Reading Katrina: Race,Space and an Unnatural Disaster1

Beneath the fleeting commotion of natural disaster, the events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 revealed deep-rooted dynamics of racial and class inequalities. National media frenzy in the wake of the storm on the Gulf Coast reported on the plight of black poor populations, especially in New Orleans, as those worst impacted and also most neglected. The first part of this article elaborates on the contested concepts of “race” and “racism” in a contemporary context, in which popular visual and narrative representations inform contemporary racial discourses and the perpetuation, in turn, of a dominant neoconservative hegemony. A discursive reading, in part two, of emergent political and media narratives around Katrina reveals the processes and tropes operating to (re)construct “race” in dominant American culture. In this deconstructive analysis, the devastated urban space of New Orleans emerges as a physical as well as highly symbolic regime of knowledge in relation to which dehistoricized racial constructions are propagated and naturalized. Finally, hegemony is reconceptualized as an inherently contingent contemporary power. Discursive processes of racial domination reinforced by popular representations of Hurricane Katrina have been effectively subverted by activist movements in New Orleans which mobilize alternative, experiential and spatial narratives; signifying a grassroots politicization to counter the naturalized racial tropes of neoconservative discourse and intervene with more democratic processes in the ongoing reconstruction of the devastated city.