Social media engagement means losing and finding oneself on a sea of disparate and divergent rhythms, which in this chapter is taken as both material condition and metaphor for the mixture of playful surprise and persistent dread that characterizes the digital dimension of contemporary Black life in the United States. This chapter reads together a collection of technologies, digital and nondigital texts, and memory to explore how contemporary Black social media protest draws on and extends legacies of Black textual play.

Given that outskirts of the city, which were mostly developed after swamplands were drained in the early twentieth century, suffered the lion’s share of the damage from the cataclysmic hurricane and levee failure of 2005, much of the writing of these areas is focused on loss and the power of writing to help one bear it. The first classic of the outskirts of the city is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which is focused on trauma and the struggle to recover from it, and thereby sets the stage for the great flowering of Black-themed writing from the suburbs in recent decades by Sara Broom, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Karisma Price, Rickey Laurentiis, Zachary Lazar, and Niyi Osundare, among many others. Many of these works, shaped by Katrina, voice anxiety about the natural environment, a theme first set forth for wide audiences in the graphic series, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and other dystopian visions, from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to Moira Crane’s The Not Yet to Beyoncé’s “Formation.”

The final chapter on human impacts to lowland rivers logically ends at the basin terminus, at the coast. Large flood basins and deltas are the most challenging environments to manage because of being impacted by ground subsidence and coastal storm surge events, particularly large populations in delta cities. Artificial floodwater diversion mirrors natural flood pulses, although it also disturbs aquatic ecosystems that requires further management. Challenges with floodwater diversion for environmental management of the lower Sacramento basin links to historic hydraulic gold mining. A major geomorphic phenomenon that influences flood basin environments is channel avulsion, which can be set up by embanked floodplain sedimentation and subsidence. Ground subsidence problems are particularly acute as regards flood control infrastructure, increasing the risk of dike failure during coastal storm surge events. Urban flood basin subsidence and flood control challenges is examined in a review of the epic 2011 Chao Phraya River flooding of Bangkok and the 2005 coastal storm surge flooding of New Orleans by Hurricanes Katrina-Rita.

This chapter begins with a discussion of contemporary critiques aimed at trauma theory, specifically how Lauren Berlant’s and Rob Nixon’s work urges us to attend to systemic and/or slow violence. The chapter argues that, rather than wholly discarding the discourses and applications of trauma theory, we can employ it to attend to the way trauma occurs in contexts of slow or systemic violence. As case studies, it turns to two contemporary narratives of post––Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Dave Eggers’s narrative nonfiction, Zeitoun (2009) and David Simon and Eric Overmeyer’s serial television show, Treme (2009––13). These texts dramatize the human suffering that occurs at the intersections of traumatic rupture and ongoing systemic violence. The chapter notes the ways these texts situate New Orleans as a vividly unique American metropolis while simultaneously considering the ways they articulate national and international issues. In doing so, It also attends to the way these texts insist on larger historical contexts for the central moment of rupture –– Katrina –– that is the gravitational force of their narratives.

“Hurricane Alley” ponders what happens when we define the literature of the coastal American South (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas), as shaped by the paths, threats, and aftermaths of hurricanes. It explores what shifts in our understanding of the field if we consider Southern literature not solely in terms of plantation and Creolization, but also around a geography of vulnerability. It argues that coastal southern literature (and its resonances with the Caribbean) provides an apt example to reflect on the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental racism. With a nineteenth- to twenty-first-century corpus featuring fiction, poetry, theater, visual arts, and cinema by George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Edwidge Danticat, Spike Lee, Patricia Smith, Kara Walker, Benh Zeitlin, Natasha Trethewey, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jesmyn Ward, the chapter expands the limits – generic, geographical, ethnic, generational, gendered, sexualized -- of southern literature.

Chapter 4 interprets funerals and second lines performed since Hurricane Katrina to articulate an ethics of mourning and hospitality. In the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, these second lines perform memorials for all those who died or were dispossessed during the storm and have been unable to return. They are simultaneously forms of mourning and protest, occupying public space in resistance to government policies of diaspora. Drawing on trauma theory, I argue that Katrina can only be understood from a morally and politically engaged position, and healing can only happen within this context. Furthermore, I build on Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality to link mourning and repair in post-Katrina New Orleans, illuminating the ways the people of New Orleans articulated an ethics for climate disruption through solidarity and social care. I conclude with a reading of Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, which depicts the empathy, care, and courage of an African American family in the bayou during the storm.

Despite the extraordinary presence of rap and bounce in New Orleans and of New Orleans practitioners of these forms in the wider world, this expressive tradition has had little institutional support in a city that devotes great resources to other forms. For this reason, an archive was set up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to preserve this cultural history in ways that would give those closest to this world as much control over the archive as possible and preserve the cultural geography of pre-Katrina.

New Orleans, before Hurricane Katrina, was a city with numerous and substantial problems. Storytelling, perhaps as a coping mechanism, was a significant feature of the local culture. With Hurricane Katrina, however, both features of the city became dramatically more pronounced, as bookstores were flooded with books about the storm and the devastating aftermath of the levee failure, several of them of significant literary value that made lasting contributions to the understanding of this highly distinctive city.

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.