{"id":176429532,"date":"2013-12-20T00:58:36","date_gmt":"2013-12-20T06:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/?p=176429532"},"modified":"2013-12-20T00:58:36","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T06:58:36","slug":"new-orleans-after-katrina-transnational-perspectives-on-the-futures-of-the-gulf-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/2013\/12\/20\/new-orleans-after-katrina-transnational-perspectives-on-the-futures-of-the-gulf-south\/","title":{"rendered":"NEW ORLEANS: After Katrina: Transnational Perspectives on the Futures of the Gulf South"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\n

After Katrina: <\/span><\/h1>\n

Transnational Perspectives on <\/span><\/h1>\n

the Futures of the Gulf South<\/span><\/h1>\n

\n<\/a><\/div>\n
By Anna Hartnell<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n

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\"Photograph<\/a><\/p>\n

Photograph courtesy of Gilbert Mercier. All Right Reserved.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\nIt\u2019s not really the place of the conference organizer to declare the occasion a success or summarize its shortcomings. Which means I\u2019m probably not the best person to reflect on the gathering of great and diverse minds on November 15 at Tulane University to discuss the ways in which the consequences of Hurricane Katrina are still shaping our understandings of the future of New Orleans \u2013 a future that is being called upon as a kind of \u2018test case\u2019 for the rest of the United States and the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

But having now listened back over the rich and varied conversations that went on during that day, I\u2019d like to do a little more than simply make the audios available online and slowly draw the material into my academic writing. In the first session of the conference, Nick Slie suggested that \u2018in New Orleans we give you unconditional love first, make you earn it later\u2019, an idea picked up by a number of people throughout the day. This article is a small offering to all of you who responded so positively to the invitation of a stranger and an outsider to give up your time and share your stories and insights.<\/span><\/p>\n

This conference was for me the culmination of many conversations I\u2019ve had with various people who have generously given their time to talk to me about their work in New Orleans over the last few years. By trade, and when I\u2019m not teaching, I work with texts, not people, but my work on post-Katrina New Orleans has taught me that the life of a city cannot be found in books alone. This piece is offered not in the spirit of academic critique, which can often devolve into an unpleasant process of splitting hairs, but in the spirit of reflection and exchange: a spirit that animated a gathering which encompassed myriad and often conflicting viewpoints that, if not always in dialogue, somehow managed to exist respectfully and often provocatively in the same room. These are the narratives that emerged for me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Richard Campanella: the failure of the levees<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Richard Campanella\u2019s keynote, \u2018Disaster as Educator: Responses and Lessons in New Orleans, 1722-2012\u2019, offered a whirlwind tour of 290 years of disaster history in this region. Campanella\u2019s historical narrative told of fires, epidemics and hurricanes that repeatedly threatened to erase the young city from the map in the eighteenth century. It told of a nineteenth century New Orleans that was \u2018remarkably resilient to its many disasters\u2019. With the vast majority of the population living on higher ground and in higher density, with a landmass that had not yet sunk below sea level, the many floods and hurricanes that battered the city in this century did not lead to major catastrophe as we saw in 2005.<\/span><\/p>\n

The collapse of the levees and subsequently all urban systems that occurred following Katrina can partly be blamed on the disastrous \u2018levees only\u2019 approach adopted in the early part of the twentieth century and shaped by military-trained engineers who saw the river as an enemy as opposed to something to be managed and even accommodated. Deprived of the ability to deposit the sediment that builds the land, the Mississippi River and its many tributaries, as Campanella explained, then threatened \u2018to create a mega-catastrophe every 50 years rather than small disasters every couple of years\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

