You Found Us Doing This, This Is Our Way: Criminalizing Second Lines, Super Sunday, and Habitus in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Abstract

This article analyzes the changing ways law enforcement agencies, city government officials, and gentrifying resident constituencies have attempted to criminalize and surveil disposition-forming rituals and daily social practices of African American working class New Orleanians before and after Hurricane Katrina. The rituals and practices discussed include pedestrian parades known as Second Lines and Super Sunday. The article demonstrates that the criminalization and surveillance of these practices must be understood in light of the role played by socially structured space in the production of racialized class differences among New Orleanians. In the post-Katrina context, the city's mandatory evacuation enabled gentrifying resident constituencies and expert urban planners to imagine the city's reconstruction as something to be achieved through the creation of architectonic relationships conducive to cycles of capital investment. These visions of urban recovery have ignored the importance residents of affected neighborhoods place on the reinstatement of the city's pre-Katrina population, which is responsible for the production of Second Lines and Super Sunday. This article explores how the policing, surveillance, and criminalization of Second Lines and Super Sunday have historically operated as mechanisms for upholding hegemonic orders, and the intimate connections between planning, race, and gentrification in the US.

Keywords:

• Disasters
• urban planning
• race
• governmentality
• New Orleans
• Hurricane Katrina