Regeneration through Genre: Romancing Katrina in Crime Fiction from Tubby Meets Katrina to K-Ville

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAHEM YOUSAF
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Law Enforcement Officials ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
The City

This essay examines detective fiction that takes New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as setting and theme. It explores the ways in which stories told in novels and prime-time TV shows across the interlocking genres of police procedural and crime thriller have steered a sensationalist course through the recovery of the city over the last five years. It considers the role and representation of the New Orleans Police Department in particular, and of law enforcement officials more broadly, as post-Katrina protagonists who protect and serve the city, a rejoinder to media-made myths according to which they deserted their posts in the days after the storm. It closes with a case study of FOX TV's K-Ville, the first television series to depict New Orleans post-Katrina in a sustained way, and investigates the extent to which it was judged harshly for translating the disaster into a formulaic cop show. Deep-seated assumptions about genre, narrative form, the burden of representation and popular ideas about this particular locale inform the reception of these genre fictions.

Green Tourism and the Ambiguities of Sustainability Discourse

2019 ◽  
pp. 1572-1590
Author(s):  
Kevin Fox Gotham ◽  
Joshua A. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Spatial Inequalities ◽  
Tourism Sector ◽  
Green Tourism ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The City

This paper uses a case study of the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans to examine the relationships between green tourism and sustainability discourse in shaping the post-Katrina rebuilding process. Specially, we draw on long-term ethnographic field observations to highlight the tensions between abstract and idealized conceptions of sustainability and the complicated realities of uneven rebuilding and neighborhood disinvestment. We focus on changes in the tourism sector since Hurricane Katrina, the promotion of green tourism through actor Brad Pitt's Make It Right (MIR) Foundation, and the ambiguities and paradoxes of sustainability discourse. Overall, our goal is to develop a critical understanding of niche tourism in a disaster-devastated neighborhood and highlight the ways in which unspoken norms about sustainability create political-economic blind-spots to the ways in which socio-spatial inequalities, disinvestment, and entrenched social problems structure life in the city and the Lower Ninth Ward.

Human-Environment Interactions: A Plea for the Humanities

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Tuana
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Global Community ◽  
Human Environment

Research on human-environment interactions often neglects the resources of the humanities. Hurricane Katrina and the resulting levee breaches in New Orleans offer a case study on the need for inclusion of the humanities in the study of human-environment interactions, particularly the resources they provide in examining ethics and value concerns. Methods from the humanities, when developed in partnership with those from the sciences and social sciences, can provide a more accurate, effective, and just response to the scientific and technological challenges we face as a global community.

The Prison School

Prison School ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lizbet Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Male Students ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Law Enforcement Officials ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Sociology Of Punishment ◽  
Status Offenses

This chapter investigates the New Orleans Prison School—a public school in a prison—where African American male students were sent as punishment for nonviolent status offenses. Through the voices of local residents, including students and their families, teachers, local activists, and law enforcement officials, it explains what the push-pull factors of punitive schooling mean for their lives and their community. The chapter situates this examination in the historical context of urban school failure, youth criminalization, and mass correctionalization from the post-civil rights era of New Orleans forward. The work is theoretically framed by scholarship in the sociology of punishment, which articulates mass incarceration as a disappearing act playing out on the stage of the postindustrial and neoliberal state. The chapter ends by returning to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While the city's schools were physically demolished by the tremendous floodwaters, the punitive ideologies of the city's criminal justice system remained intact. These ideologies resurged and were made manifest as the school system was rebuilt.

“Like We Lost Our Citizenship”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marguerite Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Vietnamese Americans ◽  
Educational Success ◽  
International Media ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Media ◽  
The City

This concluding chapter examines representations of Vietnamese Americans before and after Hurricane Katrina. The recuperation of American political and military might in the 1980s marked a transition in representations of Vietnamese Americans, as the New Orleans media began to focus on stories of Vietnamese American economic and educational “success.” Nevertheless, Vietnamese Americans lived more or less under the radar until about thirty years later, when they were once again thrust into the media limelight because of their quick return and recovery after Hurricane Katrina. Once potential objects of New Orleans exclusion, Vietnamese Americans now represented the city at its best, with national and international media outlets upholding the community's efforts as a story of hope and achievement in the aftermath of disaster.

