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After the Deluge: The Post-Katrina Cultural Revival of New Orleans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2010

HELEN TAYLOR
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Abstract

This article argues that voices of doom, predicting the demise of Crescent City, have been drowned out by an optimistic and energetic movement both within and outside New Orleans to bring everyone home, and to revive and renew the city, especially through a showcasing of its diverse cultures. New Orleans's history is one of destruction and rebuilding, climatic disaster and haphazard reconstruction. The dramatic disappearance of the wetlands and urban hinterland, caused by climate change and ecological damage brought about by construction and oil companies, makes New Orleans's physical and demographic future questionable and controversial. But there is strong commitment by its citizens and internationally celebrated musicians to keep the city alive, and the global reputation and power of its music have attracted powerful advocates and cheerleaders. Music, film, television programmes, the visual arts, literature and many forms of published testimony and oral history have reminded the world of this city's unique multicultural postcolonial history, drawing back tourists and visitors to celebrate one of America's most extraordinary melting pots.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3: Hurricane Katrina: Five Years After , August 2010 , pp. 483 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Gilroy, Paul, “Multiculture in Times of War: An Inaugural Lecture Given at the London School of Economics,” Critical Quarterly, 48, 4 (Winter 2006), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 This was later reworked by Robert Plant for Led Zeppelin, 1971, and for his Raising Sand tour with Alison Krauss, 2008; by Bob Dylan in “The Levee's Gonna Break,” 2006; and by many singers such as John Paul Jones, Rosetta Stone and Tori Amos.

3 James Lee Burke, The Tin Roof Blowdown (London: Orion Books, 2007), 2.3

4 Irma Thomas quoted in John Harris, “We All Gonna Have a Good Time,” The Guardian, 18 Nov. 2005, Film and Music section, 6. Professor Jay Edwards, “A Cultural Geography of the Shotgun House in New Orleans: Implications for Strategies of Katrina Recovery,” at The Cultures of Rebuilding in Post-Katrina New Orleans conference, Louisiana State Museum, 7 Nov. 2008.

5 Quoted by Michael Hill, www.nonesuch.com/artists/allen-toussaint. Last accessed 14 March 2010.

6 Harris, 6.

7 For example, The Great Deluge; Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster; Code Blue: A Katrina Physician's Memoir; Katrina Chronicles; There is no Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (ed. Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires); The Dogs Who Found Me; Rescued (about animals); Path of Destruction; Missing New Orleans; Voices from the Storm; and Spoiled (images of refrigerators). Some of the best collections are Rosemary James, ed., My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers (New York: Touchstone, 2006); Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic (New Orleans: Chris Rose Books, 2005); Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006); and (a more scholarly collection) Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, ed., There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (New York: Routledge, 2006).

8 Steven Maklansky, ed., Katrina Exposed: A Photographic Reckoning: New Orleans in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2006), n.p.

9 See, for instance, the acclaimed study by Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009); and the brilliant poetry collection by New York-based Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008).

10 See www.prospectneworleans.org, p. 1, Overview. Last accessed 10 March 2010.

11 Smith, Roberta, “Kaleidoscopic Biennial for a Scarred City,” New York Times, 4 Nov. 2008, C1Google Scholar.

12 Nik Cohn, Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap (London: Vintage, 2006; first published 2005), 243, original emphasis.

13 Julie Smith, Louisiana Lament (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2004), 1.

14 For example, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the New Orleans paintings of Edgar Degas, the many iconic films focussing on the city such as Jezebel, King Creole, Easy Rider, The Big Easy, and the British cinema “Hurricane” advertising campaign. See Helen Taylor, Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), chapter 4, esp. 125.

15 Mike Tidwell, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast (New York: Random House, 2003).

16 Mike Tidwell, The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities (New York: Free Press, 2006), 5.

17 Marsalis quoted in James, My New Orleans, 29.

18 The Classical Theatre of Harlem also produced an acclaimed version of Godot outdoors in New Orleans's flooded Ninth Ward in 2007.

19 Rose, 1 Dead in Attic, 154.

20 The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the organization that so badly neglected the city in its first flooded weeks (identified strongly, by audiences at the Classical Theatre of Harlem production, with the figure of Godot).

21 Jeff Duncan, at http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tpupdates/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tpupdates/archives/. Last accessed 10 March 2010.

22 The Saints boosted the city's morale even more in 2010 when they won the Superbowl for the first time ever.

23 Jonathan Holmes, Katrina: A Play of New Orleans, Bargehouse, South Bank, 1–26 Sept. 2009; quotations from Holmes, “Theatre and Experience,” in idem, Katrina (London: Methuen, 2009), n.p.

24 James, 29, 58, 31.

25 See www.cacno.org/culturalcoalition/. Last accessed 10 March 2010.

26 Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour, 264.

27 Quoted in Barbara Eckstein, Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 59.

28 Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009).