No Natural Disaster: New Orleans, Katrina, and War

Extract

It has always been difficult to talk about new orleans without resorting to cliché. Long positioned as “America's most European city” or “the city that care forgot,” the locale looms large in the national—and the literary—imagination, triggering vivid fantasies of excess and decadence but also of old–world gentility and grandeur. New Orleans, especially in its juicy Gothic flavorings, has often performed as a stand–in for the South at large, while also exhibiting a certain unique cosmopolitanism or hybridity. We might even think of it as an early manifestation of a networked global hub, the routes of the slave trade mapping our first virtual navigation system. New Orleans and indeed the entire South perform powerful ideological work for the nation, functioning throughout the twentieth century as a convenient repository and origin story for much that ails the country: poverty, racism, rigid fundamentalism, decadence, and crime.