Cultural Temporal Lenses, Native/Non-Native Boundaries, and Projected Futures in Climate-Threatened New Orleans

• In Event: Culture in/of Unsettled Times

Abstract

How do people imagine a city’s future when disaster is both lived memory and anticipated certainty? Drawing on scholarship on imagined futures and projectivity (Frye 2012; Mische 2009; Tavory and Eliasoph 2013) and on symbolic boundaries and symbolic ownership (Lamont 1992; Deener 2007), this paper argues that future projections in New Orleans are filtered through cultural temporal lenses that shape how actors connect past, present, and future—and that these lenses map onto boundary categories of “native” versus “non-native.” I show that competing temporal lenses generate divergent “genres” of future talk: one oriented toward historical continuity and endurance, and another oriented toward present conditions and near-term decline. Using 90 semi-structured interviews with 30 neighborhood organization leaders, 40 nonprofit leaders, and 20 philanthropic organization representatives, I identify patterned differences in temporal connectivity (Mische 2009) and in future coordination through trajectories and temporal landscapes (Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). Many New Orleans “natives” describe a historical temporal orientation in which the past actively structures the present, producing projections of continuation-through-crisis: “All of this has been going on for 300 years… we’ll cope with it, whatever it is that happens.” By contrast, many non-natives describe presentist or short-horizon projections read off contemporary dysfunction and perceived governance failure: “I don’t think this city has 50 years… five minutes to midnight… and we’re running out of road.” These differences help explain why residents on the front lines of climate threat may express muted climate concern: for historically oriented actors, climate threat is legible as another episode in an already-known cycle of vulnerability and survival. Future talk is also a boundary arena in which actors contest legitimate authority to define what New Orleans “really is” and who it is for, linking projected futures to symbolic ownership of the city’s meaning and direction (Lamont 1992; Deener 2007).

Author

• Nicole R Letourneau, Harvard University