Katrina's Imprint

Race and Vulnerability in America

Edited by Keith Wailoo, Karen M. O'Neill, Jeffrey Dowd, and Roland Anglin; Introduction by Keith Wailoo, Karen M. O'Neill, and Jeffrey Dowd

SERIES: Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity

Rutgers University Press

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.

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! Cornel West, Princeton University

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 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

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. Journal of African American History

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.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Katrina's Imprint by Keith Wailoo, Karen M. O'Neill, and Jeffrey Dowd

Part One: The Tangled Logic of Vulnerability
1. Who Sank New Orleans? How Engineering the River Created Environmental Injustice by Karen M. O'Neill
2. Invisible Tethers: Transportation and Discrimination in the Age of Katrina by Mia Bay
3. A Slow, Toxic Decline: Dialysis Patients, Technological Failure, and the Unfulfilled Promise of Health in America by Keith Wailoo
4. The Ship of State: Framing an Understanding of Federalism and the Perfect Disaster by Roland Anglin

Part Two: Cultural and Psychic Legacies
5. Seeing Katrina's Dead by Ann Fabian
6. Second-Lining the Jazz City: Jazz Funerals, Katrina, and the Reemergence of New Orleans by Richard Mizelle Jr.
7. Racism, Trauma, and Resilience: The Psychological Impact of Katrina by Nancy Boyd-Franklin
8. The Haunted Houses of New Orleans: Gothic Homelessness and African American Experience by Evie Shockley

Part Three: "Starting Over" in Post-Katrina America
9. Rebroadcasting Katrina: Blame, Vulnerability, and Post-2005 Disaster Commentary by Keith Wailoo and Jeffrey Dowd
10. Protecting Our Assets: Private and Public Responses to Katrina by John R. Aiello and Lyra Stein
11. The Labor Market Impact of Natural Disasters by William M. Rodgers III
12. The Katrina Diaspora: Dislocation and the Reproduction of Segregation and Employment Inequality by Niki T. DIckerson

Part Four: Tragedy, Recovery, and Myth
13. Katrina and the Myth of Self-Sufficiency by David Dante Troutt
14. Race, Vulnerability, and Recovery by Keith Wailoo, Karen M. O'Neill, and Jeffrey Dowd

Notes on Contributors
Index

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