After Katrina

Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century

Anna Hartnell

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438464183, 9781438464176
• eBook ISBN: 9781438464190
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Part I

American Time

1

New Orleans and Empire

Legacies from the “Age of Revolution”

There is a striking moment in Dave Eggers’s post-Katrina narrative Zeitoun (2009) when the principal protagonist, incarcerated in “Camp Greyhound”—a makeshift prison hastily constructed in New Orleans’ bus station in the storm’s wake—realizes that his surroundings remind him of Guantánamo Bay.1 This moment provides the opportunity to map, across myriad times and spaces, a genealogy of U.S. empire. This genealogy offers insights into the connections between the contemporary “war on terror” and an older history of U.S. imperial designs and territorial annexation, white supremacy and deep investments in the slave system. Guantánamo Bay as it appears here in Eggers’s text conjures a triangular relationship between New Orleans, Cuba and, this chapter argues, Haiti—a nation that has played a surprisingly central role in the imagination of New Orleans on the one hand and U.S. supremacy on the other. That these hands are at one and the same time distinct and indistinct is part of the complexity of the story that binds New Orleans to the United States, as both subject and object of empire.

Just a few days after Katrina George Friedman claimed in a hyperbolic piece for The New York Review of Books that the storm’s “geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud.”2 His suggestion that Katrina was comparable to a nuclear strike, and that an attack on New Orleans was more significant than an attack on New York or Washington, clearly insinuates 9/11 into our frame for thinking about Katrina. Though not the intention of Friedman’s piece, this frame also enables us to reconsider one of the labels that has policed understandings of 9/11: “Ground Zero.” Amy Kaplan argues that “like the use of 9/11, Ground Zero is a highly condensed and charged appellation.” For Kaplan, the label Ground Zero

resonates with the often heard claim that the world was radically altered by 9/11, that the world will never be the same, that Americans have lost their former innocence about their safety and invulnerability at home. This way of thinking might be called a narrative of historical exceptionalism, almost an antinarrative, claiming the event to be so unique and unprecedented as to transcend time and defy comparison or historical analysis.3

And yet, Kaplan goes on to explain, the history of the term itself belies this narrative of exceptionalism: “It was coined to describe the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” If, as Kaplan claims, “the term Ground Zero [in the context of 9/11] both evokes and eclipses the prior historical reference,” Friedman’s suggestion that Katrina bore similarities to a nuclear strike has the opposite effect.4 His controversial piece quite explicitly meditates on the history of New Orleans as an object of empire, as, in his terms, a “geopolitical prize.” Friedman speculates that had the British won the Battle of New Orleans of 1815, “we suspect they wouldn’t have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States.” He goes on to claim that Andrew Jackson’s “obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.” “If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device,” in Friedman’s opinion, it would have been New Orleans. He reaches this surprising conclusion by making the similarly extraordinary claim that “until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.” This claim is made on the basis that the city sits at the confluence of a river system that made one nineteenth-century commentator claim “New Orleans is beyond a doubt the most important commercial point on the face of the earth.”5

Although today the city still boasts the nation’s largest port—based on the volume of cargo it handles—its pre-Katrina reputation as something of an economic backwater motored largely by the tourist trade might make one sceptical about Friedman’s insistence on the city’s economic centrality. Today the Port of New Orleans is a mechanized one that no longer needs a large population to supply it with labor. This was not the case in the nineteenth century when New Orleans was a boom town as a consequence of its unsurpassed location—environmentally vulnerable but economically indispensable—at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Friedman’s commentary on Katrina is helpful because it reminds us of New Orleans’ desirability as an object of empire, and prompts an examination of the suppressed narrative that Kaplan detects in relation to 9/11.

