Floods of Memory (A post-Katrina soundtrack)

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Notes

¹ I thank Martin Welton, Paul Rae and Rebecca Schneider for their insightful and encouraging comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

² I thank Martin Welton for this point. Scholarship on the iPod is rapidly proliferating – see Michael Bull's Sounding Out the City: Personal stereos and the management of everyday life (2000) and Jean-Paul Thibaud's ‘The Sonic Composition of the City’ in Michael Bull's and Les Back's Auditory Culture Reader (2004). iPod use and culture reminds us that the soundtrack is sonic, musical, but never to the exclusion of the other senses. Indeed, the very concept of intersensoriality, explicated by David Howes in Empire of the Senses, is a useful one here. Drawing on the work of Constance Classen and Michel Serres, Howes suggests that the separation of the senses into discrete entities of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell is difficult, if not impossible; by thinking about the senses as ‘knotted’ together, scholars might be better equipped to reflect upon the complexities of embodiment and, for that matter, performance. I take Howes's argument seriously and reproduce it here in order to foreground the intersensoriality at work in my own analysis. Although my concerns here are mostly with the sonic, they are inseparable from questions of visibility and other modes of sensory apprehension.

³ If jazz, blues, and gospel songs filled up the airways and stages that celebrated and mourned Katrina's destruction of New Orleans, hip-hop and rap were mostly absent. Music critic Kelefa Sanneh suggests that even though rap is ‘by far New Orleans' most popular musical export’ rap and hip hop were neglected in favour of blues and jazz because rappers ‘enraged critiques of New Orleans' racism and poverty aren't ‘the stuff feel-good tributes are made of (Sanneh 2005).

⁴ Walker, an African American artist born in 1969, is best known for her sometimes shocking silhouette pieces that depict degrading stereotypes of African Americans. Her life-size installations implicate the viewer in scenes of physical abuse and sexual degradation, suggesting a set of racially violent images that still pervade and govern social and political realities in the United States.

⁵ For an exegesis of how performance might remain in motion, see Rebecca Schneider's essays ‘Patricidal Memory and the Passerby’ and ‘Performance Remains’. See also Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire, especially for its attention to migration, diaspora and flow in the Americas.

⁶ For a detailed account of the 1927 flood, see John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (1998).