As long ago as The Other America (1962), Michael Harrington asked, “How long shall we ignore this undeveloped nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer?”1 Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath brought into plain sight the plight of the poor, with Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, admitting sombrely at the Superdome that he was seeing people he never knew existed. The black poor were drawn forcefully into the national consciousness, for a while at least, as they had not been during the 2004 presidential election when it was discovered that many electronic voting machines had not found their way into New Orleans to register the votes of one of the largest blocs of African Americans.

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.

Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a “visual essay.” The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into “a narrative of fluid symbols” in which the overarching analogy of “murky, toxic waters” holds the potential to “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.” This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical “event.” Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina.

Within certain conservative narratives imposed upon the events of 2005, New Orleans has been demonized as a site promoting gay licentiousness and therefore meriting divine retribution. In queer narratives, New Orleans has been valorized as promoting that same licentiousness but lamented for having those hedonistic excesses tempered by the widespread destruction of the city. Especially in the latter scenario, there is a significant degree of nostalgia, an element that also marks other queer understandings of the city that focus not so much on the hedonism as on the day-to-day warp and woof of pre-hurricane gay communities. The main focus of this essay is on how, as gay communities have been reconfigured in the aftermath of the hurricane by temporary and permanent evacuations, job relocations, and other alterations, gay responses have continued to evince a range of emotions, including anger, bitterness, resignation, and optimism. This essay focusses on gay literary production responding directly to the hurricane to examine essays and poems published as Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans (2006) and Blanche Survives Katrina in FEMA Trailer Named Desire, Mark Sam Rosenthal's off-Broadway show structured around a parody of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire that, as a result of this structure, faced legal action instigated by the University of the South, owner of the intellectual rights to Williams's literary production. The collection and the play are sustained queer responses to Katrina's flooding of the city that showcase both the energizing and problematic aspects of these responses.

Joseph Rodríguez re-creates and represents African American experiences which yet remain hidden or elided in mainstream memorializations of Hurricane Katrina. Intent upon giving “a voice to the voiceless,” Rodríguez relies upon an aesthetics of rupture and juxtaposition to create multiple narratives resistant to any reformist impetus towards cathartic trajectories of moral uplift. Fragmented and elliptical, his photographs, diary entries and textual captions operate in slippery relation to one another to signify upon unimaginable traumas. Rodríguez's subjects maintain agency by engaging in political, cultural and social acts of resistance. Signifying on the documentary mode, he creates self-reflexive compositions which rely on a symbolic visual language to challenge white mainstream tendencies towards depicting African Americans as types rather than as individuals. Refusing to objectify, appropriate or colonize private black testimonies by documenting the black body as a spectacular site of suffering, he turns instead to individual identities as intertwined with family histories as the only effective way in which to begin to explore the atrocities enacted in the aftermath of Katrina. Anti-explication, anti-exhibition and anti-sensationalism, Rodríguez's Still Here is a work of disjuncture, reimagining and experimentation.

This essay examines detective fiction that takes New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as setting and theme. It explores the ways in which stories told in novels and prime-time TV shows across the interlocking genres of police procedural and crime thriller have steered a sensationalist course through the recovery of the city over the last five years. It considers the role and representation of the New Orleans Police Department in particular, and of law enforcement officials more broadly, as post-Katrina protagonists who protect and serve the city, a rejoinder to media-made myths according to which they deserted their posts in the days after the storm. It closes with a case study of FOX TV's K-Ville, the first television series to depict New Orleans post-Katrina in a sustained way, and investigates the extent to which it was judged harshly for translating the disaster into a formulaic cop show. Deep-seated assumptions about genre, narrative form, the burden of representation and popular ideas about this particular locale inform the reception of these genre fictions.