America Happens

Julia Leyda ASA Oakland October 15, 2006 juleyda@gmail.com America Happens This paper is not the one I proposed to the Program Committee nor is it the one listed in the program. I had planned to write about one of the disturbing events immediately following Katrina in New Orleans, in which a group of evacuees were prevented at gunpoint by law enforcement officers from walking across the river bridge, the Crescent City Connection. But as I began to try to write the paper, I was also trying to understand more academic political events that were just beginning to unfold. At the 2005 ASA, there had been a couple of hastily improvised sessions addressing issues around Katrina—this was only weeks after the flood. Emotions were still raw, particularly for those coming from the affected areas, and the speakers had had very little time to prepare; nevertheless the sessions were successful in that they made the first step in a process of public academic grappling with the events that destroyed 80% of the city of New Orleans. I spoke with several attendees and learned that many were planning to propose Katrina panels for the next conference in Oakland, which seemed perfectly logical. After all, that would give people more time to gather ideas, do research, and calm down a bit, maybe. I assumed that there would be several sessions peopled by history, media studies, environmental studies, and ethnic studies scholars already forming, so my idea was to introduce some disciplines relatively under-represented at most ASAs, and to try and get as many as possible from the New Orleans area. With that in mind, I decided to recruit some anthropologists and cultural geographers to bring their expertise to Oakland. But there was an obvious problem. Many academics in New Orleans had lost their homes and offices, their libraries and computers, and even their jobs or their usual funding sources. How to get commitments from scholars who didn’t know if their contracts would be renewed or where or how they would even be living by the time October 2006 rolled around? Some I approached regretfully declined, for those very reasons. I decided to ask the ASA if it would become proactive: I emailed the Program Committee and the president to ask what they were going to do about the incoming flood of Katrina proposals that would be “off-topic.” I asked them if there were some way to set up and contribute to funding to help academics whose travel budget was disrupted or destroyed by Katrina. I received polite replies saying that these were good questions. Then nothing. So this paper is my effort to figure out why this happened and what Americanists can do to interrogate both the events of Katrina and the silence of the ASA about Katrina. I. Something for Everyone In their interim report in 2006, the ASA Oakland Program Committee announced that for the conference, they “scheduled panels on the future of American Studies, cinema studies, material culture, dance, music, human trafficking; the aftermath of 9/11; Hurricane Katrina; the Black Atlantic and beyond -- basically something for everyone.” Never mind the somewhat off-putting juxtapositions and offhand tone; let’s look more closely at the crowd-pleasing smorgasbord that is the conference program. Two out of 268 session titles (including ours) contain the word Katrina; outside of those two, only three individual paper titles do. Of course, not all sessions or papers about Katrina will have “Katrina” in the title, but this gives a general sense of the representation of Katrina within the 2006 “transnational” conference program. At least based on the program and the ASA’s official website, the ASA as an institution and as an aggregation of individual scholars has nothing much to say about Katrina, other than to include it as a topic in the “something for everyone” buffet that includes the Black Atlantic and human trafficking and dance and music. Although members continue to get e-mails about the much-heralded (and funded) “International Initiative,” there has been no official communication from the ASA leadership about any kind of Katrina-related initiatives. What could the ASA and its membership do about, for example, conference funding or fee waivers for Katrinaaffected academics? Why not provide a way for members to contribute to such funding—as the Modern Language Association did? Why not encourage members by announcing that there would definitely be special sessions outside of the official conference theme of transnational American studies? Why not solicit proposals for partnerships with affected universities and schools that lost libraries, computers, equipment? Nothing. How many of the 81 proposed sessions rejected by the Program Committee were about Katrina? How many of the 201 rejected individual papers? We don’t know. What we do know is that the ASA officers have sole control over the theme of the annual meeting as well as the selection of sessions and papers that fit (or don’t fit) that theme. But why does the ASA even need a theme and why is the choice of the theme in so few hands? Imagine what the annual meeting would look like if it were more like the American Association of Geographers conference, in which any member of the association can present a paper, with no overarching “theme” to dictate what the newest trends will be. The AAG meeting is huge, over 3000 presentations, and chaotic, covering many subdisciplines. But it’s democratic. Attending the conference is more random but also more interesting, because presenters are actually doing the work they want to do without having to tweak it to fit the flavor of the month “theme” decided upon by a small group. It seems possible that because the conference theme is “transnational,” ASA members feared that a Katrina-related paper or session might not be accepted and therefore they didn’t submit proposals, or they obediently tailored their work to be “transnational” according to the dictates of the program committee. It’s not easy to get a paper accepted, and if one’s career may depend on getting the right lines on a CV, it stands to reason some members couldn’t risk it. So, what is the real purpose of the ASA—sharing and debating current research, or professional positioning within the latest trendy topics and methods? Certainly both: job interviews are going on throughout the conference, and younger scholars lucky enough to get on the program are understandably trying to create a positive, upto-date professional image. But what of the rest of us, who aren’t on the job market, who are willing to digress from the most recent scholarly fashions to do timely and relevant research? In organizing this