Book review: Consuming Katrina: Public disaster and personal narrative by Kate Parker Horrigan

Smith, Kate

Abstract

Parker Horrigan's slim but densely layered volume presents multiple viewpoints of narratives that emerged from citizen's experiences during Hurricane Katrina. Echoing the methodologies deployed in recent socio-hydrology and/or flood studies, notably Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston (SKRH) and When They Blew the Levee, the book's interrogation of these narratives suggests 'a more ethical approach' to circulating and understanding survivor experiences. The book is structured around four domains drawing on survivor experiences, starting with the most direct testimonies collected as part of the SKRH project. These interviews-a most precious resource in themselves-collected by and with survivors make a sharp contrast to the later narratives, which incrementally increase in abstraction from the immediate experiences of those who experienced the hurricane's aftermath. Hence the testimonies collected as part of SKRH foreground narratives allow survivors to contradict mainstream news media depictions of New Orleans' black communities as both helpless and unhelpable. While Dave Egger's Zeitoun is not part of that mainstream news media depiction, the story of its protagonist demonstrates that the complex process of circulation and recirculation so well-studied in relation to oral narratives equally well applies to web-based media. From an original blog posted in late 2005, Zeitoun's account of his experiences after the hurricane were made and remade in secondary accounts of the disaster. With each re-telling, the original narrative's evaluative elements become less and less visible. Zeitoun's remarkable account of struggle, challenge and hardship during the floods become instead a metonym for the innately altruistic nature of humanity: as Parker Horrigan notes 'one subtext of Zeitoun, then, might be an insidiously comforting message that Katrina's victims did not need others' help, because they were their own heroes.' The substitution of emblematic values for complex social realities is also evident in the graphic novel A.D: New Orleans after the Deluge. Parker Horrigan's careful dissection of this work's intertextual and semiotic characteristics presents a critically engaged understanding of the problematic nature of easy demographic shortcuts: they both promote unjust social structures, and reduce the specifity of the experiential reality survivors. Of note here is that Parker Horrigan distinguishes between online and printed versions of the graphic novel: the online version remained dialogic and dynamic whereas the printed version presents a 'neat and tidy narrative' which has edited out 'the messiness of identity and of experience in postdisaster lives'. Parker Horrigan next considers the 'unsettling filiming' of Trouble the Water. This documentary combines survivor observation and standard documentary content, raising important questions about co-production, participatory methods, and the possibility of reciprocity as an ethnographic ethic. The bystander footage begs some difficult questions: how do we as scholars respond to suffering that is being widely broadcast but not alleviated without become complicit in the problem? Despite the project's potential, Parker Horrigan identifies shortcomings that arise from the film's overall direction. Clearly, the directors felt compelled to honour public expectations of how a film should end: they bring things together in what Parker Horrigan feels is a too-reassuring conclusion. It seems likely, however, that had the film not conformed to some public expectations it would not have achieved such wide acceptance and thus brough the uncomfortable truths it shows to a wider audience. Least satisfactory, although still thoughtful and insightful, the final chapter considers remembrance events surrounding Katrina's 10 th anniversary and the slogan-concept 'resilience'. This could have included a more

Citation

Smith, K. (in press). Book review: Consuming Katrina: Public disaster and personal narrative by Kate Parker Horrigan. Folklore, https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2022.2090666

• Journal Article Type: Book Review
• Acceptance Date: Jun 17, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Aug 9, 2022
• Deposit Date: Feb 8, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 10, 2024
• Journal: Folklore
• Print ISSN: 0015-587X
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2022.2090666
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3924422