ABSTRACT
For hundred of years up until the late summer of 2005, New Orleans occupied a unique place in the American imaginary. It was jazz, Mardi Gras, carnival, the Big Easy-a mecca for tourists, college students, and music a cionados who wanted to experience the birth place of jazz and
blues. Almost all of this changed in a matter of hours on August 29, 2005, when, at approximately 6:10 a.m., Katrina, a category 3 hurricane with sustained winds equaling or exceeding 125 mph, moved from the waters of the Gulf Coast into the urban spaces of New Orleans. Katrina changed this centuries-old culture in days, if not hours: one thousand people were dead and two-thirds of the city population gone. Another unspeakable tragedy occurred, too, for 320 million trees were destroyed, their destruction perhaps releasing 367 million tons of carbon dioxide-an amount produced by the entire forest ecosystem in the United States in one year (Chambers et al. 318)—into the atmosphere. This reinforced the greenhouse e ect which had, scientists and eco-activists like Van Jones-former White House Council on Environmental Quality in the Barack H. Obama Administration and author of the best-selling The Green Collar Economy (2008)—widely believe, already “supercharged” (23) the storm and, thus, signifi cantly contributed to the scale of destruction.1 Located in the eye of this hurricane were Katrina’s New Orleans folk, survivors and victims who were disproportionately poor, black native daughters and sons; many of them were scattered to the four corners of the nation into what some have called the Hurricane Katrina Diaspora.
