The Catastrophe to Come: Prefiguring Hurricane Katrina’s Public Memory through the Anxious Melancholic Rhetoric of “the Big One”

Rhetoric & Public Affairs Sep 2020

The Catastrophe to Come: Prefiguring Hurricane Katrina’s Public Memory through the Anxious Melancholic Rhetoric of “the Big One”

Jeremy R. Grossman

Abstract

AbstractThe city of New Orleans has long narrated its own demise through reference to “the Big One,” a singular hurricane that would destroy the city for good. The “catastrophe to come” is a more or less permanent spectral presence for many of its residents, evidence of which can be traced as far back as the city’s founding in 1718. When it comes to memorialization of Katrina, the central question of this essay is: how does one analyze public memory of an event so thoroughly anticipated, indeed, whose historical anticipation is fundamental to the later memory of it? Rather than merely acting as the historical context within which public memory comes to be interpreted, this anticipation and the anxiety that marks its form figures directly into the reading of the later memory object itself. In this essay, I argue that the repeated narrativization of the Big One is an anxious rhetoric that prefigures post-Katrina memory objects through a process of melancholic rhetorical incorporation. I first engage the history of New Orleans and this anxiety, extrapolating my usage of anxiety and melancholy as rhetorical concepts along the way. Then, I tender a critical analysis that first reads two narratives of such destruction to describe memory’s prefiguration and then turns symmetrically to two post-Katrina memory objects to demonstrate the work of incorporation in the production of memory objects.

Journal: Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published: 2020-09-01
DOI: 10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0417
Open Access: Closed
Topics: race and writing

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Also cites 16 works outside this index ↓

13. Cedric Johnson, introduction to The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaki…

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21. Barbara A. Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject…

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26. Lynnell Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory (Durham, N.C.: D…

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32. Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity(Albany: State University of New York Press…

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34. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago, I…

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37. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press…

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45. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics …

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65. Michael Bibler, “Always the Tragic Jezebel: New Orleans, Katrina, and the Layered Discourse of a Doomed S…

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74. Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietn…

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83. Carole Blair, V. William Balthrop, and Neil Michel, “The Arguments of the Tombs of the Unknown: Relationa…

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89. Linsday Tuggle, “Encrypting Katrina: Traumatic Inscription and the Architecture of Amnesia,” in “The Cult…

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96. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, "Tourists and/as Disasters: Rebuilding, Remembering, and Responsibility in New Orlea…

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see also Phaedra C. Pezzullo, "'This Is the Only Tour That Sells': Tourism, Disaster, and National Identity i…

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98. Anna Hartnell, “Katrina Tourism and a Tale of Two Cities: Visualizing Race and Class in New Orleans,” Ame…

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103. Kevin Fox Gotham, "(Re)Branding the Big Easy: Tourism Rebuilding in Post-Katrina New Orleans," Urban Aff…

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see also Kevin Fox Gotham, "Touristic Disaster: Spectacle and Recovery in Post-Katrina New Orleans," Geoforum…

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