The lull in hurricane activity that opened up in the 1970s and 80s gave way to \u2018an unfurling social disaster\u2019 of white flight and middle class exodus to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities deprived of a tax base and the basic infrastructure necessary for people to prosper. \u2018The theme here,\u2019 Campanella explained, \u2018is that slow subtle social forces have a greater impact, at least in our case, on the city\u2019s destiny, than epic disasters.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Kalamu ya Salaam: \u2018the levees did not fail\u2019<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Social disaster was a theme that punctuated Kalamu ya Salaam\u2019s keynote, which addressed not racialized poverty as it developed in the 70s and 80s but rather the grotesque inequalities that have animated the process that has not felt like recovery to many who suffered Katrina. Addressing \u2018fellow New Orleanians\u2019, paraphrasing Frederick Douglass and taking the occasion to task, Salaam distanced himself from what he implied was a \u2018celebration of a new metropolis rising from the ashes and debris of an old and inundated city\u2019. As the title of his talk powerfully put it: \u2018What to us Negroes is your \u201cNew\u201d New Orleans?\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Salaam\u2019s talk similarly focused on disastrous environmental decision-making \u2013 in particular, the construction of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet \u2013 that exposed vast numbers of people to harm\u2019s way. \u2018This is a massive failure at all levels of government from city, to parish, to state, to federal government,\u2019 he reflected. \u2018Or is it?\u2019 This is where Salaam\u2019s talk decisively departed from Campanella\u2019s themes. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Perhaps this is not a failure but instead is the very real intentions. The motherfuckers were trying to kill us.\u2019 This last note led Salaam back to slavery\u2019s middle passage to consider the distance between the origins of black America and the contemporary Lower Ninth Ward. Contemplating the destruction of the natural wilderness in the Lower Ninth as well as the painstakingly slow redevelopment since Katrina, Salaam asked: \u2018Is it any wonder I do not celebrate the redevelopment of New Orleans? What do I, a child of Lower Nine, have to celebrate?\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to live anywhere where they have<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0tried to kill us even if it was once a place<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0I called home\u2014but still and all, my bones<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0don\u2019t cotton to Boston, I can\u2019t breath<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0that thinness they call air in Colorado,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0a Minnesota snow angel don\u2019t mean shit<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0to me, and still and all, even with all of that,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0all the many complaints that taint my<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0appreciation of charity, help and shelter,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0even though I know there is no turning back<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0to drier times, still, as still as a fan when<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0the man done cut the \u2018lectric off, still,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0regardless of how much I hate the taste<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0of bland food, still, I may never go back,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0not to live, maybe for a used to be<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0visit, like how every now and then you<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0go by a graveyard\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b>As Joel Dinerstein, who was chairing the session, pointed out, the theme here was sacrifice: \u2018What is life without a home?\u2019 But this isn\u2019t just any home, as Salaam\u2019s lines imply \u2013 a sentiment that was echoed throughout the conference. Salaam\u2019s talk, which ranged across times and spaces, offering a critique of white supremacy and American democracy, was animated by the approximately 100,000 African Americans who have not been able to return home to New Orleans in Katrina\u2019s aftermath; a city that prior to the storm boasted higher numbers of native born residents than almost any other major US city, meaning that it had nurtured some of the most close-knit African American communities in the nation \u2013 communities that gave birth to much of the culture for which New Orleans is famous.<\/span><\/p>\n

The threat posed by Katrina to these communities and thus to New Orleans in general returns us to a theme of Campanella\u2019s talk and the seductive post-Katrina metaphor of the blank slate; as Campanella put it:<\/span><\/p>\n

This metaphor, the tabula rasa, wiping the slate clean, was erroneously applied after Katrina \u2013 completely erroneously \u2013 because 300 years of inscribing value into place and space, through the erection of a built environment, through emotional and social and economic ties, Katrina\u2019s floodwaters couldn\u2019t even come close to wiping the slate clean, despite that we use that metaphor over and over.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Nativism versus the newcomers<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

