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Abstract
The reopening of the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina on Monday Night Football dramatized problematic rhetorical, visual, and spatial norms of purification rituals bound up in what Burke calls the paradox of purity. Hurricane Katrina was significant as a visually traumatic event in large part because it signified the ghetto as a rarely discussed remainder of American structural racism and pressed the filthiest visual and territorial residues of marginalized poverty into the national consciousness. In this essay, we argue that a visual paradox of purification—that purifying discourses must “be of the same symbolic substance” as the polluted images that goad them—complicated ritual attempts to both purge and commemorate Katrina evacuees. It is within the paradox of purity that visually grounded purification rituals like the Superdome reopening should be considered for their potential to invite or foreclose public engagement with race and class problems firmly entrenched in Americans’ perceptions of pollution and public territory.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their help in the preparation of this essay.
Notes
1. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 323.
2. Cheree Carlson, “‘You Know It When You See It’: The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander V. Rhinelander,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 112.
3. Carlson, “‘You Know It When You See It,’” 112.
4. Talmadge Wright, Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 69.
5. Sheryll Cashin, “Katrina: The American Dilemma Redux,” in After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina, ed. David Dante Trout (New York: The New Press, 2006), 32.
6. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 366.
7. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 7.
8. John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture,” Rhetoric Review 20 (2001): 37–42.
9. Cashin, “Katrina: The American Dilemma Redux,” 32–33.
10. Talmadge Wright, Out of Place, 40.
11. Greg Dickinson, “The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia,” Western Journal of Communication 70 (2006): 212–33.
12. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 224.
13. Dave Zirin, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007), 16–17.
14. Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz, “A Nation's Castaways; Katrina Blew in, and Tossed Up Reminders of Tattered Racial Legacy,” The Washington Post, September 4, 2005.
15. Wendy Koch, “Storm Giving Outpaces That of 9/11, Tsunami,” USA Today, September 7, 2005.
16. Michael A. Fletcher and Richard Morin, “Bush's Approval Rating Drops to New Low in Wake of Storm; He Says Race Didn't Affect Efforts; Blacks in Poll Disagree,” The Washington Post, September 13, 2005; John Harwood, “Katrina Erodes Support in US for Iraq War,” Wall Street Journal Abstracts, September 15, 2005.
17. Susan Page and Maria Puente, “Views of Whites, Blacks Differ Starkly on Disaster,” USA Today, September 13, 2005.
18. Page and Puente, “Views of Whites.”
19. “TIME Poll Results: Hurricane Katrina,” September 10, 2005, http://www.time.com/time/press_releases/article/0,8599,1103504,00.html.
20. Michael Butterworth, “Purifying the Body Politic: Steroids, Rafael Palmeiro, and the Rhetorical Cleansing of Major League Baseball,” Western Journal of Communication 72 (2008): 149–50.
21. Daniel A. Grano, “Ritual Disorder and the Contractual Morality of Sport: A Case Study in Race, Class, and Agreement,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 445–73. Also see Susan Birrell, “Sport as Ritual: Interpretations from Durkheim to Goffman,” Social Forces 60 (1981): 354–76; Michael R. Real, Exploring Media Culture: A Guide (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996).
22. Michael Butterworth, “Ritual in the “Church of Baseball’: Suppressing the Discourse of Democracy after 9/11,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (2005): 112.
23. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1966), 35–36.
24. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), 302.
25. William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 92, 101–2. Also see Burke Language as Symbolic Action, 308–43.
26. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama, 102.
27. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 343.
28. Mark T. Williams, “Ordering Rhetorical Contexts with Burke's Terms for Order,” Rhetoric Review 24 (2005): 182.
29. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 257.
30. Lucaites and Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism,” 38.
31. Cara A. Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 34.
32. Slavoj Žižek, “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans,” In These Times, October 20, 2005, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2361/.
