Katrina's Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America

by Keith Wailoo (Editor), Keith Wailoo (Introduction), Karen M. O'Neill (Editor), Karen M. O'Neill (Introduction), Jeffrey Dowd (Editor)

Overview

Katrina's Imprint highlights the power of this sentinel American event and its continuing reverberations in contemporary politics, culture, and public policy. Published on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the multidisciplinary volume reflects on how history, location, access to transportation, health care, and social position feed resilience, recovery, and prospects for the future of New Orleans and the Gulf region. Essays examine the intersecting vulnerabilities that gave rise to the disaster, explore the cultural and psychic legacies of the storm, reveal how the process of rebuilding and starting over replicates past vulnerabilities, and analyze Katrina's imprint alongside American's myths of self-sufficiency. A case study of new weaknesses that have emerged in our era, this book offers an argument for why we cannot wait for the next disaster before we apply the lessons that should be learned from Katrina.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813547749
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	06/23/2010
Series:	Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

KEITH WAILOO is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University, and the author and editor of several books, among them Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health.

KAREN M. O'NEILL is a sociologist and associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, and the author of Rivers by Design: State Power and the Origins of U.S. Flood Control.

JEFFREY DOWD is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Rutgers University.

ROLAND V. ANGLIN is the director of the Initiative for Regional and Community Transformation (IRCT) at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Katrina's Imprint Keith Wailoo Karen M. O'Neill Jeffrey Dowd 1

Part 1 The Tangled Logic of Vulnerability

1 Who Sank New Orleans? How Engineering the River Created Environmental Injustice Karen M. O'Neill 9

2 Invisible Tethers: Transportation and Discrimination in the Age of Katrina Mia Bay 21

3 A Slow, Toxic Decline: Dialysis Patients, Technological Failure, and the Unfulfilled Promise of Health in America Keith Wailoo 34

4 The Ship of State: Framing an Understanding of Federalism and the Perfect Disaster Roland Anglin 45

Part 2 Cultural and Psychic Legacies

5 Seeing Katrina's Dead Ann Fabian 59

6 Second-Lining the Jazz City: Jazz Funerals, Katrina, and the Reemergence of New Orleans Richard Mizelle Jr. 69

7 Racism, Trauma, and Resilience: The Psychological Impact of Katrina Nancy Boyd-Franklin 78

8 The Haunted Houses of New Orleans: Gothic Homelessness and African American Experience Evie Shockley 95

Part 3 "Starting Over" in Post-Katrina America

9 Rebroadcasting Katrina: Blame, Vulnerability, and Post-2005 Disaster Commentary Keith Wailoo Jeffrey Dowd 117

10 Protecting Our Assets: Private and Public Responses to Katrina John R. Aiello Lyra Stein 135

11 The Labor Market Impact of Natural Disasters William M. Rodgers III 154

12 The Katrina Diaspora: Dislocation and the Reproduction of Segregation and Employment Inequality Nikt T. Dickerson 169

Part 4 Tragedy, Recovery, and Myth

13 Katrina and the Myth of Self-Sufficiency David Dante Troutt 183

14 Race, Vulnerability, and Recovery Keith Wailoo Karen M. O'Neill Jeffrey Dowd 192

Notes on Contributors 197

Index 201

Editorial Reviews

"The intent [of Katrina's Imprint] is to reveal the human consequences of the city's devastation and to offer a moral perspective on what has been viewed too often as a failure of government, a 'natural' breakdown of technological systems. This volume reminds us of the persistence of racial divisions in American society and the many ways that African Americans are vulnerable to harm. Recommended."

Choice

"Katrina's Imprint provides some of the most valuable scholarly insights yet published regarding the 2005 disaster. It serves as an exemplary record of interdisciplinary scholars whose research illuminates Katrina's larger lessons."

Journal of Southern History

"With skilled use of primary and secondary sources, Katrina's Imprint effectively shakes us out of our 'blissful ignorance' and fulfills its stated aim to broaden and deepen our understanding of Katrina. Katrina's Imprint is important reading."

From the Publisher

"This book is the best treatment we have of the American catastrophe c
— Cornel West

Princeton University

"With skilled use of primary and secondary sources, Katrina's Imprint effectively shakes us out of our 'blissful ignorance' and fulfills its stated aim to broaden and deepen our understanding of Katrina. Katrina's Imprint is important reading."

Journal of African American History

"Katrina's Imprint is a unique book that makes critical contributions to our understanding not only of the event itself but also of the ongoing production of social inequalities in our society as a whole. The strong blend of empirically-based social science and textual and cultural analyses of Katrina's Imprint leads to a holistic understanding of the ways that structural inequalities are reproduces, but also resisted and challenged."

Contemporary Sociology

"This book is the best treatment we have of the American catastrophe called Katrina. These sophisticated views and powerful voices constitute the most formidable challenge to each of us in regards to race and justice!"

Princeton University - Cornel West