This metaphor of the blank slate seems particularly fitting and disturbing in the New Orleans context. Aspects of mainstream US mythology have so embraced the idea of the \u2018blank slate\u2019 \u2013 with its somewhat contradictory connotations of wiping the slate clean of Old World corruption and tyranny, and the fantasy of empty lands to be colonized (with its logic of subjugation which is anything but the repudiation of oppression); hence the mythic level playing field is subverted by hierarchies in the first instance. New Orleans, on the other hand, is often said to have partially resisted the processes of \u2018Americanization\u2019 due to its stubborn attachments to Old World connections \u2013 European and African \u2013 which defy the model provided by the \u2018blank slate\u2019. As Linetta Gilbert pointed out in the last session, the maintenance of some of these connections, particularly to outmoded European forms of governance, has meant that the city has often been ruled by a corrupt oligarchy; but some scholars have also suggested that central to \u2018Americanization\u2019 is the black\/white binary, which clearly deeply marks the New Orleans landscape, but perhaps not deeply enough to disable those cultures of resistance that are arguably best understood as indigenous.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is this discourse of indigeneity that has fascinated me ever since I arrived in New Orleans in September, and which ran beneath the surface of so many of the conversations at the conference, including Salaam\u2019s keynote and much of Campanella\u2019s scholarship on the city. Hannah Kreiger-Benson was not the only participant keen to acknowledge that her moving to New Orleans in 2007 meant that \u2018I speak from that experience, and only that experience\u2019. So many of the day\u2019s introductions involved the telling of \u2018Katrina stories\u2019: personal narratives that situated the participants in relation to this now all-important temporal division alongside their spatial coordinates vis-a-vis New Orleans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Residing in the city prior to Katrina did not necessarily mean native status \u2013 according to the 2000 census the city boasted a native born population of 77% and it is notoriously attached to the idea of nativity: long-time residents not born in New Orleans rarely escape being known as a \u2018transplant\u2019. But pre-Katrina residency did mean that you were not part of the post-storm influx of newcomers who have come to be associated with the processes of gentrification \u2013 an issue first raised by Catherine Michna who was chairing the first session \u2013 that have marked the city\u2019s reconstruction.<\/span><\/p>\n

The post-Katrina success story: success for whom?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

As Nick Slie put it in response to Michna\u2019s suggestions, \u2018a lot of people are now in New Orleans living ahistorical lives\u2019. Slie illustrated this idea by referring to the \u2018progress train\u2019 that he imagined running through the post-storm city, and which in turn gestures to the notion that the change that the storm brought is both positive and, perhaps, I think, all-American: the national narrative of progress is one that has not been fully extended to a city that resides on the margins of the nation\u2019s imaginary. New Orleans\u2019 long cultural memory has historically, it could be argued, subverted the amnesia of a future-bound national culture. But it is precisely this memory that is under threat: \u2018You can live with the progress now, and you can just jump right on the progress train and do your art and whatever it is you\u2019re doing, but you don\u2019t have to sit in the deep 100 year history of people\u2019s families, where they came from.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Slie\u2019s comments come in response to the narrative often spun by the media that the \u2018success story\u2019 that the post-Katrina city has become known for is partly due to the influx of young, often highly educated entrepreneurs who have boosted the New Orleans economy. As a number of people suggested, this doesn\u2019t mean much to the 53% of unemployed African American men who live in the city. Neither does it take into account the fact that what so many see as under threat in post-Katrina New Orleans are cultures and values that notably transcend the market.<\/span><\/p>\n

The paradox of gentrification: New Orleans culture and market values<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Brice Miller\u2019s contributions to the last session on post-Katrina futures captured the complicated and thorny nature of a debate that is often over-simplified by the all-encompassing and divisive \u2013 though necessary and inevitable \u2013 term, \u2018gentrification\u2019: \u2018I\u2019m a native of New Orleans, born and raised, son of a jazz musician \u2026 the indigenous cultures of the city are very relevant to who I am as a person\u2026 this culture is being celebrated and attacked by the exact same people.\u2019 Miller elaborated: \u2018If it wasn\u2019t for the music and the culture, New Orleans would just be another bland place and nobody would be interested in it. It\u2019s important that we understand the culture is much more than just a profiteering system, that it\u2019s a way of life for people.\u2019 For Miller, the post-Katrina push towards regulation has endangered the musical cultures that draw newcomers who often then become part of the system that threatens these same cultures.<\/span><\/p>\n

While this makes no sense in economic terms by threatening what is arguably the tourist trade\u2019s most valuable commodity, it is perhaps the logic of economics that needs to be marginalized: as Ron Bechet suggested in the first session, \u2018art and culture is a manifestation of the people, and when we try to commodify it is where we run into problems, and I think that\u2019s some of what\u2019s happening here.\u2019 The commodification of art in the city is perhaps the corollary of other public spaces that have, in Katrina\u2019s aftermath, been transformed by the logic of privatization and the market.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018A crisis is a terrible thing to waste\u2019<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The idea that the post-Katrina city has become a kind of laboratory for neoliberal engineering is fairly well-known: Naomi Klein noted these patterns in her 2007 book\u00a0Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism<\/i>, which documented what Klein saw as the dismantling of the public sphere in post-Katrina New Orleans. The demolition of public housing that occurred in Katrina\u2019s wake was interpreted by many as a cynical move on the part of authorities that had long wanted to remove supposedly \u2018blighted\u2019 projects from prime real estate. As Lawrence Powell, Tulane historian who spent the earlier part of his career working in public housing, suggested in the last session, it was clear to him that \u2018as soon as the city could figure out a way to get rid of them [public housing residents], they would. Katrina was a classic example of \u201ca crisis is a terrible thing to waste.\u201d\u2019 Powell elaborated: \u2018Nobody wants to reconstitute those challenged communities as they were, but it\u2019s a terrible, tragic thing, to push people out of their homes, whose families maybe have been in this city for eight generations.\u2019 A similar story might be told about the closure of Charity Hospital and the sacking of thousands of public school teachers after Katrina to make way for Charter schools.<\/span><\/p>\n

