Abstract
With contributions by historians, geographers, sociologists, philosophers, architects, literary scholars, and others, this is one of the most thorough and wide-ranging collections to assess the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, 10 years since the event. The phrase ‘the Katrina Effect’, according to the editors, refers to the long-term impacts, prolonged duration, and broad range of responses to the catastrophe. The book’s focus remains resolutely fixed on ethical issues, injustices, and social equity. In this regard, the Katrina Effect also claims to be about the effect of this event on ‘currents of thought’ across a wide academic and political terrain.
For cultural geographers, the book opens up new avenues for the consideration of the intersection of material, political, and cultural terrains in the aftermath of urban destruction. It also tracks their intersections with engineering, urban planning, architecture, media, and aesthetics. While nonplussed about precisely distinguishing definitions of catastrophe versus disaster, the book makes clear throughout that this was not so much a ‘natural disaster’ as a catastrophic human event of failed levees, government mismanagement, inequitable urban planning, and neoliberal rebuilding, leaving a wide wake of spatial waves and cultural resonance.
The crosscutting and diverse contributions are structured into six short sections focusing on ideas of justice, recomposing, disassembling, and accounting for disaster, urbanism and architecture, and forgetfulness and commemoration. Several comparative chapters are especially compelling, including Anna Hartnell on ‘New Orleans, 2005 and Port-au-Prince, 2010’, James Rhodes on the ‘disaster paradigm’ in New Orleans and Detroit, and Jeffrey Diefendorf on learning about urban catastrophe from the history of wartime destruction. These eye-opening comparisons help place the Katrina Effect in wider contexts, and bring out various facets of the complex event in ways that sensitize us to how it has been interpreted, represented, remembered, and forgotten.
Several chapters also take up the aesthetics of witnessing disaster, including a powerful photographic essay by James O’Byrne on journalists ‘bearing witness’, a piece by Michael P. Levine on morbid curiosity and the aesthetics of disaster, and essays by Craig E. Colten and David Simpson on memory and memorialization. These chapters reflect on the visualization and marking of disaster, resonating with studies such as Barbie Zelizer’s book about morbid news photography, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (2010), or Anne Stoler’s study of Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013). 1
Other chapters take a more applied approach to discussing legal and political challenges to justice after the disaster (Naomi Zack), city planning and ruination (M. Christine Boyer), lessons for architecture and rebuilding after Katrina (William M. Taylor), and shifts in insurance and compensation (Michael G. Faure). Several chapters jibe with Naomi Klein’s critique of ‘disaster capitalism’ in Shock Doctrine (2007) and Cedric Johnson’s edited volume Neoliberal Deluge (2011), which also interrogates the market-oriented remaking of New Orleans. 2
In sum, this book is a diverse, comprehensive, and provocative intervention into the accumulating post-Katrina literature. It will be a useful addition to teaching not only about New Orleans but also more broadly about multi-disciplinary approaches to the cultural geography of disaster, social inequality, and urban justice.