Telling Katrina Stories: Problems and Opportunities in Engaging Disaster

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Notes

1. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without Guarantees,”in Marx: A Hundred Years On, ed. Betty Matthews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 57–85.

2. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 84.

3. John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 163–64.

4. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 18.

5. Benjamin, Illuminations, 86.

6. Mark Krasnoff, qtd. in Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot, “Hurricane Gumbo”, in Unnatural Disaster: The Nation on Hurricane Katrina, ed. Besty Reed (New York: Nation Books, 2006), 129–30.

7. Davis and Fontenot, “Hurricane Gumbo,” 131.

8. Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1961), 34.

9. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 18.

10. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 19.

11. See, e.g., Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “‘This Is the Only Tour that Sells’: Tourism, Disaster, and National Identity in New Orleans,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 7 (2009): 99–114; and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Tourists and/as Disasters: Rebuilding, Remembering, and Responsibility in New Orleans,” Tourist Studies 9 (2009): 23–41.

12. On the performant function, see Jean Alter, A Socio-Semiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 39–90. The distinction between presence effects and meaning effects is the subject of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

13. For this reason, it is no accident that post-Katrina New Orleans has become the center of a vibrant new community-based performance/theatre community. For a brief look at this phenomenon, see Christopher Wallenberg, “In Katrina's Wake,” American Theatre, May/June 2010, http://tcg.org/publications/at/mayjune10/katrina.cfm. See also Jan Cohen-Cruz, “HOME, New Orleans: University/Neighborhood Arts Collaborations,” in Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina, ed. Amy Koritz and George J. Sanchez (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 162–84.

14. This was a subject Gerbner lectured on widely toward the end of his life. See, for example, his The Electronic Storyteller: Television and the Cultivation of Values, VHS, dir. and prod. Sut Jhally, (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1997).

15. See, e.g., Michael S. Bowman and Ruth Laurion Bowman, “Performing the Mystory: A Textshop in Autoperformance,” in Teaching Performance Studies, ed. Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 161–74. For an example of Katrina-related work in this vein, see Ruth Laurion Bowman, Melanie Kitchens, and Linda Shkreli, “FEMAture Evacuation: A Parade,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27 (2007): 277–301.

16. Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael S. Bowman

Michael S. Bowman is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University

Ruth Laurion Bowman

Ruth Laurion Bowman is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University