Noise ordinances are one example of the attempt to drive from the public sphere musical cultures that have long \u2018bubbled up\u2019 from the streets in the city. The increasing reliance on non-profits as a way of funding the arts is possibly another. See the discussion\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>. And yet art also, as many pointed out, should represent and imagine alternatives. The first panel on \u2018Art after Katrina\u2019 provided a number of examples of people engaged in projects that have been rejuvenated as a consequence of the storm.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Carol Bebelle, founder and director of the Ash\u00e9 Cultural Arts Center, explained, after the storm \u2018Ash\u00e9\u2019s light became like a beacon when New Orleans\u2019 lights went off\u2019. It became a nerve centre for the community arts scene in Central City, and occasioned the realization of a vision that had not taken off before Katrina. Bebelle summarized Ash\u00e9\u2019s central goals: \u2018culture and art and equity \u2026 and learning from a past that\u2019s not done well by everyone.\u2019 She elaborated: \u2018Artists have always been trash to treasure people. You give them nothing and they make something out of it\u2026 And so to create a landscape where that\u2019s possible is really what I would say, from the Ash\u00e9 philosophy, is what we\u2019re reaching for.\u2019 But Slie\u2019s comment on his own work with Mondo Bizarro seemed to apply here too: \u2018its an approaching, it\u2019s not an arrival.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Rebecca Mwase continued this theme. She is one of the many actors and theatre-makers who arrived in New Orleans after Katrina. As Mwase suggested, \u2018one thing that I\u2019ve continually reminded myself of since I moved here after Katrina is that I know less than I think I know and I\u2019m always aware and curious about the stories that I don\u2019t know yet.\u2019 For her, the \u2018post-Katrina art scene is about: How can I listen more?\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Art and activism: overcoming the distinction?<\/b><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The concept of community engaged art to which many of the participants are committed in many respects overcomes the distinction between art and activism that the conference structure partially and somewhat arbitrarily maintained \u2013 as was pointed out by Helen Regis who chaired the panel on \u2018Activism and Organizing after the Storm\u2019. Abram Himelstein\u2019s Neighborhood Story Project, which he describes as \u2018collaborative ethnography \u2026an experiment in reclaiming stories\u2019, is one of the clearest illustrations of the ways in which the control of narrative in the post-Katrina city is directly related to power and the ways that the city has been and is still being re-shaped. Luisa Dantas\u2019\u00a0Land of Opportunity<\/i>\u00a0feature documentary film and larger interactive website is another: as Dantas explained in the last session, her project\u2019s aim has been to listen to and represent the \u2018competing visions of what the future of New Orleans should be, and the different agendas that come into play\u2019.Other art projects like The Porch by Bechet and Willie Birch and the numerous theatre projects produced by Mondo and Artspot Productions similarly centralize the importance of storytelling to the life of the community.<\/span><\/p>\n