33. Ann Gerhart, “‘And Now, We are In Hell,’” The Washington Post, September 1, 2005.
34. Mari Boor Tonn, Valerie A. Endress, and John N. Diamond, “Hunting and Heritage on Trial: A Dramatistic Debate Over Tragedy, Tradition, and Territory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 169–70.
35. Shaun R. Treat, “Scapegoating the Big (un)Easy: Melodramatic Individualism as Trained Incapacity in K-ville,” KB Journal 5 (2008): 7.
36. M. Justin Davis and T. Nathaniel French, “Blaming Victims and Survivors: An Analysis of Post-Katrina Print News Coverage,” Southern Communication Journal 73 (2008): 249–51.
37. Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell, “Rape. Murder. Gunfights; For Three Anguished Days the World's Headlines Blared that the Superdome and Convention Center had Descended into Anarchy. But the Truth is that While Conditions Were Squalid for the Thousands Stuck There, Much of the Violence NEVER HAPPENED,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), September 26, 2005. See David Carr, “More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports,” The New York Times, September 19, 2005 and Robert E. Pierre and Ann Gerhart, “News of Pandemonium May Have Slowed Aid; Unsubstantiated Reports of Violence Were Confirmed by Some Officials, Spread by News Media,” The Washington Post, October 5, 2005.
38. Donna Britt, “In Katrina's Wake, Inaccurate Rumors Sullied Victims,” The Washington Post, September 30, 2005; Michelle Roberts, “Reports of Rape, Murder at Katrina Shelters Were Probably Exaggerated, Officials Now Say,” Associated Press Worldstream, September 27, 2005; Mary Foster, “Superdome Survivors: Fear, Heat, Misery, But Most of All the Smell,” The Associated Press State and Local Wire, August 27, 2006; Neil Mackay, Jennifer Johnston, and Alan Crawford, “Chapter One: A City Reduced to Ruins; Anarchy in the USA Special Five-Page Report,” The Sunday Herald, September 4, 2005.
39. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion (New York: Routledge, 1995), 55–56, 49–59.
40. Thevenot and Russell, “Rape. Murder.”
41. David Carr, “More Horrible than Truth.”
42. Donna Britt, “In Katrina's Wake.”
43. Thevenot and Russell, “Rape. Murder.”
44. Jack Shafer, “Lost in the Flood: Why no mention of race or class in TV's Katrina coverage?,” Slate, August 31, 2005, http://www.slate.com/id/2124688.
45. See Aaron Kinney, “‘Looting’ or “finding’?: bloggers are outraged over the different captions on photos of blacks and whites in New Orleans,” Salon, September 1, 2005, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/01/photo_controversy/index.html.
46. Tonn et al., “Hunting and Heritage,” 168, 171.
47. Jeff Ferrell, “Remapping the City: Public Identity, Cultural Space, and Social Justice,” Contemporary Justice Review 4 (2001): 175.
48. Tonn et al., “Hunting and Heritage;” Grano, “Ritual Disorder.”
49. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 191.
50. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 183.
51. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 184.
52. Dave Zirin, “Saints and the Superdome,” The Nation, September 28, 2006, http://www.thenation.com/article/saints-and-superdome.
53. Real, Exploring Media Culture: A Guide, 48.
54. Grano, “Ritual Disorder.”
55. Butterworth, “Ritual in the “Church of Baseball,’” 107–29.
56. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 15, 35.
57. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 60.
58. Jim Corbett, “Saints Tackle New Challenges; Attracting New Sponsorship, Rallying a Shrinking Market Key As Club Looks Beyond Katrina, Record Ticket Sales,” USA Today, June 29, 2006.
