Home/Sick

Memory, Place, and Loss in New Orleans

Bibliographic Data

ID15030741
AuthorsMargaret E Farrar (corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume12
Issue4
Publication date2009-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheory & Event (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1092-311X • E-ISSN: 2572-6633
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/tae.0.0091
OpenAlexW2070743767
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited19

Home/SickMemory, Place, and Loss in New Orleans Margaret E. Farrar (bio) To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past. -- Tim Ingold, "The Temporality of Landscape" On August 29, 2005, it was just becoming apparent how devastating Hurricane Katrina had been for the city of New Orleans, as the storm surge resulting from the hurricane caused the breach of 53 levees in the New Orleans area, flooding 80 percent of the city. In an interview with FEMA deputy director Patrick Rhode on August 30, Jim Lehrer grimly speculated that the death toll had topped 50; only days later it would be clear that this number was a significant underestimation.1 I remember watching the news coverage with steadily increasing incredulity and horror, wondering: How can a place like this - with its everyday rhythms and cadences and ways of being—simply be extinguished so quickly? And how would a person begin to make sense of losing her place in such a terrible and dramatic way? This essay is not an attempt to calculate the extent to which Katrina was a "natural" or a "man-made" disaster. Nor does it assess various claims about responsibility (or its absence) for preparation and recovery efforts in the area.2 Instead, parses the relationship between place, loss, and memory in New Orleans: how we understand what was lost or is being lost in the city, and if and how we should mourn those losses. To do this, I examine the accounts of journalists in their descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans and their interviews with residents and former residents of the city. In their stories I see two, related themes: anxiety over loss of the city's particular character, and a profound sense of place attachment that undergirds New Orleanians' understandings of who they were and are.3 These two themes generate several questions. First, does the particular tragedy of post-Katrina New Orleans reflect more a general apprehension about losing our place in a post-industrial world? And second, does place attachment or homesickness have a role to play in a world increasingly characterized by political and ethical commitments not bound to or dictated by place? (To phrase the second question a slightly different way: is place attachment a naïve and potentially anti-democratic sensibility, i.e., is it merely a poor man's patriotism?) (I posit that the simple answers to these questions are "yes," "yes," and "no," respectively. The longer and more complicated answers follow.) In the final section of the essay, I discuss briefly how these questions suggest a more general concern: how might we begin to theorize place and place-based politics in a way that is neither exclusionary nor reactionary? While the traumatic circumstances surrounding post-Katrina New Orleans might be singular, they help us begin to articulate a notion of place that augments, rather than constricts, our attempts to cultivate pluralistic politics. The means by which citizens undertake efforts to remember and remake places are profoundly political and, as such, intrinsically interesting and important to political theorists interested in memory, agency, and democracy. "What has happened down here is the winds have changed" or, how to lose a city 4 In the four years that have passed since Hurricane Katrina first made landfall, it is apparent that the stories we tell about post-Katrina New Orleans are, almost without exception, stories about loss. This is not and should not be surprising; after all, so much was lost in the storm that any other kind of story would seem macabre, especially in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. Some of the most obvious losses are well known; their magnitude, though, makes them worth repeating once more.5 Lives were lost: more than 1,800 in all, and over 1,400 from Louisiana alone. People were lost: a year after the storm, some 135 people from New Orleans remained missing,6 and the number exceeded 2,000 for the entire Gulf

Geography · Hurricane katrina · Meteorology · Natural disaster · Sense of place · Sociology · Temporality · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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