Katrina Seven Years On: The Politics of Race and Recovery— Notes on a Roundtable Organized for the 2012 APSA Annual Meeting

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 748-752
Author(s):  
Christine L. Day
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
The City

AbstractAfter Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, flooding the city of New Orleans for several weeks after levees collapsed, the city struggled to recover and rebuild. Scholars and activists participating in the roundtable, “Katrina Seven Years On: The Politics of Race and Recovery,” at the 2012 APSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans, were to discuss recovery and racial justice in post-Katrina urban planning and rebuilding efforts, grassroots movements, job recovery, fair housing, and cultural revival. Although the 2012 meeting was canceled as Hurricane Isaac threatened New Orleans anew, panelists offered their observations and ideas to be summarized forPSreaders.

scholarly journals “Choosing to Stay”

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Anja Nadine Klopfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
The City

Oral histories of the Hurricane Katrina experience abound in stories of conscious decisions to “ride out the storm.” My article explores the narrative of “choosing to stay” as an empowering narrative rooted in assertions of place-knowledge and traces its historical genealogy to the nineteenth century. I argue that claiming agency in New Orleans and articulating a sense of belonging and local identity through professed intimate knowledge of the local environment took shape as a strategy of resistance against dominant discourses of American progress after the Civil War. Ultimately, this counternarrative of connecting to place as “homeland,” drawing on knowledge arising from lived experience, defied the normative twist of modernization, simultaneously reformulating power relations within the city. “Choosing to stay” thus turns out to be a long-lasting narrative not only of disaster, but of place, belonging, and community; without understanding its historical layers, we cannot fully make sense of this particular Katrina narrative.

AFTER THE STORM: In the Wake of Katrina

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-158
Author(s):  
Michael C. Dawson ◽  
Lawrence D. Bobo
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
The Political ◽  
Large Share ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

By the time you read this issue of the Du Bois Review, it will be nearly a year after the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina swept the Gulf Coast and roiled the nation. While this issue does not concentrate on the disaster, (the next issue of the DBR will be devoted solely to research on the social, economic, and political ramifications of the Katrina disaster), the editors would be amiss if we did not comment on an event that once again exposed the deadly fault lines of the American racial order. The loss of the lives of nearly 1500 citizens, the many more tens of thousands whose lives were wrecked, and the destruction of a major American city as we know it, all had clear racial overtones as the story unfolded. Indeed, the racial story of the disaster does not end with the tragic loss of life, the disruption of hundred of thousands of lives, nor the physical, social, economic, and political collapse of an American urban jewel. The political map of the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana (and probably Texas), and the region is being rewritten as the large Black and overwhelmingly Democratic population of New Orleans was dispersed out of Louisiana, with states such as Texas becoming the perhaps permanent recipients of a large share of the evacuees.

After the Flood

2018 ◽  
pp. 298-326
Author(s):  
Jason Berry
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Social Controversy ◽  
Black Indians ◽  
Diverse Society ◽  
Life Force ◽  
The City

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, killing over 1,000 people and displacing over 1 million. As the rebuilding process began, musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and Social Aid and Pleasure Club members began trickling back. Culture prevailed as politics failed. The life force of music and memory, determined to survive, came back to the shattered city. The hurricane wasn’t the only devastating force: the city had undertaken many urban development projects in Tremé throughout the second half of the 20th century, demolishing historical areas and displacing people. New Orleans has also long suffered from government corruption, and several politicians were arrested throughout the 2000s. Yet hope and vibrancy abound. The 2014 funeral for Larry Bannock, Big Chief of the Golden Starhunters, drew a large gathering of black Indians in a magnificent cultural spectacle. Amidst much political and social controversy, Mayor Mitch Landrieu removed the Robert E. Lee statue from the city in 2017. As New Orleans begins its fourth century, it faces issues of gun violence, poverty, and gentrification, but opportunities from a flourishing digital economy, resurgent music scene, and cultural mecca as well. It is still the vibrant, diverse society composed of people whose roots lie across the world, whose resilience has been a rudder through the storms and violent upheavals throughout the centuries.

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