59. Corbett, “Saints Tackle New Challenges.”
60. Zirin, Welcome to the Terrordome, 17.
61. Lawrence A. Wenner, “Towards a Dirty Theory of Narrative Ethics: Prolegomenon on Media, Sport and Commodity Value,” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 3 (2007): 113. While for Mary Douglas dirt is “matter out of place,” Wenner analyzes communicative sports “dirt” in more general terms throughout his work to refer to the process of symbolic transfer and leakage of meanings, logics and tendencies from one text or sphere to another. See: “The Unbearable Dirtiness of Being: On the Commodification of MediaSport and the Need for Ethical Criticism,” Journal of Sports Media 4 (2009): 86–94; “Gendered Sports Dirt: Interrogating Sex and the Single Beer Commercial,” in Examining Identity in Sports Media, ed. Heather L. Hundley and Andrew C. Billings (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 87–108; “Brewing Consumption: Sports Dirt, Mythic Masculinity, and the Ethos of Beer Commercials,” in Sport, Beer, and Gender: Promotional Culture and Contemporary Social Life, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner and Steven J. Jackson (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 121–42; “Super-Cooled Sports Dirt: Moral Contagion and Super Bowl Commercials in the Shadows of Janet Jackson,” Television and New Media 9 (2008): 131–54; and “The Dream Team, Communicative Dirt, and the Marketing of Synergy: USA Basketball and Cross-Merchandising in Television Commercials,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 18 (1994): 27–47.
62. See Wenner, “Super-Cooled Sports Dirt.”
63. Hariman and Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management,” 8.
64. Michael Real, Mass-Mediated Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 103.
65. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Publishers, 1990), 160–61.
66. David Elfin, “San Diego Hands Reigns to Rivers,” The Washington Times, March 17, 2006.
67. Bernie Miklasz, “Drew Brees: Renaissance Man,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 2, 2010.
68. See Daniel A. Grano, “Risky Dispositions: Thick Moral Description and Character-Talk in Sports Culture,” Southern Communication Journal 75 (2010): 255–76; Douglas Hartmann, “Rush Limbaugh, Donovan McNabb, and ‘A Little Social Concern’: Reflections on the Problems of Whiteness in Contemporary American Sport,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31 (2007): 45–60; Thomas P. Oates, “The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007): 74–90; Daniel Buffington, “Contesting Race on Sundays: Making Meaning Out of the Rise in the Number of Black Quarterbacks,” Sociology of Sport Journal 21 (2005): 19–37; Andrew Billings, “Depicting the Quarterback in Black and White: A Content Analysis of College and Professional Football Broadcast Commentary,” The Howard Journal of Communications 15 (2004): 201–10; J. R. Woodward, “Professional Football Scouts: An Investigation of Racial Stacking,” Sociology of Sport Journal 21 (2004): 356–75; Douglas Hartmann, “Rethinking the Relationships Between Sport and Race in American Culture: Golden Ghettos and Contested Terrain,” Sociology of Sport Journal 17 (2000): 229–53; John Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Laurel R. Davis, “The Articulation of Difference: White Preoccupation With the Question of Racially Linked Genetic Differences Among Athletes,” Sociology of Sport Journal 7 (1990): 179–87; James A. Rada, “Color Blind-Sided: Racial Bias in Network Television's Coverage of Professional Football Games,” The Howard Journal of Communications 7 (1996): 231–40; Audrey J. Murrell and Edward M. Curtis, “Causal Attributions of Performance for Black and White Quarterbacks in the NFL: A Look at the Sports Pages,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 18 (1994): 224–33;; and John M. Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
69. Grano, “Risky Dispositions.”
70. Ohm Young, “Dome Rebirth a Super Sight. Saints March Home to Win,” Daily News (New York), September 26, 2006.
71. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 175. Emphasis added.
72. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 173.
73. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 191.
74. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 190.
75. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 184.
76. Les Carpenter, “Behind its team, the city rallies,” The Washington Post, February 7, 2010.
77. Victoria J. Gallagher, “Black Power in Berkeley: Postmodern Constructions in the Rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 87 (2001): 147, emphasis original.
78. Gallagher, “Black Power in Berkeley,” 147.
79. Charles Ogletree Jr., “Introduction,” in After the Storm xxii.