This suppressed narrative concerns the fact that, as Marcus Rediker argues, “extraordinary violence has always been central to the making of modern capitalism.”6 And New Orleans, this chapter argues, is a key site in highlighting the myriad ways in which the United States has participated in—and has been a central agent of—this extraordinary violence. According to Rediker, the plantation and the slave ship are “the two main institutions of modern slavery,” which in turn underwrite the history of capitalism itself. At the start of the nineteenth century New Orleans, surrounded by sugar and cotton plantations, was a key site on the transatlantic slave trade, and after 1810 it became the center of the U.S. domestic trade in human beings. I would like to take these two institutions, the plantation and the slave ship, which crucially inform the history of New Orleans, as examples of containment on the one hand and mobility on the other. Together, I argue, they form a dialectic of empire that refuses the notion that the one is a sign of oppression whereas the other is indicative of liberation; clearly the imperial path of modern capitalism has relied on a flexible process of drawing boundaries to variously include and exclude peoples and territories, in ways that have secured the flow of money as well as its accumulation. And yet the example of New Orleans evidences that this dialectic is also the path to resistance, both in the form of rooted understandings of belonging and in a freewheeling, transnational flux that in the nineteenth century pitted the city against national trends.

This chapter considers contemporary material that I argue offers echoes of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Orleans, and which provides us with the opportunity to map New Orleans’ central place in the history of U.S. empire and the city’s ambiguous status with regard to Americanization. This status positions New Orleans on the periphery, if not as the complete inversion, of what this book is calling “American time” as it developed from the revolutionary period and came to fruition in the mid-twentieth century. The first section explores the contemporary transnational prison-industrial complex, glimpsed in Dave Eggers’s post-Katrina text, as an echo of both the plantation and the slave ship. The section suggests that the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay provides the opportunity to begin exploring historical links between New Orleans and Haiti that culminated in the nineteenth century following the first and only successful slave revolt in history. These links are forged in the second section via comparisons between post-Katrina New Orleans and post-earthquake Haiti. The striking similarity between often racist constructions of the victims of both disasters brings into view a biopolitical regime that works both within and beyond U.S. national boundaries to render certain groups of human beings disposable in the context of neoliberal capitalism. These constructions have a history in the virulently racist responses to the Haitian revolution which threatened the entire slave and imperial system on which modern capitalism was built. The final section offers alternative approaches to “writing revolution,” focusing on Isabel Allende’s 2009 novel Island Beneath the Sea. This text might be read as a post-Katrina rendering of the Haitian Revolution which registers its enormous impact on nineteenth-century New Orleans and the legacy of this encounter which survives into the present day: the idea that New Orleans is somehow irrevocably foreign, a city whose Creole culture has partially resisted Americanization. In this sense New Orleans emerges here as a “geopolitical prize” whose contemporary reputation as a “Caribbean city” pays tribute to the myriad ways in which it has resisted colonization by the United States.

Bounding Empire: “Homeland” and the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex

“Guantánamo Bay” in contemporary rhetoric—and in Zeitoun—has become a cipher for the U.S. detention camp that is situated in the U.S. naval base which is stationed at the southeastern end of Cuba.7 We have to travel back in time to recover Guantánamo Bay as a vast and stunning natural harbor, one that, as Jonathan Hansen writes, “enjoys a front-row seat along the Windward Passage, one of the hemisphere’s busiest sea-lanes and an integral link in the circum-Caribbean communication system. The passage takes its name from the breeze that blows in off the Atlantic between Cuba and Haiti, hurtling crews and cargo into the heart of the Caribbean basin.” Before becoming a dystopian symbol of U.S. extra-legal authority and shame, the remoteness of this rugged corner of Cuba made it “a land of exile and refuge accommodating marginalized people from within Cuba and across the Caribbean basin.”8

Given the superior strategic position Guantánamo commands in the western hemisphere, it is unsurprising that, once the United States had given up “the dream of Cuba”—its long-held goal of annexing the entire island that animated U.S. presidents for more than a century after the nation’s founding, from Thomas Jefferson onward—it insisted on the Guantánamo lease as a condition of ending its occupation of Cuba. Cuba had seduced successive U.S. presidents for two key reasons: following the Haitian Revolution, Cuba took the former Saint-Domingue’s place as the most lucrative colony in the world; it would also secure for the United States control of the Gulf of Mexico, and access to the waterway for what would become the United States’s second most important port: New Orleans. Hanging on to Guantánamo thus secured New Orleans and the Mississippi River.

