Bounce back: Social movements and self-activity through the Katrina catastrophe.

摘要

After Katrina tens of thousands of working class black residents of the city of New Orleans engaged in a political conflict over the future of the city from a position of hyper-marginalization. One vision of the city's recovery and redevelopment was predicated on the chronic displacement of working class residents, and forms of opportunistic accumulation made possible by their physical, social, and political absence. As it was structured through federal, state, and local government, the political-economy of recovery favored the reconstitution of certain economic sectors and discrete groups of enfranchised propertied citizens, and was designed to further marginalize and ultimately exclude racialized denizens in the name of finally fixing the city's complex "urban" problems. In order to engage in this conflict over development and to secure a right to return, the city's displaced and potentially dispossessed denizens relied on two kinds of empowerment. The first level of social movement activity occurred through the formal organizations and protest politics of the Right of Return Movement. However, because this was political action relying on claims making by citizens to redress civil and humans rights violations, it was limited in effect. The hyper-marginalization of black working class New Orleanians through Katrina, beyond the pale of meaningful citizenship, led them to engage in another sort of empowerment to contest the unequal recovery process that threatened to permanently dispossess their communities. Using ethnographic data gathered over several years in post-Katrina New Orleans, and centering a narrative on the experiences and knowledge of two public housing residents, Stephanie Mingo and Sam Jackson, I recount the Katrina catastrophe as a struggle over the development of the region, and explore the subversive practice of "hustling" as a way to come home.