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Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year "The main
thrust of Horowitz's account is to make us understand Katrina-the
civic calamity, not the storm itself-as a consequence of decades of
bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature."
-Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New
Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the
disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city
weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board
believed that developers could safely build housing near the
Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government
subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these
were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The flood line tells
one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story
that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood,
when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return
home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and
liabilities created by Louisiana's oil industry have been
distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a
catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today.
"Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we
value, what we're willing-and unwilling-to protect." -New York
Review of Books "If you want to read only one book to better
understand why people in positions of power in government and
industry do so little to address climate change, even with
wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a
daily occurrence, this is the one." -Los Angeles Review of Books
This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical
disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster,
critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are
not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions-and they
shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of
disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of
defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk. As
social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk
shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and
technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and
recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality,
the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster
studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of
technocratic expertise to maintain power. Moreover, rather than
existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People
commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making
structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions
appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing
disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away
that veneer. With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven
disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies asks how disasters come to
be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of
governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate
disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster
in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing
number of courses on disaster studies.
This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical
disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster,
critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are
not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions-and they
shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of
disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of
defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk. As
social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk
shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and
technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and
recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality,
the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster
studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of
technocratic expertise to maintain power. Moreover, rather than
existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People
commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making
structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions
appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing
disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away
that veneer. With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven
disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies asks how disasters come to
be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of
governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate
disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster
in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing
number of courses on disaster studies.
Some years-1789, 1929, 1989-change the world suddenly. Or do they?
In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse,
inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises
sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world-like
many patients-met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which
together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn't the
year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world
finally understood its deadly diagnosis. In The Long Year, some of
the world's most incisive thinkers excavate 2020's buried crises,
revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more
equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of
police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates
why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze
reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already
greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang,
Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others
offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts
of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded
hospitals of India. The definitive guide to these ongoing
catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots
and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented.
It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public
Books and the Social Science Research Council.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction
Book of the Year The definitive history of Katrina: an epic of
citymaking, revealing how engineers and oil executives, politicians
and musicians, and neighbors black and white built New Orleans,
then watched it sink under the weight of their competing ambitions.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005,
but the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the
twentieth century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in
1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could
safely build housing away from the high ground near the
Mississippi. And so New Orleans grew in lowlands that relied on
significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee
system surrounding the city and its suburbs failed, these were the
neighborhoods that were devastated. The homes that flooded belonged
to Louisianans black and white, rich and poor. Katrina's flood
washed over the twentieth-century city. The flood line tells one
important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that
matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when
policymakers reapportioned the challenges the water posed, making
it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than it was for
African Americans. And he explores how the profits and liabilities
created by Louisiana's oil industry have been distributed unevenly
among the state's citizens for a century, prompting both dreams of
abundance-and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today.
Laying bare the relationship between structural inequality and
physical infrastructure-a relationship that has shaped all American
cities-Katrina offers a chilling glimpse of the future disasters we
are already creating.
Some years-1789, 1929, 1989-change the world suddenly. Or do they?
In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse,
inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises
sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world-like
many patients-met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which
together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn't the
year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world
finally understood its deadly diagnosis. In The Long Year, some of
the world's most incisive thinkers excavate 2020's buried crises,
revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more
equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of
police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates
why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze
reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already
greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang,
Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others
offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts
of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded
hospitals of India. The definitive guide to these ongoing
catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots
and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented.
It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public
Books and the Social Science Research Council.
From vanishing coastlines in the Carolinas to the toxic legacies of
coal ash, and from reclamations of Indigenous histories
in Louisiana to Black radical environmentalism in the
Tidewater, meet the Human/Nature issue of Southern Cultures.
As guest editor Andy Horowitz writes, this issue ""advocates for a
humane vision of how people live in and with the world around
them--a view of the environment as, at once, a material landscape
that crunches under foot and burns on the skin, and an intellectual
terrain, where ideas about place inform people's views of the
world.
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