Through the Eye of Katrina

Clarence L. Mohr

On March 7-10, 2007 more than twenty scholars from history and related disciplines gathered in Mobile, Alabama, to participate in a conference on the historical meaning of Hurricane Katrina. Sponsored by the Journal of American History in conjunction with the Department of History at the University of South Alabama, the three-day program entitled, “Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue?” was part of the ongoing Howard Mahan lecture and symposium series supported by the University of South Alabama Foundation.

Lawrence N. Powell of Tulane University delivered the meeting’s keynote address in which he examined the hurricane’s national significance. Powell argued that the Katrina debacle had the potential to become what the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called a “detonating event,” an occurrence that might help usher in a shift toward a more liberal political consciousness after a generation of conservative emphasis on private initiative and limited government. Citing evidence of growing impatience with free market approaches to the Gulf Coast disaster, Powell stressed the need for historians to adopt a national perspective that would set Katrina’s aftermath within the context of a larger cluster of post-9/11 anxieties and discontents. This theme was taken up by a number of other panelists during discussions and in the symposium’s concluding roundtable session, which will be available on the JAH website in December.

In addition to Powell’s lecture, the symposium featured eighteen papers grouped under several broad topical headings such as the relationship of the Mississippi River to the people and the built environment, the role of race, gender, and ethnicity in responses to Katrina, the ways in which the mechanisms of group identity and power are embedded in New Orleans culture, and the historical foundations of grass roots efforts to rebuild and reconstitute local communities. Most panels featured scholars from more than one discipline. Historian Ari Kelman and geographer Richard Campanella, examined the nineteenth-century roots of modern flood control and drainage policies as well as the historical processes that shaped the ethnic geography of hurricane damage in 2005. Architectural historian Karen Kingsley discussed the changing significance of the New Orleans Superdome as an urban symbol whose dual meaning of disaster and rebirth had come to overshadow traditional images such as the Cabildo and Presbytere in the French Quarter. Sociologist Elizabeth Fussell stressed that the arrival of Hispanic workers in post-Katrina New Orleans should be understood as one episode in an ongoing history of immigration that had continually reshaped the port city’s demographic profile, while musicologist and jazz clarinetist Michael White provided nuanced personal insight into the now imperiled cultural foundations of the traditional jazz art form.

In seeking to clarify the meaning of Katrina and its still unfolding aftermath, historians found several areas of common analytic ground with their colleagues in the fields just mentioned. At least three recurrent themes cut across the topical sessions. These might be briefly stated as “inclusion vs. exclusion,” “geography and group identity,” and “change vs. continuity” in history and collective memory.

Several presenters were prepared to interpret New Orleans’s history up to and beyond Katrina as part of a larger narrative of inclusion and exclusion. This concept was applied by Kelman and Campanella to the struggle with the physical environment (keeping water at bay) and, by other panelists, to the human consequences of competition for resources and physical space in a city surrounded by water. Alecia P. Long, for example, described the physical displacement of black and poor residents that had accompanied the creation of the “Storyville” prostitution district in 1897, and went on to draw analogies between the containment of vice and current redevelopment schemes that would exclude the poor. Poverty, she concluded, had become the “new prostitution.” In a somewhat similar vein, Juliette Landphair traced the historic marginalization of black and white working class residents of New Orleans’s lower ninth ward, an area in which a prolonged history of governmental neglect had produced sporadic protest along with deep feelings of mistrust and alienation toward those who wielded power with little concern for the powerless. On the inclusionary side of the intellectual balance sheet several speakers, including Landphair and Kingsley, acknowledged that New Orleans’s residential patterns gave rise to unusually strong attachments to local neighborhoods and produced a strong sense of community even among the dispossessed. This idea formed the point of departure for Donald DeVore’s discussion of the work undertaken by black churches, both Protestant and Catholic, to revive local neighborhoods and preserve the religious institutions that were at the center of historically segregated community life.

Implicit in these presentations was a recognition that for many New Orleans residents, losing one’s community or neighborhood was tantamount to losing an essential part of one’s self. In examining the shape of post-Katrina urban politics, for example, Arnold Hirsch questioned whether the city’s modern pattern of mayoral leadership by “downtown,” or seventh ward, light skinned Catholic Creoles could persist in the face of mass population displacement. For Hirsch the key question became “Can the Creoles survive in diaspora without a replenishing geographic base?” Marline Otte, a historian who has studied the reconstruction of civil society in post-World War II Germany, recognized the importance of local geography in her analysis of the psychological dimensions of Katrina recovery. Noting that for newly returned residents “suffered pain was countered by self-inflicted pain,” in visits to devastated homes and neighborhoods, Otte wondered “how one is able to recognize individual pain in the language of collective mourning, without the help of a community to reaffirm the self; how can one speak meaningfully in the voice of the collective while being separated from it?”

Virtually all the conference papers concerned themselves in some way with the issue of actual or perceived continuity and discontinuity in American history. Specialists in southern history have long grappled with the question of whether the region’s identity is best understood in terms of enduring cultural patterns or, as the late C. Vann Woodward insisted, in terms of sharp breaks and discontinuities that demarcated succeeding epochs of a troubled past. As a city combining “iniquity with antiquity,” in Walt Disney’s apt phrase, New Orleans poses the problem in a special way. Famed for its exotic architecture and old world charm, the New Orleans of national imagination bears scant resemblance to the gritty realities of a once great port city in the throes of long-term economic decline. The rise of a tourist economy, historian Mark Souther argues, has long since turned the French Quarter into an “ersatz caricature” of its historic self, leaving the city’s real history to languish in neighborhoods rarely seen by outsiders. Although glimpses of New Orleans’s true past were provided by “disaster tours” in the months after the Katrina flood, it remained unclear what use would be made of history once permanent commemoration of the disaster took place. Recognizing that commemorations inevitably suppress some aspects of collective experience while highlighting others, most of those attending the Mobile conference seemed to agree that the official version of Katrina’s meaning would be determined by the winners in the city’s self-proclaimed “market driven” recovery process. It was the hope, although hardly the expectation, of those present that the Mobile conference and its published proceedings in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of American History might bring the insights of historians to bear upon national decisions that will shape the course of Gulf Coast reconstruction.

Clarence L. Mohr is professor and chair of the history department at the University of South Alabama.