Countering “Resiliency” in Visual Media from Post-Katrina New Orleans and Post-Maria Puerto Rico

• In Event: Ghosts and Media Futures: Sovereignty, Memory, and Afterlives of Property

Abstract

August 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the failure of the federal levee system in New Orleans and the subsequent disastrous flooding that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Without a doubt this will be an occasion for local and national leaders and media outlets to remark upon the “resiliency” of the people of New Orleans. In Introducing Critical Disaster Studies, Andy Horowitz and Jacob Remes argue that “resilience” in relation to disaster is “a thoroughly political concept: it asserts the goals of a community’s response to a disaster—conservative goals, to be sure, as ‘resilient’ means a durable status quo—and also creates the conditions in which community attempts to reach those goals” (3). Recent documentary films such as Edward Buckles’ 2022 Katrina Babies, directly contest and complicate the easy application of resilience narratives to the New Orleans communities who have suffered the most in the last two decades. Buckles’ film, in particular, centers the experience of those who were children living in tight-knit Black working-class and middle-class neighborhoods when the storm hit. I analyze the film as a meditation on the disastrous impacts of unaddressed childhood trauma, taking the long view of the material conditions that produced “Katrina” and its extended wake. In their recounting and remembering, as well as attention to the processes involved in youth-produced films, community members reveal the power of using new media technologies to fill the silences of the past and address the ongoing violences that reverberate throughout their daily lives.

Cecilia Aldorando’s 2020 documentary film, Landfall, addresses the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, with the implication that while there certainly is a “before” and “after” Maria, “disasters take place over time” (Horowitz and Remes 5). Like Buckles and Katrina Babies, Aldorando and the Puerto Rican voices who narrate Landfall challenge the terms of resilience directly as well. They attest to the cultural imperatives of the expression “pa’lante” or “keep going” while depicting how “technocratic plans promulgated in the name of ‘resilience’ often reproduce existing inequalities, usually by design, and many such plans exacerbate them” (Horowitz and Remes 3). In analyzing Katrina Babies and Landfall, I situate these films in a broader framework of Critical Disaster Studies and in the specific context of locally-produced grassroots visual media that responds to post-hurricane realities. I argue that these texts visually and narratively challenge “resiliency” paradigms imposed by late-stage imperialism and disaster capitalism.

I draw from my ongoing work as a co-author of The People’s Guide to New Orleans, a social justice tour guide to the city that seeks to counter popular tourist narratives of New Orleans as “the city that care forgot.” We reject various exceptionalist narratives about New Orleans that perpetuate the erasure of histories of inequality and struggle. As such, I hope this comparative paper can speak to the particularities of place while also attending to the ways these Gulf South-Circum-Caribbean tourism-dependent sacrifice zones have been subject to technocratic management that creates the conditions for ongoing disaster and compelled resilience.

Author

• Elizabeth Steeby, University of New Orleans