Community organizing emphasizes the more directly political aspects of storytelling to citizen participation. Jordan Shannon\u2019s work with Puentes and New Orleans\u2019 Latino community, Darryl Malek-Wiley\u2019s work with the Sierra Club and the Lower Ninth Ward, Kreiger-Benson\u2019s work with MACCNO (Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans) and New Orleans musicians and Timolynn Sams\u2019 work with the Neighborhoods Partnership Network is all about advocating on behalf of particular communities whose voices have been marginalized or invisible in the decision-making processes that have had such a huge impact on people\u2019s lives after the storm. As Gilbert reflected in the last panel, looking back on her work with public housing, the Ford Foundation, and now Declaration Initiative, \u2018policy has to really have meaning for the people who will benefit from it\u2019; and the only way for this to happen is for communities to have a real voice. This is what Sams describes as the Sesame Street methodology: \u2018that every person, regardless of what they look like, how they sound, who they represent, is part of the community\u2019s fabric.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately the Sesame Street methodology has not been followed by many of the most influential actors in the city\u2019s reconstruction. As Greer Mendy put it in the first panel, \u2018the race and class issue, it slams you, across the face, front and back\u2019. Mendy\u2019s work with the Tekrema Center for Art and Culture located in the Lower Ninth Ward is very aware of the limited funds for community art projects that don\u2019t want to sacrifice their agenda to partner with commercial concerns. \u2018Art is a luxury,\u2019 she explained, \u2018unless it\u2019s free.\u2019 For her, the agenda has to be about \u2018livability\u2019, about survival \u2013 an activity that should not be reduced to the dynamics of the marketplace but which has ultimately never been able to disentangle itself from economic imperatives.<\/span><\/p>\n

The future in a \u2018post-survival\u2019 New Orleans<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Louisiana's<\/p>\n

Louisiana\u2019s disappearing wetlands\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n


\nLinetta Gilbert concluded her contributions to the Post-Katrina Futures panel by stating: \u2018I don\u2019t want to believe that you have to be poor and broken to create the blues or create jazz. I want to know that you can play that horn even living in a house that doesn\u2019t leak; that your message is not shaped by your circumstances only \u2026 I don\u2019t want the message to go out \u2013 that in order to keep the culture of New Orleans that people have to be broken down, disenfranchised and in a bad way to tell their story.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

While so much of the conference was devoted to describing the wrong turns taken by the recovery and reconstruction process, and the various ways in which these turns have been resisted, the last panel in particular addressed the challenge posed by Nghana Lewis, who chaired the session, that New Orleans throughout its history has been absorbing various forms of change; with the implication that the change brought by Katrina should perhaps not be uniformly treated as an \u2018unnatural\u2019 distortion of the city\u2019s \u2018proper\u2019 evolution. This suggestion also seemed to animate Campanella\u2019s observation that after Katrina people tended to resist change and crave normalcy. Gilbert\u2019s desire to realistically assess pre-Katrina New Orleans, and to discard what she constructed as the romanticization of poverty, proposed one way of coming to terms with aspects of the \u2018new\u2019 New Orleans.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ways in which the reconfigured city has exacerbated often racialized inequalities led Himelstein to state: \u2018I don\u2019t experience the rebuild as a total success\u2026 I\u2019m not living in the city that I wanted, and I didn\u2019t necessarily fight all the fights I wanted to fight in the last eight years.\u2019 Echoing Salaam\u2019s keynote and some of Himelstein\u2019s disappointment, Malek-Wiley described a Lower Ninth Ward being slowly redeveloped by citizens whose determination, commitment and work is under the government radar and beyond their concern: \u2018it\u2019s a jungle down there.\u2019 Willie Birch sounded this note of unease about the future of the city\u2019s culture repeatedly from the audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet all conceded that there was value in some of the newness, with Malek-Wiley embracing the levels of post-storm volunteerism as \u2018amazing\u2019. Recalling the Saul Alinsky model, Himelstein said of the post-Katrina newcomers:\u00a0 \u2018its really about whether this relationship is going to be permanent, it\u2019s about whether or not I should invest in being close to you \u2026 I don\u2019t have the energy to greet all the people who come with good intentions and tell them my stories \u2026 I just want to be here with those people who are going to stay here.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

This sense of the need for continuity and perseverance in the fight for social justice strongly animated Sams\u2019 and Shannon\u2019s contributions. Sams suggested that if communities in New Orleans continued to see their efforts at change-making as atomized \u2018campaigns\u2019 as opposed to a larger \u2018movement\u2019, \u2018we will win some battles but the war will be lost\u2019. Shannon\u2019s theme was similar, when she referred to the Congress of Day Laborers\u2019 recent and unexpected victory against discriminatory immigration policies and suggested: \u2018I think we can sell our communities short and go after what we think we can win, instead of what justice looks like, and this was something that actually went after justice and got it.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea that we need to look at the bigger picture and play a long game, one that isn\u2019t just about reactive campaigning in what feels like an emergency situation, seemed to inform Amber Wiley\u2019s suggestion that what we are now dealing with is a \u2018post-post-Katrina New Orleans; we\u2019re not in the post-Katrina era anymore.\u2019 Wiley\u2019s own work as an urban historian and teacher of students of architecture \u2013 who, she explained, view themselves as the planners of the future \u2013 encapsulates the tension between the past and future but also suggests that the need to reflect on and preserve the past must not stand in the future\u2019s way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s related suggestion that this new \u2018post-post-Katrina\u2019 space might be described as \u2018post-survival\u2019 pointed to a new frame for a New Orleans in which Katrina is at least decentred as a reference point. Certainly when I began to organize this conference I heard a lot about \u2018Katrina fatigue\u2019, though everywhere there is evidence that the city has yet to move on.<\/span><\/p>\n

It strikes me that there is much value in thinking of \u2018post-survival New Orleans\u2019 in a comparative vein that both acknowledges New Orleans\u2019 distinctiveness and recognizes that the experience of Katrina-like catastrophes is not unique. Dantas\u2019 work, which has begun to compare the Katrina story with that engendered by Hurricane Sandy, provides a necessary reminder that disaster situations only highlight forms of social abandonment that already existed as \u2018slow violence\u2019. The comparison is also a reminder that disasters are not social levellers but rather exacerbate inequalities. In this sense the \u2018before\u2019 and \u2018after\u2019 of Katrina merely provides one vantage point among many to view the city\u2019s evolution; its \u2018unfurling social disaster\u2019 and its rich material culture, the one which cries out for amelioration and the other that calls for preservation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Postscript: New Orleans and the transnational<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

It also strikes me that another way of envisaging \u2018post-survival New Orleans\u2019 is to open it up to comparisons with the rest of the world. The title of a conference is only ever a provocation, and it struck me as very interesting that it was the future of New Orleans, and not transnational perspectives, that took centre stage. A number of people have suggested to me over the last few months that New Orleans is like a magnet that draws you in: the local often proves so compelling that you have to defeat irresistible centripetal forces to gain perspective on the rest of the world. Initially this surprised me: this city had always seemed to me to be so open to its outsides, so clearly marked by the African and European influences that represent its most prominent anterior worlds. But this unexpected suggestion now seems right to me. The deep roots that mark the lives of so many that live here, and which were so violently displaced after Katrina, are about stability and place, values that don\u2019t sit well with the mobility implied by the transnational.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet, as Carol Bebelle suggested to me a couple of weeks after the conference, the daily rituals that celebrate the value of this place are deeply marked by African and Caribbean ancestors that live on in the city. Some have argued that New Orleans\u2019 status as America\u2019s most \u2018African\u2019 city partially accounts for the appalling treatment of evacuees after the storm.<\/span><\/p>\n

New Orleans as a Caribbean city?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

My own work is currently trying to make sense of some of this by thinking about the connections between post-Katrina New Orleans and post-earthquake Haiti. These connections go beyond the rhetorical violence done to both sets of victims, but arguably this shared suffering is in part constituted by this \u2018beyond\u2019: after the Haitian revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century the New Orleans population doubled in size as a consequence of the influx of \u2018refugees\u2019 \u2013 slave owners, slaves, and free persons of colour \u2013 from the former slave colony of Saint Domingue. These newcomers arguably had a profound effect not only on New Orleans culture and its unique racial make-up in the context of the United States, but also on the perception of New Orleans\u2019 distinctiveness and, by some, often negative, accounts, \u2018foreignness\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

New Orleans\u2019 status as a \u2018Caribbean city\u2019 did not go unmarked at the conference. Jordan Shannon mentioned that while teaching Latin American Studies at Tulane, \u2018I would continually stress to students that we can look to Latin America not only as a source of dictatorial government or poverty, but because people have been combatting forms of oppression and postcolonial structures \u2013 that are actually very similar to New Orleans \u2013 we can look to these places as innovative sources of solutions\u2019 including cooperatives and other social movements. Certainly the celebration of the public sphere that seems so evident in New Orleans has much in common with these kinds of collectives. Hannah Kreiger-Benson agreed that the Latin American model provided \u2018a really fascinating commentary on the city and the way it\u2019s situated in America and also in the Caribbean\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

