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1 results

  • Chapter 27 - Swan Song?

  • Edited by T. R. Johnson, Tulane University, Louisiana
  • Book:
    New Orleans
    Published online:
    23 August 2019
    Print publication:
    05 September 2019, pp 356-372

  • Summary

    Recent research by climate scientists suggest that New Orleans, much of which is below sea level and protected from the sea only by a rapidly eroding marshland, may someday become uninhabitable. The city’s literature of the last few decades has been preoccupied with the theme of fatalism and apocalypse, and the deadly epidemics of the nineteenth century have provided rich symbolic terrain for figuring the troubles that “plague” the city and that will someday mean its end. Some recent work by women of color – notably Erna Brodber and Brenda Marie Osbey – delineates a different literary project, one appropriate to a post-apocalyptic diaspora, namely the work of remembering. Both the traditional fatalism and this emerging interest in memory will likely be central themes to watch for in the major literature associated with the New Orleans in coming decades.