric Johnson, and Steve Hewitt. Thanks also to my fantastic colleagues in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, especially Alison Finlay, Roger Luckhurst and Sue Wiseman. During the course of this project I was lucky enough to be the holder of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship. I am very grateful to the AHRC, both for the time this allowed me to work on this book, and for the support for the two conferences that book-ended the fellowship, the one in New Orleans and the one held in London at Birkbeck in November 2014, “Rupture, Crisis, Transformation: New Directions in US Studies at the End of the American Century.” Thanks to everybody who participated in that conference, especially the two keynote speakers, Wai Chee Dimock and Caryl Phillips. Huge thanks also to two of my PhD students, Pippa Eldridge and Alex Williamson, for their enthusiasm and hard work on this conference. They are among some of the wonderful students I’ve had the privilege of working with at Birkbeck, and who make teaching there so stimulating and special.
Thanks to Michael Rinella at SUNY Press for his interest in and commitment to this book, and to Rafael Chaiken for his kind assistance. Their patience is much appreciated! I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for providing such detailed and helpful feedback.
Special thanks to Caroline Hartnell, who I am unbelievably lucky to call my mother. I first visited New Orleans with her in 2003, and on many subsequent return trips she has not only supported my work—providing company, childcare, connections—but shared my love of the city. Thanks also to my wonderful father, John Strawson, for always being there.
Above all, I must thank my own little family unit, primarily my husband, Bart, and our daughter, Maddy. They have supported and tolerated this project, respectively, and have accompanied me on numerous trips to New Orleans. In autumn 2013 we lived there for three months, during which New Orleans became another home to all of us. Thanks to Maddy for her enthusiasm not only for the adventure of relocation but for the city itself. It was in New Orleans that she first started stringing sentences together at just two years old. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that it was in this city that she learned her love of telling stories. Thanks to Bart for his insatiable interest in everything, which extended to an openness to a city that he also learned to love, despite the fact that it sits within a national context that he found so politically unpalatable. It’s thanks to conversations with Bart that this book found its shape through the conceptualization of various types of temporality. Bart helped me appreciate the particularly sharp distinction between the dystopian qualities that pervade the Crescent City in the name of a racialized neoliberalism—imagined here as “Katrina time”—and the more utopian currents that I have called in this book “New Orleans time.”
Bart was diagnosed with kidney cancer in April 2015, and he died eight, painfully short months later. This book is dedicated to Bart, my best friend and love of my life, not to mention my most exacting academic critic—among so many other things. It is also dedicated to the other members of the family we share, our darling Maddy, and our son Luke, the gift that arrived just nine days before Bart died. Bart lives on in so many ways, not least in his own considerable bod