ABSTRACT
The book’s central chapter turns to the Southern US city of New Orleans, struck by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. If this urban disaster made starkly visible the city’s inequalities as they are organised along race and class lines, New Orleans has since been increasingly rebranded as a global city in subsequent years. Yet the disaster of Katrina also yielded the global city’s obverse: a range of urban social movements, united in their attempts to rebuild a more socially and spatially just city, arose to respond directly to these infrastructural discriminations. This chapter explores how graphic narratives about New Orleans, which have proliferated since the storm, seek to correct the racist bias of Katrina’s mainstream media coverage, to document the continued violence of urban redevelopment that has seized the city in the storm’s aftermath, and to highlight the resilience of New Orleanians in the post-disaster context. With short readings of several graphic responses to the storm, and longer readings of Josh Neufeld’s A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (2009) and Erin Wilson’s Snowbird (2011), the chapter shows how comics about New Orleans challenge the violent processes of disaster capitalism and tourism gentrification by documenting and constructing newly public, community-led urban spaces.
