Romain Huret - Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective

EDITED BY ROMAIN HURET
AND RANDY J. SPARKS

Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 2014 by Louisiana State University Press
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ISBN 978-0-8071-5843-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-5844-9 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8071-5845-6 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8071-5846-3 (mobi)

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Introduction
Romain Huret

Two Centuries of Paradox
The Geography of New Orleanss African American Population, from Antebellum to Postdiluvian Times
Richard Campanella

Explaining the Unexplainable
Hurricane Katrina, FEMA, and the Bush Administration
Romain Huret

Picturing the Catastrophe
News Photographs in the First Weeks after Katrina
Jean Kempf

Wilt Thou Judge the Bloody City? Yea, Thou Shalt Show Her All Her Abominations
Hurricane Katrina as a Providential Catastrophe
James Boyden

Naturalizing Disaster
Neoliberalism, Cultural Racism, and Depoliticization in the Era of Katrina
Andrew Diamond

Reformers, Preservationists, Patients, and Planners
Embodied Histories and Charitable Populism in the Post-Disaster Controversy over a Public Hospital
Anne M. Lovell

The Political Economy of Invisibility in Twenty-First-Century New Orleans
Security, Hospitality, and the Post-Disaster City
Thomas Jessen Adams

Faith, Hip-Hop, and Charity
Brass-Band Morphology in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Bruce Boyd Raeburn

Memory Lives in New Orleans
The Process and Politics of Commemoration
Sara Le Menestrel

Why Mardi Gras Matters
Randy J. Sparks

This book began in December 2005 with a conference organized in Paris by Sara Le Menestrel. Only a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, French and American scholars tried to bring some rationality to such a moving and disturbing event. For launching the project, we are very grateful to Saras initiative and the people at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris who helped organize the conference. In particular, we would like to thank Ccile Vidal and Franois Weil. Later, with Jim Boyden we presented some of our conclusions at conferences of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. We are grateful to all participants in our sessions, including Adam Fairclough, Alecia Long, and Matthew Mulcahy.

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a group of scholars from Tulane and France gathered for a conference in New Orleans from October 21 to 23, 2010. Six scholars from various departments at Tulane and six scholars from France presented papers, exploring how academics on both sides of the Atlantic viewed the hurricane and its aftermath. That conference was cosponsored by the Tulane Department of History and the Centre dtudes Nord-Amricaines at the EHESS. Additional support was provided by the New Orleans Gulf South Center at Tulane, the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane, the Institut universitaire de France, and by the Florence Gould Foundation, an American foundation devoted to French-American exchange and amity.

In 2011, we organized a follow-up workshop in Lyon and Paris. Many people provided crucial support, especially Camille Amat, Brigitte Esnault, Nicolas Larchet, Vincent Michelot, Sandrine Revet, Alexandre Rios-Bordes, Evelyne Thvenard, and Jean-Claude Zancharini. We are grateful for the support of these individuals and organizations, without whom this book project would not have been possible.

HURRICANE KATRINA
IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE

You cant afford to have a hurricane when youre earning seven or eight dollars a day.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

I understood that being poor meant not being a citizen, one New Orleans resident bitterly observed on the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in late August 2005. Branded refugees by the American government and suspected of committing the darkest of crimes during the long week in which the city was cut off from the rest of the world, the poor seized the opportunity to tell their harrowing tales of days surrounded by water, weeks of wandering in search of shelter, and months of wondering whether they would ever be able to return home. For many Americans, Hurricane Katrina marked the moment in which they rediscovered poverty and social injustice in America, and eventually wondered about their social contract. Far from the nations opulent suburbs, from New Yorks Fifth Avenue and Californias Sunset Boulevard, the lines of people at the Superdome, the stadium where the poor took shelter during the storm, revealed the existence of Americans with little cash in their pockets, living paycheck to paycheck on the earnings from menial, insecure, poorly paid jobs. Journalists and politicians harped on the same question: how was such a disaster possible in America, the worlds greatest superpower?

Although social scientists had written copiously about the deterioration of a range of social indices in the wake of welfare cuts and economic deregulation, the disaster ripped the veil off Americas hidden poverty and displayed it to the world without the softening filter of cultural mediators. Toothless old women, homeless people, aimless youths, and addicts in search of a fix appeared on television in scenes resembling those described by William T. Vollmann, a writer with a talent for portraying the impoverished America of poor white trash and the mostly African American underclass of the ghettos. In France, where links with Louisiana are old, many people expressed their concerns for the people of New Orleans and especially the musicians. In the left-wing newspaper Libration, the journalist Patrick Sabatier evoked a city under water, which will remain a ghost town for weeks. Like all other commentators, he couldnt help interpreting the event in terms of the geopolitical context and highlighted the sudden collapse of a wealthy and over developed society. Concerts to support artists in the city were spontaneously organized in Paris. People of New Orleans humorously thanked the French by wearing the sticker Chirac rachte nous (Buy us back, Chirac) during Mardi Gras.

Because of its social and ethnic makeup, and due to the medias construction of the event, New Orleans after Katrina offered an exceptionally concentrated image of discrimination in America, compounded by the citys bad reputation. Thanks to the media, the citys Lower Ninth Ward quickly came to symbolize exclusion at the heart of American prosperity. As in many other urban neighborhoods across the United States, the situation in the Lower Ninth has deteriorated considerably since the 1950s owing to a combination of unfavorable economic, migratory, and social factors at both the local and national levels. Residents of New Orleans with the highest incomes left to live in the suburbs, state aid dried up, and the recession of the 1970s left public finances in a shambles for decades. New Orleans is also exceptional because of its large African American population, which has been hit harder by poverty and exclusion than other ethnic groups. Thanks to tourism and the Mardi Gras industry, the city did grow, but the poverty rate remains quite high in this majority black city.