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Abstract
In moments of crisis, performance becomes a tool for claiming or reclaiming citizenship. Citizens creatively construct their identities in relation to official expectations and the existing potential for innovation. This essay examines a citizenship crisis in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the use of performance to reclaim a New Orleans locality. Looking at the Louisiana Superdome as a citizenship site during and after the storm, this essay explores the personal embodiments of New Orleanians as defiant claims to citizenship.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the reviewers for their insightful critique, Jenny Burch Louis for suggesting a citizenship site, and the city of New Orleans for enabling citizenship performance. For Ashley Moris, 1963–2008.
Notes
1. Given the diaspora that followed Hurricane Katrina, public and private stagings of New Orleans citizenship occurred throughout the United States. This essay focuses narrowly on the enactments of those who returned to the city in the year after Katrina, while acknowledging that every citizen's return to New Orleans was itself complicated by age, race, class, and where you might have landed, intentionally or otherwise, in the weeks after the storm.
2. After Hurricane Katrina, CitationMorris lived in New Orleans with his family and commuted every week to Chicago where he taught Computer Science at DePaul University. His blog (www.ashleymorris.com) is a visceral chronology of a resident's post-storm citizenship performance, especially his practice of calling anyone critical of the city a “fuckmook.” Morris died in 2008.
3. Enactments of New Orleans citizenship might also be examined through the theatrical performances that followed Hurricane Katrina, especially those that emerged from citizens’ oral histories (CitationVignes), were performed on-site for residents in flooded neighborhoods (CitationBowling and Carrico; Chan), or toured cities that housed large numbers of relocated New Orleanians (CitationHammel).
4. See CitationMitchell for a historical account of the 2006 Carnival season in New Orleans, and CitationBowman et al. for a performative rendering of the satirical Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade that was staged in Baton Rouge in 2006 under the theme “FEMAture Evacuation.”
5. The Saints did not commit to return to New Orleans until December 2005, after entering serious discussions with the city of San Antonio about a permanent relocation there. Ashley Morris (“What”) offers an example of how New Orleanians reacted to the relocation threat.
6. Kevin and Chris CitationWiseman are New Orleans residents who sit in Section 635 of the Upper Terrace during Saints games. The brothers wear the jumpsuits to every home game. On the chest pocket of the suits, they have embroidered an image of the Superdome and the words “Dilly” and “Berto” in honor of Buddy Diliberto, a cherished New Orleans sports reporter who covered the Saints for forty years before dying in 2005.
7. My costume was a comic nod to New Orleans’ rich culinary tradition and the “CitationWho Dat!” cheer that Saints fans chant during games. The full cheer, “CitationWho dat?! Who dat?! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?!” has been linked to early New Orleans jazz, vaudeville, and minstrel performances. Saints fans first used it in the 1970s (“Who Dat”).