1898 saw similar U.S. interventions in the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico—all of which realized, like Cuba, that liberation from the Spanish, overseen by the United States, did not come without a price.9 This year also saw the annexation of Hawaii. Niall Ferguson notes in his book, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004), that where many U.S. historians deny that the United States is an imperial power, they will concede that it did succumb to the temptations of empire for a brief moment at the turn of the twentieth century.10 Ferguson notes more than a brief moment of U.S. imperial indulgence, however. And I suggest that the unfolding of the history of Guantánamo Bay is a poignant reminder of this continuous history, one that does not vindicate the United States as a basically benevolent empire, as in Ferguson’s account, but rather tracks its evolution into a power that has claimed porous borders and granted itself endless exemptions from the rule of law.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s conception of “Empire”—at the center of which is the United States—is one that transcends the model created by European powers with their stark distinctions between center and periphery, and which accretes power by blurring, as opposed to demarcating, territorial boundaries. They write:

Thomas Jefferson, the authors of the Federalist, and the other ideological founders of the United States were all inspired by the ancient imperial model; they believed they were creating on the other side of the Atlantic a new Empire with open, expanding frontiers, where power would be effectively distributed in networks. This imperial idea has survived and matured throughout the history of the United States constitution and has emerged now on a global scale in its fully realized form.11

Hardt and Negri also claim that as well as having no spatial limits, Empire’s temporal horizons are similarly infinite: “the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity.”12

Guantánamo does not fit neatly into Hardt and Negri’s own rather totalizing and indeed imperious rhetoric. Nonetheless, it might be seen as a crucial node in the complex network of U.S. imperialism, which has shuttled back and forth between the more traditional, territorial model of empire (the plantation) and the uncircumscribed ambition of economic, political, and cultural imperialism (the slave ship). Guantánamo has seen the unfolding and dissolving of myriad forms of U.S. authority, and this process of reimagining American power currently has no end: as in Hardt and Negri’s account of “Empire,” Guantánamo is leased to the United States in perpetuity.

The desire on the part of the founding fathers to make empire work for republicanism—against the tide of contemporary theories that the two were incompatible13—is illustrative of the fact that the American Revolution was not a revolt against empire. And yet innocence in relation to imperialism has become crucial to American exceptionalist accounts of U.S. history, with the British Empire emerging in this narrative as an organizing symbol of tyranny and un-freedom.14 Indeed, this apparent contradiction of U.S. imperial innocence is precisely in keeping with the logic of exceptionalism: the United States claims for itself a category apart, one that is unique and strikingly self-authorizing. Guantánamo, described by Anne McClintock as a “historical experiment in supralegal violence,” is an obscene example of this state of exception.15 Guantánamo illuminates like no other symbol the curious status of contemporary U.S. empire in the American imagination: everybody knows it exists—it is hypervisible evidence that the United States detains and tortures people who are more than likely innocent, indefinitely—and yet eyes are peculiarly averted, reluctant to peer through the wire-mesh fences to imagine ourselves into the position of those orange jumpsuits.

McClintock writes of Guantánamo inmates:

The men are reduced to zombies, unpeopled bodies, dead men walking, bodies as imperial property. This image is hypermodern and yet, alongside it, unbidden, the history of American slavery rises up—imperial déjà vu. When each new prisoner is brought off the plane, his ear muff is lifted and a U.S. marine says in his ear, “You are now the property of the U.S. Marine Corp.” Called “packages” by the Marines, these men are unpeopled bodies, reduced to subhuman status, mere property of the state.16

This “imperial déjà vu” returns us not just to the memory of U.S. domestic slavery and its persistent legacy, but to the new forms of social control over the racialized body that have followed in its wake. As Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and others have argued, the contemporary system of mass incarceration that can be witnessed across the United States is more than simply an echo of slavery, an expression ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Is This America?”
• Part I: American Time
• Part II: Katrina Time
• Part III: New Orleans Time
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover