Ten Years after Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm's Effect on American Culture and Identity

261 Pages·10.22 MB·English

by  Mary Ruth Marotte, Glenn Jellenik (eds.)

1
Ten Years after Katrina

Ten Years after Katrina
Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s
Effect on American Culture
and Identity
Edited by
Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ten years after Katrina : critical perspectives of the storm’s effect on American culture
and identity / edited by Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-9268-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-9269-6 (electronic)
1. Hurricane Katrina, 2005—Social aspects. 2. Disasters—Social aspects—United States.
3. Disasters in literature. 4. Disasters in art. 5. Disasters—Press coverage. 6. Mass media
and culture—United States. 7. United States—Civilization—21st century. I. Marotte,
Mary Ruth. II. Jellenik, Glenn.
HV6362005.G85 T46 2015
973.93—dc23
2014038335
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction: Reading Hurricane Katrina vii
Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik
PART I: TESTIMONY 1
1 Disaster’s Ethics of Literature: Voicing Katrina’s Stories
in a Digital Age 3
Joseph Donica
2 Dramatic “Belated Immediacy” in John Biguenet’s
Rising Water Trilogy 17
Daisy Pignetti
3 “The Storm”: Spatial Discourses and Katrina Narratives
in David Simon’s Treme (2010–2013) 33
Michael Samuel
4 Shattered Reflections: One D.O.A., One on the Way,
Short-Short Stories and Enacting Trauma 57
Laura Tansley
5 Bearing Witness to the Dispossessed: Natasha Tretheway’s
Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast 73
Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza
6 Subversive Interpellation: Voices of Protest Out of
“the storm called . . . America” 93
Glenn Jellenik
v
vi Contents
PART II: CULTURAL IDENTITY 107
7 Katrina Stories Get Graphic in A.D.: New Orleans
After the Deluge 109
Kate Parker Horigan
8 Displacement and Dispossession: The Plantation Regime as
a Disaster Discourse in Rosalyn Story’s Wading Home (2010) 129
Florian Freitag
9 Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Katrina’s Southern Biopolitics 153
Christopher Lloyd
10 Katrina Time: An Aggregation of Political Rhetoric in Zeitoun 171
A. G. Keeble
11 The Camera as Corrective: Post-Photography, Disaster
Networks, and the Afterimage of Hurricane Katrina 191
Thomas Stubblefield
12 Pregnancies, Storms, and Legacies of Loss in Jesmyn Ward’s
Salvage the Bones 207
Mary Ruth Marotte
13 Re-shaping the Narrative: Pulling Focus/Pushing Boundaries in
Fictional Representations of Hurricane Katrina 221
Glenn Jellenik
Index 239
About the Contributors 243
Introduction
Reading Hurricane Katrina
Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik
Midway through Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun (2009), the book’s eponymous main
character and his friend Nasser paddle though the flooded streets of New
Orleans. Zeitoun has spent the days after Hurricane Katrina navigating the
city by canoe and doing what he can to help those in need. So when he and
Nasser spot a helicopter hovering just over the water, they head over to see
if they can be of assistance: “As they got closer, they saw a dark smudge in
the water, a log or a piece of debris . . . The object looked like a tire, shiny
and bulbous—It was a body. They were sure now . . . It was a man of average
size, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, half-submerged, face-down.”1 Predictably,
Zeitoun is stunned. He looks up to the helicopter: “Was it a rescue in prog-
ress? He looked closer. No. A man was pointing a camera at the body. He
did so for a few more minutes and then the helicopter rose, tilted, and drifted
off.”2 Tragically, this moment in Zeitoun, which simultaneously represents
the abject horror of the storm and the troubling public and media response,
is far from an isolated occurrence. Indeed, floating and abandoned dead bod-
ies are a regular trope in the Katrina narrative, and thus, they have become a
regular trope in American culture.
Ten years of chronological distance from the hurricane is not enough for
us to forget the images of the floating bodies, images that captured and con-
tinue to capture the terrible nature of Katrina and the shame of how and why
America abandoned so many people affected by the storm. Details of the
devastation were quickly reported (and misreported) by media outlets, and
a slew of articles and books were published in the aftermath of the storm,
offering a whole spectrum of socio-political commentaries and analyses. But
beyond the reportage and the commentary, a whole series of fictional and
creative accounts of the Katrina-experience have emerged in various media:
novels (both literary and pulp fiction), plays, films, television shows, songs,
graphic novels, collections of photographs, and works of creative non-fiction
vii
viii Introduction
that blur the lines between oral history and reportage, memoir and poetry. The
creative outpouring brings to mind Salman Rushdie’s observation that, “Man
[is] the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that tells itself stories
to understand what kind of creature it is.”3 This book begins by accepting the
urge behind Rushdie’s formula: humans tell stories in order to understand
themselves, their world, and their place in that world. And essentially, that
is what is at work in the creative output on Katrina—it represents a series
of efforts to construct a coherent narrative out of the chaos and wreckage of
a cataclysmic event. This collective body of work amounts to proof of the
