Graphic Katrina: disaster capitalism, tourism gentrification and the affect economy in Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2009)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which Josh Neufeld’s documentary comic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which was published first online from 2007 to 2008 and then collected in book form in 2009, offers a radical visual commentary on the processes of disaster capitalism and tourism gentrification that have reshaped New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whilst A.D.’s biblical imagery evokes the proto-corporate language of the ‘blank canvas’ in order to critique regimes of disaster capitalism, its vertical multi-scalar perspectives meanwhile resist the racism of media coverage of the event. Through colouring and other aesthetic choices, the comic also challenges the subsequent propagation of an ‘authentic image’ of New Orleans that promotes tourism gentrification. Where previous critics have emphasised the emotional appeal A.D.’s makes on its readers, I instead discuss the comic’s identification of the structural conditions that have violently impacted the city’s most marginalised inhabitants. Nevertheless, the article qualifies these contentions by acknowledging that A.D. also contributes to an ‘affect economy’ that has exacerbated the privatisation of previously public infrastructure and social services, often to the detriment of pre-Katrina residents simply trying to return to their city.

KEYWORDS:

• New Orleans
• disaster capitalism
• comics journalism
• tourism gentrification
• Josh Neufeld

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. By 2011, New Orleans was still only returned to about three-quarters of its pre-Katrina size (Weber and Peek 2012, 1, 15).

2. Of course, tourism has for decades (if not centuries) been ‘considered a major sector of the New Orleans economy’, though as Kevin Fox Gotham notes, since the 1970s ‘it has become the dominant sector’, a transition that ‘has paralleled population decline, white flight to the suburbs, racial segregation, poverty and other a host of other social problems including crime, fiscal austerity, poor schools and decaying infrastructure’ (2002, 1742–1743).

3. Interestingly, Neufeld illustrated Brooke Gladstone’s book-length comic, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone On The Media (2011), which documents in comics form the mechanisms and power relations that inform the way in which the media operates. In one brief section, Neufeld actually draws images of the ‘problematic’ media coverage of Katrina, adding a further layer of self-reflexivity to his own graphic documentation of the disaster (Gladstone and Neufeld 2011, 41–42).

4. This combination of general overview and individual testimony is similarly employed in one of the most compelling prose accounts of Katrina, Dan Baum’s bestselling Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans (2010).

5. Hoefer himself concedes that in the comments section that accompanied the original webcomic of A.D., ‘instead of discussion of potential action, the comments are most often platitudes for Neufeld’s work; the community created by these discussions is fleeting and offers little additional testimony by victims’ (2011, 274).

6. Critic Jim Coby similarly notes a similar moment in a later scene in which Neufeld graphically reinterprets the infamous photograph of Ethel Freeman that ‘came to underscore the callousness and unmitigated failures [115] of FEMA and the US Government’ (2015, 114). In the dialogue surrounding this image, Coby points out, the questions raised by A.D.’s characters are again ‘directed at us’, thereby placing at least in part ‘the burden of failure on the reader’ (2015, 114–115).

7. This global marketisation of the Mardi Gras festival conceals the extent to which the festival has long been divided racially and spatially within the city, even prior to Katrina: ‘Whites historically have gathered on St Charles Avenue and Canal Street, while blacks historically have gathered at the intersection of Orleans and Clairbourne Avenues, where the Zulu parade ends. Additionally, the Mardi Gras Indians function as a living tribute to the associations between slaves and Native Americans’ (Robertson, 2008, 41).

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Notes on contributors

Dominic Davies

Dominic Davies is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London. He holds a DPhil and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Oxford, where he also established the TORCH Network, ‘Comics and Graphic Novels: The Politics of Form’ (2014-present). He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930 (Peter Lang, 2017), Urban Comics: Infrastructure & the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (Routledge, 2019), and a number of articles and book chapters relating to postcolonial literature and culture. He is also the co-editor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World (Peter Lang, 2017) and Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature & Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is currently co-editing a collection of essays and comics entitled Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage, which is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.