Visions at the Scene of Trauma: New Orleans Prospect(s) (original) (raw)
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Artistic Responses to Natural Disasters: The Case of New Orleans
MaHKUscript. Journal of Fine Art Research, 2016
Alongside the ruins of asymmetrical warfare, we are now living in an era of unimaginable natural destruction. The irreversible effects of climate change, hurricanes, large-scale earthquakes and tsunamis haunt our social psyche and capture our imagination. These volatile occurrences are intensified as governments are unable to sufficiently handle the physical and emotional aftershocks of such catastrophes. In turn, the media transform the state’s failure into a spectacle. Only after the media extravaganza settles down and the aid workers leave, do clean-up and reconstruction begin. Then, artists, designers and social scientists start to employ visual and spatial strategies to make sense of what really happened. With the help of local and international art organizations, artists tackle the human condition and our innermost collective fears to rethink life in the wake of natural disasters. In this article, I critically identify some of the artistic and spatial practices and their manifestations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. >> CLICK LINK TO ACCESS THE ARTICLE.
Visual Comm Quarterly: Seeing Katrina: Perspectives on a Cultural/Natural Disaster
This article examines a series of photographs from The Washington Post covering Hurricane Katrina. I argue that the modes of seeing in the images structure the possible meanings of the event. These images represent the documentary mode which, in pursuit of “objectivity,” positions the viewer in a stance of detachment and judgment. In the rush to judge, familiar identifications of left/right, culture/nature, and public/private, surface as the primary grounds for evaluation. In the photographs, the urban characteristics of the scene direct the viewers’ identification. The various judgments diverge based on how the viewer identifies with this urban scene. In short, I argue that how we saw Katrina influences how the disaster was interpreted. The stale interpretations, from cultural to natural, are both equally structured into the photographs. Producing different evaluations, from anti-globalization to the anti-racist, requires interrogation of the dominant news-media mode and the imaging of new points of view.
2014
I recently took a group of students to New Orleans over our spring break for an interdisciplinary class on the relationships between space, culture, and media industries in cities. It was a trip that promised to be both wonderful and terrifying—wonderful in the sense of students living an embodied education of not only the history, politics, and culture of the city, but also of the sights, sounds, smells, and physical encounters that make up those histories, politics, and cultures; yet terrifying in the sense that the students might miss the significance of how these same sounds, sights, smells, and physical encounters speak to histories of inequity, injustice, and struggle that manifest themselves in renewed struggles over privatization, insecurity, and loss in the post-Katrina aftermath. Carrying Vincanne Adams’ book in my bag throughout the trip (as I was toting it around as a reminder of the need to complete this review) felt like more than the weight of the physical pages on my...
Available Here: https://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:101354/datastream/PDF/view Catherine Michna, PhD Dissertation From the BLKARTSOUTH literary collective in the 1970s, to public-storytelling based education and performance forms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and fiction and nonfiction collections in the years since the storm, this study traces how New Orleans authors, playwrights, educators, and digital media makers concerned with social justice have mirrored the aesthetics and epistemologies of the collaborative African diasporic expressive traditions that began in the antebellum space of Congo Square and continue in the traditions of second-line parading and Mardi Gras Indian performances today. Combining literary analysis, democratic and performance theory, and critical geography with interviews and participant observation, I show how New Orleans authors, theatre makers, and teachers have drawn on "second-line" knowledges and geographies to encourage urban residents to recognize each other as "divided subjects" whose very divisions are the key to keeping our social and political systems from stabilizing and fixing borders and ethics in a way that shuts down possibilities for dissent, flux, and movement. Building on diverse scholarly arguments that make a case both for New Orleans's exceptionalism and its position, especially in recent years, as a model for neoliberal urban reform, this study also shows how the call and response aesthetics of community-based artists in New Orleans have influenced and benefited from the rise of global democratic performance and media forms. This dual focus on local cultures of resistance and New Orleans's role in the production of national and transnational social justice movements enables me to evaluate New Orleans's enduring central role in the production of U.S. and transnational constructs of African diasporic identity and radical democratic politics and aesthetics.
Cultural Studies, 2019
On 20 September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall on Puerto Rico causing unprecedented disaster. From that day onwards, the Puerto Rican multi-layered colonial, social and political context was further complicated by the traumatic acceleration of a human disaster via this natural disaster. This crystalized the urgency of using art as vehicle for (social) catharsis, a practice that continues to be used by individual artists, collectives, community organizations, art projects, and other art institutions on the island and abroad, through mural art, community paintings, art exhibitions, literature, music, and many other aesthetic expressions. This article examines, from a decolonial and critical cultural studies perspective, post-Hurricane María artistic expressions in contemporary art as decolonial aesthetics through the cathartic use of the frame of an aesthetics of disaster. It is argued that, an aesthetics of disaster aims to reassert an artistic form that is able to accelerate the discursive nullification of a deeply rooted colonial, social and cultural problem by way of art as catharsis inspired by the way that Hurricane María unveiled these problems. The piece briefly contextualizes Puerto Rico, and it examines the idea of Puerto Rican contemporary art as catharsis. Then, it describes how Puerto Rican contemporary art exhibitions and associated aesthetic production are processing urgent post-hurricane issues through three illustrative pieces in exhibitions in PR and abroad in the United States (US). Lastly, decolonial aesthetics is reexamined and re-understood, informed by Édouard Glissant's view expressed in Poetics of Relation which aids to the conclusion that Puerto Rican contemporary art using the frame of an aesthetics of disaster functions as a powerful form of decolonial aesthetics. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2019.1607519