...Stephen A. Nelson Although it has been nearly ten years since the Hurricane Katrina disaster, many misconceptions (myths) still surround the events that took place. Among these myths are that levees failed the day after Katrina made landfall, that the failed levees were on the Mississippi River...

...Graham Owen Though the flooding of New Orleans was the result of shoddy construction of the city’s levees, the city’s recovery was to be not through enlightened government initiative but by frontier self-reliance, “personal responsibility.” Returning inhabitants, like pioneers, were to homestead...

...Jennie Lightweis-Goff Within days of the breach of the levees in New Orleans, a second man-made disaster—the “recovery” efforts—began to transform the city’s institutions, leaving many urban partisans afraid that New Orleans would be rebuilt along the model of other, more expensive, less habitable...

... and emergency rescues from rooftops were not the only impact Katrina had —it​ altered fundamen- tal social contracts in cities such as New Orleans, from public educa- tion to public housing. It also awakened a new activism focused on issues ranging from calls for better levee protection to addressing...

... the first farms Vietnamese refugees cultivated upon arrival were moved to a large, lengthy piece of land that runs along the Lagoon Maxent —​ named for the wealthy eighteenth-century New Orleanian —​and behind the levee protecting eastern New Orleans neighborhoods. Apartment management had pushed out...

... Ghost Music Silence and Listening in the Post-Katrina Ninth Ward I moved into the Ninth Ward of New Orleans in the spring of 2000, and I’ve lived here ever since. I live only one block from the river, the very lip of the legendary topographical bowl, and so, when the levees failed, my...

... of the effectiveness of emergency management systems is difficult. Gauges of each storm’s destructive- ness when it makes landfall are elusive. The storm track, its intensity, and surge as affected by topographical conditions, barrier islands, wet- lands, levee and floodwall protection, pumping stations...

... filled the news with breached levees, collapsing bridges, neighborhoods falling off the power grid, and other end- of-the-world-style disasters. At the same time, what attracts Pike to these materials is a little hard to zero in on. It’s not edgy nostalgia of the sort that draws TV...

..., greenhouse gases rise, cells overproduce, levees break, individuals spiral, nation- states collapse, populations explode, art distracts, thought seizes up —​ all causing and all causes of disaster” (2007, 649).1 Amid such ubiquitous scaling up of the discourse of disaster, one opens Blanchot’s...