Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context

Literature, Film and Television

Arin Keeble

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030163525
• eBook ISBN: 9783030163532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

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."

© The Author(s) 2019

Arin KeebleNarratives of Hurricane Katrina in Contexthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16353-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Narrating Katrina in Context

Arin Keeble¹

(1)

Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

Arin Keeble

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This introduction provides an in-depth outline of the book’s approach to six key narratives of Hurricane Katrina across literature, television and film. It introduces the argument that these texts narrate 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 the ensuing War on Terror. It works through an itinerary for exploring and examining the striking preoccupations of this cycle of Katrina narratives while addressing one of the urgent tasks of 9/11 studies: meaningfully understanding the impact and legacy of the attacks without reinforcing exceptionalist narratives. 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.” Finally, it outlines the theoretical frameworks and ideas that underpin this project of illuminating the fraught intersections and reverberations between two “cultural traumas” that have punctuated early twenty-first-century history.

Keywords

Hurricane KatrinaTrauma9/11The War on TerrorNeoliberalismSlow violenceLiteratureTelevisionCinema

End Abstract

1 Two Cultural Traumas

The first mainstream film to be shot on location in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006). A police procedural with some speculative elements, it is notable for its questionable use of images of flood-ravaged New Orleans neighborhoods and for its terrorism plot. Despite such a conspicuous use of location, the film’s spectacular central set piece and focus on terror evoked for many commentators, America’s previous national tragedy. Mark Kermode’s Guardian review was typical: “the major trauma that this movie is, in its way, clearly trying to heal: 9/11.” ¹ I would argue, though, that Déjà Vu is compelled—albeit clumsily—by underlying links between the Katrina disaster and 9/11 and the still-unfolding War on Terror. Though it lacks any clear articulation of what these links are, it very deliberately locates this set piece (a terror attack on a Mississippi River Ferry which kills over 500 citizens) before the backdrop of an American urban space whose vulnerabilities to disaster were fresh in the imagination in 2006. This book examines cultural texts that also pursue an impulse to locate connections between these two Bush-era events, but whose explorations are more far-reaching and critically suggestive.

In-depth, scholarly accounts of the wider and underlying connections between 9/11 and Katrina have only begun recently and have been characterized by a certain caution. This is understandable given that, as Lucy Bond has noted, various assessments and narratives of 9/11 have used historical analogy in reductive ways that have “exceptionalized,” rather than meaningfully contextualized the attacks. ² There is some consensus, though, that while many other seismic and tragic events around the world have punctuated early twenty-first-century history, 9/11 and Katrina and their aftermaths have a shared resonance as events that have revealed certain truths about American power. They were different in nature and indeed in some ways antithetical in that 9/11 engendered a powerful nationalism while Katrina exposed stark division. Yet clear lines of connection invite analysis. Both events evoked a sense of American vulnerability; both posed questions about American citizenship; both have challenged the myth of the American melting pot and both have at least recalibrated—and in Donald Pease’s account, fatally exposed, the myths of American exceptionalism. Additionally, the governmental response to both events made the neoliberalization of the US state starkly visible, particularly through the massive private contracts awarded to the likes of Blackwater (how Academi) and Haliburton to support the War in Iraq and various private contractors that undertook the disaster management and rebuilding of New Orleans. The challenges of meaningfully mapping out these connections, and the caution that has characterized this undertaking, are linked to the fact that, as individual moments of rupture or crisis, their meanings are still debated and their consequences still unfolding. This book seeks to make advances on this project by examining the ways six narrative representations of Katrina—across literature, television and film—also respond to 9/11 and to the ensuing War on Terror. Through close readings of these texts within their cultural and political contexts, it illuminates some of the fraught intersections and reverberations between these two “cultural traumas ” that have punctuated the early twenty-first century. ³

Early representations of 9/11 consisted mostly of apolitical or “domestic” narratives of trauma and loss that avoided explicit political or social critique. Consequently, we might see the Katrina texts as addressing a post-9/11 absence of meaningful political discourse in art and culture that was still stark when they were produced. It is certainly the case that while 9/11 was initially approached as if it had been an apolitical natural disaster; in early novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) or films such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2005), for example, Katrina, ostensibly an actual natural disaster, was immediately politicized. ⁴ But this inversion is reductive, and it would be simplistic to suggest that these texts simply write back against the early cultural depoliticization of 9/11. The resonances of 9/11 and its political fallout in these texts are nuanced and multifaceted. Just as they address the void of political discourse in early representations of 9/11, they also echo and build on the disorientation of disaster that those narratives conveyed. The Katrina cycle does both of these things, and the prevalence of 9/11 and the War on Terror in these narratives demands attention. This book seeks to show how these texts tell the stories of Katrina while simultaneously adding texture to our understanding of the enduring relevance and rhetorical power of 9/11. In doing this, I argue, they offer important insights into contemporary American exceptionalism, the trajectories of post-9/11 “states of exception,” the rise of a strident American nationalism and the prevailing myth of the American melting pot. Additionally, they offer vantage points from which we might consider the overlapping of traumatic ruptures and the “slow violence” or systemic violence of neoliberalism or Lauren Berlant’s claim that traumatic events “are better described by a notion of systemic crisis or ‘crisis ordinariness’ and followed out with an eye to seeing how the affective impact takes form…”. ⁵

The particular political itineraries of the Katrina narratives I discuss in this book are striking given the extraordinary complexity of the catastrophe, the range of meanings it has accrued and array of global issues it has raised. From the early aftermath, commentators pointed to permutations that reached far beyond the immediate devastation and loss of life. Wai Chee Dimock, for example, wrote that Katrina marked an “unbundling” of the American nation-state and of the very concept of statehood. Dimock’s essay, “World History According to Katrina,” also argued that Katrina demanded new scholarly approaches to ideas of “the national.” Citing the transnational nature of climate change-related phenomenon and catastrophe, Dimock suggested that humanities scholars “use these unbundlings as an occasion to think about the circumference of our work.” ⁶ Adjacently, Naomi Klein also saw global resonance in Hurricane Katrina, as the first American homeland application of Chicago School neoliberalism and its “shock and awe” tactics. Klein identified the catastrophe as a moment when the perniciousness of neoliberal ideology was exposed as a domestic phenomenon, bringing her arguments to a substantial readership. In The Shock Doctrine (2007), she showed how the “Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory” for a “government-run-by-contractors,” while also drawing broad connections between the privatization of disaster relief to the privatization of security in Iraq. ⁷ While Klein and Dimock’s arguments are linked, as Christopher Lloyd has noted, to a wider transnational turn in American Studies and contemporary literary studies scholarship, there were also early responses that sought to locate the catastrophe within more capacious histories of the American South. ⁸ For the South and the Southern Gulf Coast, Katrina exposed the enduring prevalence of racial hierarchies and inequality and brought the region’s traumatic histories of racial violence vividly back to life. Clyde Woods argued, in a 2009 special issue of American Quarterly, that Katrina was hard evidence that the violence and oppression of this history were re-emerging powerfully: “no longer content to haunt the American psyche, it aspires to be resurrected.” ⁹

If Katrina evinced a crisis in the very notion of the nation-state, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Narrating Katrina in Context
• 2. Intertextuality, Domesticity and the Spaces of Disaster in Salvage the Bones and Zeitoun
• 3. “Won’t Bow: Don’t Know How”: New Orleans and American Exceptionalism in Treme
• 4. Disposability, Criminality and Lawlessness in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Beasts of the Southern Wild and When the Levees Broke—A Requiem in Four Acts
• 5. Conclusion: Traumatic Rupture and Slow Violence
• Back Matter