Performance and Cross-Racial Storytelling in Post-Katrina New Orleans: Interviews with John O'Neal, Carol Bebelle, and Nicholas Slie

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Michna
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
Performance Traditions

Interviews with three leading community-engaged theatre makers in New Orleans underscore why practices of public storytelling became crucial to the work of artists in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Connecting their work to New Orleans' heritage of African American neighborhood-based cultural performance traditions, O'Neal, Bebelle, and Slie emphasize the importance of cross-racial and cross-generational collaboration for generating theatre practices that are part of a collective struggle for pluralistic, democratic social change.

“All That You Can’t Leave Behind”

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Early Twenty

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”

scholarly journals Differences in post-disaster mental health among Vietnamese and African Americans living in adjacent urban communities flooded by Katrina

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0255303
Author(s):  
Mengxi Zhang ◽  
Mark VanLandingham ◽  
Yoon Soo Park ◽  
Philip Anglewicz ◽  
David M. Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Housing Stock ◽  
Short Form ◽  
Vietnamese Americans ◽  
Disaster Mental Health ◽  
Post Disaster

Some communities recover more quickly after a disaster than others. Some differentials in recovery are explained by variation in the level of disaster-related community damage and differences in pre-disaster community characteristics, e.g., the quality of housing stock. But distinct communities that are similar on the above characteristics may experience different recovery trajectories, and, if so, these different trajectories must be due to more subtle differences among them. Our principal objective is to assess short-term and long-term post-disaster mental health for Vietnamese and African Americans living in two adjacent communities in eastern New Orleans that were similarly flooded by Hurricane Katrina. We employ data from two population-based cohort studies that include a sample of African American adults (the Gulf Coast Child and Family Health [GCAFH study]) and a sample of Vietnamese American adults (Katrina Impacts on Vietnamese Americans [KATIVA NOLA study]) living in adjacent neighborhoods in eastern New Orleans who were assessed near the second and thirteenth anniversaries of the disaster. Using the 12-Item Short Form Survey (SF-12) as the basis of our outcome measure, we find in multivariate analysis a significant advantage in post-disaster mental health for Vietnamese Americans over their African American counterparts at the two-year mark, but that this advantage had disappeared by the thirteenth anniversary of the Katrina disaster.

Religion, Rhetoric, and Social Change after Hurricane Katrina

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Marie Arlinghaus
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Mississippi Gulf Coast ◽  
Newspaper Articles

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and in its aftermath, Americans were left asking why it had happened. This paper explores the discussions that occurred in newspaper articles, editorials, websites, and blogs in an attempt to distill the multiple interpretations people had of such a major natural disaster. Three major meanings emerge: that the hurricane was a type of divine retribution, that the hurricane was caused or its consequences exacerbated by human failings, and that the hurricane could serve as a catalyst for social change.

Migration, Immigration, and the Political Geography of American Cities

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Jason Anastasopoulos
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
The Political ◽  
Residential Choice ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
American Cities

How do migration and immigration shape the political geography of American cities? In this article, we propose a mechanism of partisan sorting and demographic change which is tested using the mass migration of African Americans from New Orleans to Houston, Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We argue that differences in residential choice preferences among partisans combined with demographic changes which increase diversity can induce sorting by triggering flight (migration) among ideological conservatives. Using Hurricane Katrina evacuee data from schools in Harris Country along with a variety of empirical tools, we find evidence suggesting that African American Hurricane Katrina migration led to Republican flight.

scholarly journals Exploring the Transformative Power of Play in African Children’s Games

2021 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 167-182
Author(s):  
Kennedy C. Chinyowa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
Cash Economy ◽  
Scientific Technology

The transformative power of indigenous African children’s games can be demonstrated by how they were framed by the aesthetics of play such as imitation, imagination, make-believe, repetition, spontaneity, and improvisation. Such games could be regarded as ‘rites of passage’ for children’s initiation into adulthood as they occupied a crucial phase in the process of growing up. Using the illustrative paradigm of indigenous children’s games from the Shona-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe, this paper explores the transformative power of play as a means by which children engaged with reality. The paper proceeds to argue that the advent of modern agents of social change such as Christianity, formal education, urbanization, industrialization, scientific technology, and the cash economy not only created a fragmentation of African people’s cultural past but also threatened the survival of African cultural performance traditions. Although indigenous African children’s games were disrupted by modernity, they have managed to survive in a modified form.

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