The conference\u2019s title was in part an invitation to reconceptualize New Orleans\u2019 geographical location, as not only part of a larger Gulf South but also a larger Caribbean eco-system and African and European political ecology. New Orleans absolutely is part of the United States, but paradoxically its own \u2013 vexed \u2013 exceptional status within the nation might be seen as a gateway for thinking beyond the limitations of US exceptionalism; perhaps beyond the logic of national or regional exception in general.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some final thoughts from Mexico<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Mexico<\/p>\n

Mexico City\u2019s wonky angles\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n


\nI began writing this piece in New Orleans and continued writing as I travelled to Mexico City. I was fascinated to discover another sinking cultural gem that was also the result of an attempt by human beings to triumph over water and this time build on top of the site of a lake. Campanella\u2019s description of the dangers of the \u2018levees only\u2019 approach and Malek-Wiley\u2019s reports on conversations about sustainability in the Lower Ninth Ward seemed to apply here in this smog of pollution and water and cultural productivity. Mexico City is hemmed in between mountain ranges which trap the pollution and create a bowl effect reminiscent of that which surrounds New Orleans. Also the result of the colonial imagination, the site of this city seems even more unlikely, when you witness the stunning Spanish architecture subside, at various rates \u2013 creating an uneven, jostling effect \u2013 across the city and particularly in its historic centre. The dilemmas described by Campanella in\u00a0Bienville\u2019s Dilemma<\/i>\u00a0(2008) haunt this city too, posing contemporary challenges about land and water use and adaptation to inevitable environmental effects that will have a profound impact on the city and its future \u2018livability\u2019. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cultural connections were even more pronounced when I arrived in Merida, the capital of the tropical Yucatan, one of New Orleans\u2019 sister cities and located just off the opposite shore of the Gulf of Mexico. Merida, like Port au Prince, is architecturally reminiscent of New Orleans and, in turn, Havana. It boasts a high percentage of indigenous peoples \u2013 some say about 60% \u2013 who are proud of their distinctive culture and cuisine, eager to preserve their practices against a seemingly encroaching dominant Mexican culture. The culture here contrasts with that of New Orleans in marked ways, but the city\u2019s embattled status, and the sense of abandonment that stalks some of the beautiful Spanish and French colonial buildings at the city\u2019s core \u2013 despite the fact that Merida, unlike New Orleans, is often promoted as a social and economic success story \u2013 is a reminder of the fact that so much of what seems to be unique to New Orleans are cultural traditions shared not just with the rest of the US but with its Latin and Caribbean neighbours.<\/span><\/p>\n

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This is not to say that New Orleans\u2019 development has not taken these traditions on a unique course, but what the conference seemed to suggest is that the city is a case study of disasters of all kinds \u2013 that transcend the Katrina moment \u2013 which have miraculously co-existed with astonishing levels of cultural creativity that have much to teach the world. That these two legacies are possibly inextricably intertwined was suggested by Lawrence Powell when he said, \u2018New Orleans to me is like a low grade fever, once it gets into the bloodstream it\u2019s really hard to shake it, for all its problems\u2019; and yet there also seemed to be a collective sense that \u2018the rhythm of the community and the brilliance of the people\u2019 that so struck Linetta Gilbert after spending some time in the city is currently endangered by ongoing economic, social and environmental disaster that must be averted if New Orleans culture is to thrive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thank you<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, I would like to thank everybody for coming to join the conversation, and particularly the speakers and panellists: Richard Campanella, Kalamu ya Salaam, Carol Bebelle, Ron Bechet, Luisa Dantas, Joel Dinerstein, Linetta Gilbert, Abram Himelstein, Hannah Kreiger-Benson, Nghana Lewis, Darryl Malek-Wiley, Greer Mendy, Catherine Michna, Brice Miller, Rebecca Mwase, Lawrence Powell, Helen Regis, Timolynn Sams, Jordan Shannon, Nick Slie, Amber Wiley. It was a privilege to work with you all.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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>via:\u00a0http:\/\/blogs.bbk.ac.uk\/afterkatrina\/2013\/12\/19\/after-katrina-transnational-perspectives-on-the-futures-of-the-gulf-south\/<\/a><\/p>\n

__________________________<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Conference<\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
\n

After Katrina: Transnational Perspectives on the Futures of the Gulf South<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Confirmed keynote speakers: Professor\u00a0Richard Campanella\u00a0<\/span><\/a>and\u00a0Kalamu ya Salaam<\/span><\/a><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Tulane University, New Orleans<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Friday November 15,\u00a02013<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Venue:\u00a0Uptown Campus, LBC 201<\/span><\/a><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

