After Katrina: Projecting Racial, Transnational and Environmental Futures Beyond the 'American Century'

Extreme weather events are commonplace in the United States but the legacy of Hurricane Katrina still reverberates throughout contemporary political, cultural and academic debate. The aftermath of Katrina as it unfolded in New Orleans not only raised key questions about race and national identity in 21st century America but it also raised the spectre of climate change in relation to a city built largely below sea level and increasingly exposed to hurricanes as a result of rapidly depleting barrier islands. This project suggests that post-Katrina New Orleans, which has so vividly captured and displayed key aspects of US history, provides us with a vital lens through which to project a future beyond the 'American century'.

New Orleans has long posed as a kind of mirror-image of the triumphalist narrative of US identity as it developed in the twentieth century. The twentieth century saw the transformation of New Orleans from a bustling economic centre to a weak, service-based economy dominated by tourism. This has meant that the city has come to be associated with the time of leisure as opposed to that of work, a feature which has exacerbated its image in the popular and literary imagination as a place of decline and obsolescence - one that is in marked tension with the idea of relentless progress central to US national ideology. The advent of Hurricane Katrina, and the drowned black bodies that it brought to world attention, and which bore witness to the catastrophic consequences of US racial and environmental history, was in one sense a literal and horrifying fulfilment of the gothic fantasies that have long hovered over the city. In this way, and by invoking key internal fractures within the US, post-Katrina New Orleans emerges as a key site for analysis of the discourse of US decline that has been gaining ground since 9/11.

This project thus asks: if Katrina is a 'teachable moment' (Barack Obama), how might it be drawn upon to better understand what the waning of US power means for the contemporary world? While post-Katrina New Orleans has lent some of the most desperate and dystopian imagery to the discourse of US decline, arguably it has also invoked the possibility of a re-awakening of democracy at the grassroots. The significance of the resurgence of community organizations in post-Katrina New Orleans calling for racial and environmental justice is demonstrated in the vast outpouring of creative and critical projects that reflect these developments.

In analysing these emerging forms of social engagement and their interaction with post-Katrina artistic and cultural production, this project suggests that thinking 'after Katrina' might offer an alternative approach to thinking 'post-9/11'. This alternative can help us to re-orient our understanding of the changing status of the United States away from pessimistic renderings of the decline of a superpower towards a vision of a transnational, multi-racial nation in which New Orleans might represent the somewhat paradoxical template for the future.

To this end, this project involves a cluster of research-related activities centred on the production of an interdisciplinary monograph which will engage with post-Katrina novels, memoir, films, literary critical discourses, eco-criticism, history, critical race theory and philosophy. It will constitute a distinctive intervention into American studies, promising to question the premise of the discipline: the centrality of the United States in cultural and geo-political terms.

This monograph will be supported by and in turn support a series of research collaborations, including international exchanges, and it will also feed directly into various public-facing activities which I believe this kind of research calls for. It will contribute to understandings of the history, politics and culture of the contemporary United States, and will project ways of imagining its transfigured promise into the 21st century.

Hurricane Katrina raised a complex and urgent set of issues that were most immediately relevant to material realities on 'the ground', involving issues that affect people in their daily lives: physical safety, housing, education, local community. The responses of government authorities, foundations, community organizations and activists have therefore been decisive in determining the material conditions that have governed the aftermath of the storm. Yet artistic work and academic discourses have a vital role to play in terms of identifying larger trends and patterns of representation, belief and behaviour, and highlighting, as well as complicating, what we might be able to learn from moments of social upheaval. The project therefore seeks at every level to promote dialogue between these different approaches, and also to demonstrate the ways in which post-Katrina New Orleans might speak to projected futures in the UK.

Who will benefit from this research?
- Various stake-holders based in New Orleans working on the post-Katrina reconstruction effort; I currently have contacts with: faith-based organizers at St. John Baptist Church, the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation, the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Fund, Loyola Law School's Katrina Clinic, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Declaration Initiative.
- Local artists in New Orleans (linked to the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, among others).
- The German-Marshall Fund and the US Embassy, which will be sending representatives to speak in a roundtable on US Foreign Policy at the London conference.
- The British Film Institute, the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, with which I am currently in discussion about the possibility of hosting events that will showcase my research.
- The interested public who will attend the talks and who will read the blog.
How will they benefit from this research?
- The one-day conference in New Orleans will provide opportunities for foundations and community organizations working on issues related to race and the environment to enter into a dialogue with academics who are critically reflecting on these areas. For example, the academic work on human rights discourses in post-Katrina New Orleans, including my own, is analysing its effectiveness in practical and ethical terms; these discussions about narrative, rhetoric, and ethics, will inform and possibly influence organizations that are shaping agendas on the ground. Local New Orleans artists who have responded to Katrina will be provided with a new opportunity to read, display and publicize their work.
- The one-day conference in London will provide a forum for organizations with a vested interest in perceptions of the US and US foreign policy to engage in discussion with academics working in this field. In particular, work in American studies, including my own project outlined here, which is assessing the narrative of US decline and its consequences for the imagination of America into the 21st century, will suggest broader cultural perspectives on this crucial narrative that is beginning to influence thinking across a whole range of policies, including those related to the environment and thinking on climate change, that are determined by US centrality.
- A series of talks will feed into the missions of the various partners I hope to work with: the BFI's 'Education and Research' agenda which aims to offer its audiences critical tools with which to better appreciate film; the Bernie Grant Arts Centre's commitment to cultural diversity in the arts.
- The public talks will raise awareness around critical issues about the effects of disaster on vulnerable populations, as well as the challenges of politicized art. The blog will also raise public awareness of these issues and my research.