Melissa Parrish, “Re-Ordering Disaster in Francis Lo’s A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters”
As the recent onslaught of “natural” disasters has shown, state-sponsored responses to climate emergency insufficiently attend to institutional and cultural neglect. A wide range of poets in the US have recently taken this problem to task—including Francis Lo (they/them), whose poetry re-orders the Bush administration’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. In A Series of Un / Natural / Disasters, Lo copy-pastes calculations of lives lost, property damage sustained, and storm locations and patterns. They then interweave evidence of long-standing crises including mass incarceration, economic inequality, city planning failures, the influence of the war on terror, and unmitigated climate change. Lo thus demands attention to the normalized effects of presumably acute disaster events to dwell with their long-standing underpinnings, environments, and detritus. In so doing, they treat climate emergency as an occasion for imagining possibilities of flourishing for non-hierarchical communities of care.
Ishanika Sharma, “Hurricane Katrina and the Rise of Postcolonial Disaster Studies”
Hurricane Katrina radically revised what we understand as “catastrophe.” Katrina was much more than a natural disaster that pummeled Mississippi and Louisiana; it was also a catastrophe concocted by the government’s mishandling of it. The drastically different racialized experiences of Katrina in the United States have, I argue, been instructive for scholars researching the ambit of disaster in the postcolony. In this paper, I explore how contestations with Katrina inform postcolonial disaster studies, a nascent field that engages catastrophes in the wake of colonialism. I investigate how postcolonial thinkers such as Pallavi Rastogi, Pablo Upamanyu Mukherjee, and Anthony Carrigan variously cite Katrina to theorize catastrophe, even as they contemplate environmental and geopolitical disasters in the global South. I claim that unpacking the foundational invocation of Katrina in this disciplinary formation helps imagine broader networks of precarity and resilience, moving beyond the field’s current emphasis on the nation state.
Weston Twardowski, “Slow Catastrophe: My Louisiana Love and Life Under Necropower”
Dramaturgically, Katrina is a catastrophe: it was the turning that revealed the broken systems that enabled the human, social, and political failures that fundamentally reshaped New Orleans since 2005. Significant work (Horowitz’s Katrina: A History; Adams and Sakakeeny’s Remaking New Orleans; Woods et al. Development Drowned and Reborn; etc.) has detailed the social and historical forces that enabled Katrina. These forces are understood by local communities and artists who have, for decades, watched as their ancestral homes have been lost to a dissolving coast. Following Katrina, Indigenous filmmaker and artist Monique Verdin (Houma) documented this reality in her 2012 PBS America Reframed documentary, My Louisiana Love. Verdin critiques petrostate power by directly connecting post-Katrina recovery to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. I argue that Verdin, through anticlimactic storytelling, creates a film that offers an embodied experience of life under necropower – revealing Katrina as merely a chapter of the slow violence Louisianians live with.
Michele White, “Tracing a Disaster: Floodlines and the Artifactual History of Hurricane Katrina”
The impact of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans’ levee breaches is sometimes effaced, including material traces of floodlines (overpainted or power-washed off) and FEMA search codes (faded and sometimes retraced in rusting metal overlays). The VESTIGES Project, Banksy, and other artists rearticulate these traces. Such environmentally drawn and retraced lines produced a visible map and declaration of “this high” in relation to flooded homes, toxicity, and bodies—an indication of how the government and its promised infrastructural systems failed. In this presentation, I keep the dissipation of these indexical, emotional, and environmental reminders in tension with the ways the city has been more nostalgically marketed as lost and remade through sales of Katrina artifacts on ecommerce sites, which claim to provide the essence of floodwaters and disasters. I conclude by looking at artifactual remainders of Hurricane Ida and NOLA failures as ways of considering how traces intervene in and have been rubbed into environmental acceptability.