A schedule of\u00a0the day\u00a0can now\u00a0be\u00a0found\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Audio versions of some of the conference sessions are now available on the following links:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Keynote: Kalamu ya Salaam<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Roundable 1:Art after Katrina<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Roundtable 2: Activism and Organizing after the Storm<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Roundtable 3: Post-Katrina Futures<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Participants include:\u00a0Carol Bebelle\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Ash\u00e9 Cultural Arts Center),\u00a0Ron Bechet<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(artist, Xavier University),\u00a0Luisa Dantas\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Land of Opportunity project), \u00a0Joel Dinerstein\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Tulane, Center for the Gulf South),\u00a0Linetta Gilbert\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Declaration Initiative),\u00a0Martin Gutierrez\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Puentes),\u00a0Abram Himelstein<\/span><\/a>(Neighborhood Story Project, UNO),\u00a0Hannah Kreiger-Benson\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans),\u00a0Nghana Lewis\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Tulane),\u00a0Darryl Malek-Wiley\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Sierra Club),\u00a0Greer Mendy\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Tekrema Center for Art and Culture),\u00a0Catherine Michna\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Tulane),\u00a0Brice Miller\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(musician, University of Alabama),\u00a0Lawrence Powell\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Tulane),\u00a0Helen Regis\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(LSU),\u00a0Timolynn Sams\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Neighborhoods Partnership Network),\u00a0Nick Slie\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Mondo Bizarro),\u00a0Amber Wiley\u00a0<\/span><\/a>(Tulane).<\/span><\/p>\n

Hurricane Katrina was identified by a host of commentators as a \u2018teachable moment\u2019, one that somehow held lessons not just for the Gulf South but for the rest of the United States. These lessons were variously understood as relating to racialized poverty, decaying infrastructure and an ideology of neglect \u2013 a picture that seemed to point to the failure of the US as a utopian project. One of the limitations of early political, news media and scholarly commentary on Katrina was the idea that it had illuminated a specifically national tragedy, one that emanated from a past that might not be as distinct from the present as we like to imagine. While this viewpoint contains important insights, it also forecloses on the global resonances of the storm and the ways in which Katrina and its aftermath might be deployed to think about the future. The future is now a hotly contested topic in post-Katrina New Orleans and this conference proposes to bring together scholars and those working beyond the academy in order to address a temporal category that poses particular challenges\u00a0for academic scholarship.<\/span><\/p>\n

This one-day conference, hosted by Tulane\u2019s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, is part of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, entitled \u2018After Katrina: Projecting racial, transnational and environmental futures beyond the American Century\u2019. This project is run by\u00a0Anna Hartnell\u00a0<\/span><\/a>from Birkbeck, University of London, who is a visiting scholar at Tulane in autumn 2013, and whose research is attempting to locate post-Katrina New Orleans within larger national and international debates about the changing status of the United States in the twenty-first century. The conference seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars \u2013 working across the arts, cultural studies, geography, environmental studies, architecture, law, etc. \u2013 and artists, activists and organizers in New Orleans and the region, to explore the ways in which global perspectives on Katrina might open up new ways of envisaging the futures of the Gulf South.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alongside two keynote talks, the conference will consist of three roundtable discussions which will establish a dialogue between participants and the audience, on the following intersecting themes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Art after Katrina<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Organizing and activism after the storm<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Post-Katrina Futures<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

This event is free but if you would like to attend please register\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you would like any more information about this conference please contact Anna Hartnell, a.hartnell@bbk.ac.uk.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

>via:\u00a0http:\/\/blogs.bbk.ac.uk\/afterkatrina\/conference-at-tulane-university-friday-15-november-after-katrina-transnational-perspectives-on-the-futures-of-the-gulf-south\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  After Katrina: Transnational Perspectives on the Futures of the Gulf South By Anna Hartnell   Photograph courtesy of Gilbert Mercier. All Right Reserved.   It\u2019s not really the place of the conference organizer to declare the occasion a success or summarize its shortcomings. Which means I\u2019m probably not the best person to reflect on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[6],"tags":[4,12,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176429532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176429532"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176429532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176429534,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176429532\/revisions\/176429534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176429532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176429532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176429532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}