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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2010
As long ago as The Other America (1962), Michael Harrington asked, “How long shall we ignore this undeveloped nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer?”1 Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath brought into plain sight the plight of the poor, with Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, admitting sombrely at the Superdome that he was seeing people he never knew existed. The black poor were drawn forcefully into the national consciousness, for a while at least, as they had not been during the 2004 presidential election when it was discovered that many electronic voting machines had not found their way into New Orleans to register the votes of one of the largest blocs of African Americans.
1 Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 184.
2 See David Rae Morris, especially Lagniappe, at http://www.davidraemorris.com/lag.html, last accessed 16 April 2010.
3 Dr. John, quoted in US News and World Report, 19 Sept. 2005, 44.
4 Steven Maklansky, ed., Katrina Exposed: A Photographic Reckoning: New Orleans in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2006), 1.
5 Bonner, Thomas Jr., “Literary Center or Literary Place: The Ambiguity of New Orleans,” Journal of American Studies Association of Texas, 25 (1994), 1–13Google Scholar, 13.
6 Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 355.
7 Adam Weinberg quoted in Burn, Gordon, “Make It New,” The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2006, 13Google Scholar.
8 I should like to thank the British Academy for awarding me a Travel Grant to visit New Orleans in 2010 and the Dean's Fund for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham for financial support for the symposium on Hurricane Katrina in 2006.
9 Quoted in Walsh, Bryan, “The Meaning of the Mess,” Time, 17 May 2010, 38Google Scholar.
