Innovation, Anticipation, Homicidal Ideation: Living and Dying in New Orleans’ Future Paradise

• In Event: The Master’s Tools: Innovation, Interruption, and Regeneration as Technologies of Whiteness

Abstract

New Orleans residents have spent too much of their lives living in anticipation of future innovation. Like most American cities, the City of New Orleans funds many public services through investment by private foundations. These foundations value innovation in public administration; creating a market in aspirational futures that is hard to live in. Dwelling ethnographically in the space of proposed change, this paper focuses on innovations in the city’s criminal punishment system; juxtaposing funded proposals for governmental innovation with interruptions to the narrative of reform that, at the time of their articulation, were heard as irrational, impossible, and unwise. The paper draws on my broader intellectual work -- which argues that the American municipality’s financial, political, and affective investments in pretrial incarceration are both homicidal and suicidal -- and focuses on homicide in particular; asking after the relationship between the City’s strategic plan for murder reduction and the reality of violent death in the city. The paper takes place in the period of time immediately following the Bloomberg Foundation’s funding of the Mayoral Innovation Team tasked with murder reduction, and centers ethnographically around a single community member’s suggestion that city residents organize to “kill” the City’s plan to attract additional funding from the MacArthur Foundation. Asking how governmental innovation led to such ‘homicidal ideation’ and why this proposal ultimately fell on deaf ears, the paper makes the case for attention to the ideas killed along the way to innovation, and to the people ultimately killed in its name.

Author

• Kaya Williams