Rebirth

Jockomo ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Shane Lief ◽  
John McCusker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Future ◽  
Major Disruption ◽  
The City

This final chapter describes how Mardi Gras Indians became more prominent in the public eye during the twentieth century. While they were often associated with violent street clashes during the early decades, by the last quarter of the century, a deliberate move towards harmony and growing cooperation led to more peaceful encounters among Mardi Gras Indians. This development paralleled the city’s growing acceptance and ultimate embrace of the Mardi Gras Indian as a cultural icon of the city. Just a few years into the twentieth century, Hurricane Katrina caused a major disruption in the cultural life of New Orleans, impacting the lives of Mardi Gras Indians and throwing the future of their tradition into doubt. Featured in this chapter is another series of interviews in which Mardi Gras Indians describe their struggles to return to New Orleans and their role in leading the city back to recovery and renewal.

Downtown Mardi Gras

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie A. Wade ◽  
Robin Roberts ◽  
Frank de Caro
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

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.

The Making of a Slovak City: The Czechoslovak Renaming of Pressburg/Pozsony/Prešporok, 1918–19

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 205-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bugge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Future State ◽  
The Future ◽  
The City

Any modern atlas or encyclopedia will inform us that Bratislava is the capital of the Slovak Republic, the center of Slovak political and cultural life. But before World War I—or even toward the end of it in 1918—it was far from clear that the city could or should be defined as “Slovak,” to say nothing of a “Slovak capital”; that it was to belong to the future state of Czechoslovakia; or that it was to be called Bratislava. This essay will describe the processes that led to these outcomes, and how a name shift became a crucial instrument in the “Slovakization” of the city. In focusing also on the ways local and central actors responded to these political and symbolic transformations, I hope to shed new light on the complexity of collective identifications and allegiances, and on the significance of renaming as a catalyst for processes of nationalization in Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals The Economic Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 135-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Vigdor
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Land Reclamation ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Equilibrium Level ◽  
The Future ◽  
The City ◽  
Geological Position

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept into Louisiana and New Orleans, a city built largely on land reclaimed from swamp, witnessed massive failures in its levees. Much of the city and its surrounding suburbs were inundated; those residents of the city who had not heeded warnings to flee the approaching storm were evacuated in its wake. In less than a week, the city's population declined from over 400,000 to near zero. Census Bureau estimates indicate that almost two years after the storm, by July 1, 2007, nearly half of these evacuees had yet to return. Will the future New Orleans bear any resemblance to the city that existed prior to Katrina? Most government authorities, from city officials to federal spokespersons, insist that New Orleans must—and should—be fully rebuilt. Many environmental scientists question whether such a rebuilding would be sensible, given the city's precarious geological position and the contribution of past land reclamation to the city's current vulnerability. The more basic positive question of whether the city will come back, however, is fundamentally an economic one. After Hurricane Katrina, will the city of New Orleans continue to be a preferred location for more than 400,000 residents and their employers? Or will the disaster shift the city to a new equilibrium level of employment and population?

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Public ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
The Future

This conclusion explains how American temporalities changed after the war and sketches how expectations and anticipations of the future have alternated as the dominant view in American culture through the twentieth century to today. This chapter also shows how the short war myth, the story that Civil War Americans expected a short, glorious war at the outset, gained currency with the public and consensus among scholars during the postwar period. It contrasts the wartime expectations of individuals with their postwar memories of the war’s beginning to show how the short war myth worked as a tool for sectional reconciliation and a narrative device that dramatized the war by creating an innocent antebellum era or golden age before the cataclysm. It considers why historians still accept the myth and showcases three postwar voices that challenged it.

scholarly journals Social patterns of natural disasters: The case of hurricane Katrina

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-215
Author(s):  
Mirko Filipović ◽  
Sonja Žakula
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Black People ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Political Economic

Public perception and imagination tend to view natural disasters and catastrophes as phenomena that impact everyone equally. However, they do not occur in a historical, political, economic or social vacuum. Every phase and aspect of a disaster - its causes, vulnerability, preparedness, aftermath, response, reconstruction, the scope of the disaster and the price paid in the end are, to a lesser or greater extent, socially conditioned. Natural disasters actually replicate and amplify existing social inequalities and their effects. Such was also the case with hurricane Katrina. Black people, the poor, the elderly... remained in sunken New Orleans because their economic and social exclusion diminished their possibility to escape the disaster (the same way it diminished their opportunity to escape poverty). Had Katrina been a mere accident of geography and ecology, it would have been possible to peacefully await the resolution of its aftermath. However, because the inequalities which Katrina made apparent have deep socio-historical roots, it was illusory to expect that they would be repaired by the public policies on offer. Because of this, Katrina remains a powerful reminder to those advocating for a more just and democratic society.

scholarly journals Response to Disasters and Moving from Emergency to Sustainability

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmet Geys Elseyidissa ◽  
◽  
Zein Hbous
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Disaster Response ◽  
Great Change ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Future ◽  
The City

After any disaster that happens, whether natural or war, all governments and organizations accelerate to respond at all levels, humanitarian and others, to restore the damage. If this disaster is huge, it will result in a great change so that what comes after it does not resemble what it was before. In this study, it will be discussed how to respond effectively and how local and foreign authorities can cooperate to achieve the required response. Measuring the effectiveness of disaster response is not by the speed of this response, despite its importance, but the nature of intervention and its effects on the lives of people. It’s important to measure whether this intervention leads to the strengthening of urban aspects and increases the public participation and whether it gives stability to the city and population or not, and to what extent this intervention defines the future of this city in general.

Liquid Labyrinths

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
Nicholas Allen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Medbh Mcguckian ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The North ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Ciaran Carson ◽  
The City ◽  
Northern Star

Stewart Parker’s play, Northern Star, begins with the character of Henry Joy McCracken reciting his seaborn heritage as a descendant of Huguenots and Covenanters, his mongrel inheritance ‘natural’ to his Belfast birth, the city a port of refuge from ‘the storm of history’. McCracken is remembered now as a United Irishman who was executed for his part in the 1798 rebellion, an insurrection that lingers still in the public consciousness of the city and its past. Northern Star was first performed in 1984 and through it Parker created a space for expressions of identity and place beyond the Troubles; that he did so in metaphors of storms and sea suggests the imaginative depth of the city’s maritime attachments, which form the basis of this chapter’s readings of mid-twentieth-century cultural production in the north of Ireland, including Seamus Deane, Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey, Glenn Patterson, and Ciaran Carson.

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