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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.43,Issue1,P.115-139

语言

英文

关键字

Hurricane Katrina; disaster narratives; nineteenth-century New Orleans; levees; Creole history; environmental knowledge; flood prevention; LOWER 9TH WARD; CITY

作者单位

[Klopfer, Anja Nadine] Ludwig Maximilians Univ Munchen, Amer Hist, Munich, Germany. Klopfer, AN (reprint author), Ludwig Maximilians Univ Munchen, Amerika Inst, 3 VG, D-80799 Munich, Germany. E-Mail: nadine.klopfer@lmu.de

摘要

Oral histories of the Hurricane Katrina experience abound in stories of conscious decisions to ride out the storm. My article explores the narrative of choosing to stay as an empowering narrative rooted in assertions of place-knowledge and traces its historical genealogy to the nineteenth century. I argue that claiming agency in New Orleans and articulating a sense of belonging and local identity through professed intimate knowledge of the local environment took shape as a strategy of resistance against dominant discourses of American progress after the Civil War. Ultimately, this counternarrative of connecting to place as homeland, drawing on knowledge arising from lived experience, defied the normative twist of modernization, simultaneously reformulating power relations within the city. Choosing to stay thus turns out to be a long-lasting narrative not only of disaster, but of place, belonging, and community; without understanding its historical layers, we cannot fully make sense of this particular Katrina narrative.