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THE STORM CALLED AMERICA: HURRICANE KATRINA AS A DISCURSIVE FIGURE AND THE RHETORIC OF TRAUMA By KEASHA RENEE WORTHEN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2018 © 2018 Keasha Renee Worthen To all the people who struggled and prayed for me to be here ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my dear friend, Yen Loh, for being there. I would also thank my dissertation chair, Susan Hegeman. A special thank you to the late Scott Nygren and Terri Harpold for being the first and only professors to tell me that I belong here and that I am worthy of being here. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 7 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: ARTICULATING EXPERIENCE IN THE FACE OF TRAUMA ... 10 Discourse, Figure’s Hyper-Reflection on Trauma ................................................... 16 Rhetorical Circulation and Transformation of the Figure ......................................... 24 Katrina Figured ....................................................................................................... 37 2 HECK OF A JOB: RHYMING CONTESTATIONS ON THE VIOLENCE OF POLITICS ............................................................................................................... 44 The Absent Bush Administration ............................................................................. 51 Hip Hop Epistemologies .......................................................................................... 66 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 83 3 AS KATRINA CHURNS: BARE LIVES, STATES OF EXCEPTIONS AND THE LEGAL OTHER ....................................................................................................... 87 Zeitoun, Caught in the State of Exception............................................................... 92 Bare Life, Black Life, and Hurricane Katrina ........................................................... 98 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 116 4 DAMNABLE GAZE AND LAMENTATION”: TRAUMACASTS, RUMORS, AND MYTHS IN THE MEDIAPOLIS .............................................................................. 119 Traumacasts: Media Hype and Media Wrong ....................................................... 124 The Katrina Mediapolis ......................................................................................... 133 Myths and Meaning .............................................................................................. 138 Hurricane Katrina and The Spectacle ................................................................... 147 5 A GOD FOR EVERY SIDE: RELIGIOUS AFFECT IN THE KATRINA CHAOS .... 156 Jesus is the Reason for it All ................................................................................. 163 Rhetoric of the Storm: The Religious Right, and Katrina as God’s Punishment .... 169 God on the Other Side .......................................................................................... 175 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 180 5 6 CONCLUSION: “I WANT TO BE COHESIVE.”: LEARNING THE KATRINA LESSON ............................................................................................................... 184 On Utopia and Dystopia ........................................................................................ 186 Beasts of the Southern Wild ................................................................................. 192 On Hurricane Katrina ............................................................................................ 214 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 219 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 234 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 4-1 Finding/Looting Meme by Wrenever ................................................................. 121 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE STORM CALLED AMERICA: HURRICANE KATRINA AS A DISCURSIVE FIGURE AND THE RHETORIC OF TRAUMA By Keasha Renee Worthen May 2018 Chair: Susan Hegeman Major: English Hurricane Katrina is a cultural event that has entered into the rhetorical discourse of America and emerged as a discursive figure. As a discursive figure, Katrina is a tensor – what Lyotard calls a disruptor because of its ability to disrupt normative processes of signification – that intensifies, through hyper-reflection, the discourses of representation and presentation in America. While race and class have long been determinants of the impact and extent of the trauma for any given situation, this project aims to examine the articulation of race and class through articulations that have been given thickness, or intensity, because of the experience of trauma. Ultimately, I am also suggesting that American society has historically, religiously, politically, and economically engineered a culture of disposability that follows along race, gender, religious, and class lines, and these lines are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes they come together in uncomfortable ways, at least for the victim of this disposability. This project will be seen as a contribution to the research on Katrina because it focuses on how people speak their trauma into existence or render their experience into words. It focuses on narrative control and how people rhetorically situate themselves in a socio-cultural context. The focus of this project is the cultural exigency that Katrina 8 created. While many scholars have written about specific aspects of the storm – race, class, gender, urbanization, and even scientific observations – there have not been many projects dedicated to the discursive and rhetorical productions of the storm except for the few articles that discussed media representations. This project will fill that void by looking at multiple rhetorical “situations” generated by the storm. I suggest that Hurricane Katrina has been historicized into a figure of signification within various rhetorical threads in an effort to represent and re-present the “thickness” of the experience of the storm and, by extension, of post-9/11 America. This thickness, this density of experience, has a direct effect on the articulation of traumatic experience, and it shapes the response to the storm while simultaneously transforming the storm itself into a discursive figure of multiple traumatic exigencies. 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: ARTICULATING EXPERIENCE IN THE FACE OF TRAUMA The relationship between what we experience and how we talk about that experience is incredibly complex. This project will examine that relationship between experience and articulation. Using Hurricane Katrina, I will demonstrate how the trauma of those who experienced the storm directly shapes the contours of the rhetorical productions that surround the storm. In doing so, I hope to show that the rhetoric produced about an event is the product of the relation between the variability of the perception about an experience and the fluidity of articulation. Hurricane Katrina is an event with significant implications for American culture. While the storm itself was devastating, what the storm revealed about American society in the 21st century changed the nature of the storm from a meteorological event into a cultural-social one. To be clear, it was not the hurricane itself that made the storm into an Event. Other hurricanes like Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were either larger or deadlier than Katrina.1 What makes Katrina stand out is the aftermath of the storm, the blatant incompetence or indifference of federal and local government, and the indexing of how race relations would play out in Millennial America. Indeed, one of the main significations of Katrina is its ability to simultaneously reconstruct precedent and sameness. Similar to how we think of “Hiroshima” as an idea that exceeds the actual event of its destruction, Hurricane Katrina is an overdetermined incident and idea that directly reflects and signifies various aspects of 21st century 1 Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 90; Sharp, Tim, “Superstorm Sandy: Facts about the Frankenstorm” November, 27, 2017, accessed December 24, 2017, https://www.livescience.com/24380-hurricane-sandy- status-data.html 10 America. The storm has become conflated with various socio-cultural histories that have re-affirmed the American narrative of race and class for some observers, unveiled a previously suppressed American narrative of inequality for others, and for others still, demonstrated the issues we only theorize about in our respective academic houses. Much of the literature on Katrina at this point is contained within