Front Porch Strategy

Chapter 1 opens on the front porch of WWAV’s first organizational home after the arson attack. From this interstitial expanse of southern storytelling, on the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we take stock of this so-called resilient city and ask what is concealed in the city’s official language of strength in recovery. This porch talk is the stage for contrasting two very different systems of producing space: the enduring, rebellious logics of WWAV’s “front porch strategy” and the white supremacist violence of “resilience space” that was being operationalized across the city of New Orleans by government officials and developers alike. We undertake a double move: first, provincializing “resilience space” by suturing the historical circumstances of its production back to it, and second, simultaneously rendering visible the physical, historical, and epistemological depth of the fire dreams that fuel WWAV’s own front porch strategy.