ABSTRACT
The multidirectionality that Katrina texts tend to employ challenges some earlier formulations of trauma. For African-American victims, then, the trauma of Katrina comes not just from the storm’s destruction but also from the repetition of racial discrimination through negligence and violence. Katrina has summoned texts that attend to these insidious traumas, perhaps because an “account of the racialized poor as failed neoliberal subjects has considerable explanatory power in relation to many aspects of” Katrina. Arin Keeble explains that the body of Katrina texts “is undoubtedly dwarfed by the still rapidly growing canon of 9/11 narratives”. The Katrina texts that do exist, however, carry with them many well-known markers of trauma and trauma literature. Katrina texts, then, are primarily concerned with making sure the victims are not forgotten, a fate the writers worry about especially due to the race of most of the traumatized, and documenting what occurred in order to counteract blame assigned to those victims.
