Description
Book SynopsisHurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast in 2005, leaving an unparalleled trail of physical destruction. In addition to that damage, the storm wrought massive psychological and cultural trauma on Gulf Coast residents and on America as a whole. Details of the devastation were quickly reportedand misreportedby media outlets, and a slew of articles and books followed, offering a spectrum of socio-political commentaries and analyses. But beyond the reportage and the commentary, a series of fictional and creative accounts of the Katrina-experience have emerged in various mediums: novels, plays, films, television shows, songs, graphic novels, collections of photographs, and works of creative non-fiction that blur the lines between 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. This book accepts the urge behin
Trade ReviewThis book shows us why we need cultural criticism: the x-codes of Hurricane Katrina take on life as polysemous performance. Through careful attention, disasters’ long reverberations yield their sad and all too familiar truths. -- Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College
Table of ContentsContents Introduction. Ten Years Later Part I: Testimony Chapter 1. Disaster’s Ethics of Literature: Voicing Katrina's Stories in a Digital Age Joseph Donica Chapter 2. Dramatic ‘Belated Immediacy’ in John Biguenet’s Rising Water Trilogy Daisy Pignetti Chapter 3. “The Storm”: Spatial Discourses and Katrina Narratives in David Simon's Treme Michael Samuel Chapter 4. Shattered Reflections: One D.O.A., One on the Way, Short-Short Stories and Enacting Trauma Laura Tansley Chapter 5. Bearing Witness to the Dispossessed: Natasha Tretheway’s Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza Chapter 6. Subversive Interpellation: Voices of Protest Out of “the storm called… America” Glenn Jellenik Part II: Cultural Identity Chapter 7. Katrina Stories Get Graphic in A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge Kate Parker Horigan Chapter 8. Displacement and Dispossession: The Plantation Regime as a Disaster Discourse in Rosalyn Story’s Wading Home (2010) Florian Freitag Chapter 9. Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Katrina’s Southern Biopolitics Christopher Lloyd Chapter 10. Katrina Time: An Aggregation of Political Rhetoric in Zeitoun A.G. Keeble Chapter 11. The Camera as Corrective: Post-Photography, Disaster Networks, and the Afterimage of Hurricane Katrina Thomas Stubblefield Chapter 12. Pregnancies, Storms, and Legacies of Loss: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Mary Ruth Marotte Chapter 13. Re-shaping the Narrative: Pulling Focus/Pushing Boundaries in Fictional Representations of Hurricane Katrina Glenn Jellenik