validity of Rushdie’s formula; a vast and diverse group of people are in the
process of telling stories about Katrina, in search of deeper understanding
about the world where the hurricane happened and our place in it.
However, this book seeks to go further than merely cataloguing the ways
that Katrina narratives support Rushdie’s rich claim. Because while a diverse
body of work has sprung out of Katrina, the critical response to this emergent
canon has lagged well behind that creative outpouring. Indeed, we are fast
approaching the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, but scholars and
critics have done surprisingly little in the way of systematically processing
these creative processings. The only scholarly collection dedicated specifi-
cally to essays about Katrina is The Neoliberal Deluge (University of Min-
nesota Press, 2011), a book focused on political and economic theory, that
explores the contextual socio-economic drivers that deepened the natural
(Katrina) and man-made (levee breaches) disasters. While there is no short-
age of books (written by pundits and political proxies) presenting political
and socio-economic arguments about who is to blame for the Katrina debacle
and what we can/should learn from it, no collection exploring creative
Katrina-texts exists. This dearth of scholarly attention stands in stark contrast
to the scholarly response to the cultural processing of 9/11, which has pro-
duced a veritable catalogue of books (in just the past three years: American
Culture Transformed: Dialing 9/11 [Palgrave Macmillan, 2012], Plotting
Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture After 9/11 [University of
Nebraska Press, 2012], Horror After 9/11 [University of Texas Press, 2011],
Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film, and
Theater [McFarland, 2011]).
Ten Years After Katrina takes its cue from these critical responses to the
creative work that emerged from 9/11. Our collection represents a concen-
trated attempt to chart the effects of Katrina on our cultural identity; it seeks
to not merely catalogue the trauma of the event but to explore the ways
that such an event functions in and on the literature that represents it. This
book works under the assumption that the body of work that sprung out of
Katrina offers a unique critical opportunity to better understand many things,
including the genres that structure those stories and the ways that stories
Introduction ix
reflect and produce culture and identity. Consistently throughout the book,
new questions are raised about the representative genres themselves: Can a
poetic memoir by a poet laureate function as a political act? Can a book of
photographs simultaneously function as a journalistic record and an artistic
revolution? Can a television show function as social activism? Of course the
stories themselves are efforts to represent and understand the human condi-
tion, but so are the organizing principles that communicate the stories. That
is, Katrina-narratives offer us an opportunity to interrogate the ways that spe-
cific narrative structures inform our understanding and develop our cultural
identity.
For example, Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel
Salvage the Bones, published in 2011, was written several years after Ward’s
own personal experience surviving the storm with her family in DeLisle,
Mississippi. Her novel is representative of a distinct and meaningful body of
literature that has emerged following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, litera-
ture that seeks to examine not only the personal lives affected by the storm
but also the ways that Americans deal with disasters, both natural and man-
made, public and personal. Ward also published an essay about the storm
in the Oxford American literary magazine’s three-years-after Katrina issue.
Certainly her personal history of the devastation lends her a position as a sort
of expert, and Salvage the Bones is a book that follows the fictional Baptiste
family’s experience in the days before the storm and during the storm itself.
But rather than be contained by the storm, Ward’s novel expands the Bap-
tistes’ Katrina-story to touch on local, national and universal experiences; it
uses the hurricane as a springboard for a broader and more probing social
exploration. As with Ward’s novel, the best of these works of fiction give
voice to the experiences of those wounded and displaced by the storm, under-
scoring the need to better comprehend the ways our nation failed to provide
for its citizens in their time of need, how we might prepare more adequately
for future disasters, how we might rectify the multitude of wrongs committed
against the Americans in the eye of the storm, and how, despite our persistent
desire for answers to these questions, we must learn to live with more ques-
tions than answers in the wake of such disasters. Certainly New Orleans and
its surrounding regions diverge significantly from other regions in America,
and knowing this, any look at Katrina must include a studied understanding of
the region before the storm and the ways that the storm altered and continues
to alter this region. Most importantly, this collection will examine the impor-
tant themes at work in the texts that have emerged in the wake of this disaster.
And after ten years we have the space and the distance to begin to analyze
how deeply Katrina reaches into our culture, to move beyond remarking on
the horror and injustice toward an exploration of what these texts are doing
in and to our cultural landscape.