panel, I was concerned that we might be rejected not on the basis of quality or originality but because there isn’t anything really “transnational” about our session (other than my institutional affiliation, that is). I have always felt that the conference theme serves to limit the range and number of interesting presentations; after all, the current trends and fashions in American studies cannot possibly represent the whole spectrum of good work in the field—I often wondered what kinds of research and analysis was being ignored because it wasn’t that year’s flavor? But Katrina for me is the crowning example of the uselessness and indeed the danger of proclaiming a single overarching theme for an entire national association’s annual meeting. The theme was decided before Katrina, but there was no attempt to inform ASA members about the committee’s stance on Katrina sessions or papers, which obviously would not for the most part fit the “transnational” theme. With the top-down choice of a single conference theme such as transnationality, does the ASA really foster the best possible atmosphere for scholarly engagement and debate? Or does it impose a false sense of cohesion when a less ordered chaos might be more true to the actual state of the field (and maybe have even more of “something for everyone”)? II. Transnational American Studies vs. Non-US-Based American Studies? On the other hand, perhaps because non-US-based American studies is always already international (see Hones and Leyda) and thus needn’t exclude domestic US issues from their programs to prove it, American studies associations in other countries have emphasized Katrina-related topics in a much more visible and focused way. In South Korea, the ASAK’s call for papers for its two-day 2006 conference “Crossing America’s Borders” features Katrina as its prime example of the domestic issues it wants to focus on: “rather than viewing the U.S. as a monolithic superpower, locating the real or imagined ‘third worlds’ within the U.S. may transform the way we imagine the future world.” In Japan, the JAAS’s annual two-day conference featured a workshop entitled “New Orleans,” in which invited participants included an environmental studies scholar, a specialist on Cajun culture, a political scientist, an Americanist researching IT, and myself as a reluctant native informant taking advantage of the bully pulpit. To give one example: Yayoi Haraguchi’s paper focused on the environmental justice campaigns in the Vietnamese American community and the urgent need to rebuild Louisiana’s wetlands, drawing on her pre-Katrina research in New Orleans and outlining important research questions for post-Katrina work. These two conferences are much smaller than the Oakland meeting, yet their organizers made a significant effort to address what they judged to be a major event in recent US history, culture, politics, and society. ASAK’s call for papers and JAAS’s workshop planners tried to encourage members and attendees to engage with Katrina. What did the ASA do to address this event in the lead-up to the conference? How is Katrina represented in the program? As I attempt to answer these questions, I start to wonder whether maybe the “transnational turn” in American studies actually means that the most relevant work on the US is not being done (or not being fostered) in the US. III. What Could Americanists Do? What can we do as Americanists in response to Katrina, as professionals trained to study and theorize about the United States and its people, its history, its archive? Americanists should respond when “America happens,” never mind our everyday specializations and research topics. So, faced with a disaster of this scale and severity, what will be our response? What is our subject matter, if not this? So many of us already specialize in areas related to race and class, perhaps the most obvious angle of approach. So many of us study movements for social change and resistance to inequality; still others, the troubled relationship between the people and the state. More than a year after the flood, activists and community organizations are doing great work that could serve as case studies in urban planning. But whatever one’s specialty, what if we used this traumatic moment in US history to examine our own profession and how it can (or cannot) foster a critical engagement with America as it happens? What if we all tried to create a response to Katrina, based on our own academic experience and expertise? Whether you are an American citizen whose academic practice is personally connected to your own national identity, or an Americanist carrying another passport committed to studying the US, I would like to suggest that you—and we all—have an urgent responsibility to at least consider and discuss how we can answer the challenge of Katrina as Americanists. One way to do that is to use our analytical skills to address the strange absence of Katrina in this year’s conference. IV. The Third World? Why Rebuild?: Implications in the Study of “America” In darker moments, I wonder if this neglect of Katrina at ASA this year might be a cognitive extension of the repeated disavowals from media commentators and eyewitnesses during the fiasco: “this can’t be happening in America” and “this looks like a third world refugee camp.” As Americanists, we are used to questioning discourses like this. What do people think America does look like? What distinguishes the US from a third world country? Why was CNN’s Africa correspondent sent in? What idealized images of “America” were exploded by the media images of elderly, poor, disabled, and abandoned New Orleanians in the days after the flood? Americanists trained in close reading could surely have something to say about the representations in the media that equated poor and black Americans with the third world (see Brooks; Dominguez). It would even have been possible to fit Katrina into the ASA program with a “transnational” angle: incorporate the recent work on Caribbean studies and the US South: politically, economically, socially, how does post-K (and pre-K for that matter) New Orleans compare to Port-au-Prince? Kingston? Bahia? In addition to the Caribbean-Southern angle, I can imagine several ways to read Katrina as a transnational event, for example, the obvious parallels with the occupation of Iraq (KBR, Blackwater, National Guard deployments), the Department of Homeland Security, the Asian tsunami, non-US-based offers of aid, and the post-K influx of Latino workers to New Orleans. But I would really like to see Americanists theorize about what could be behind the chilling rhetoric that has echoed through the halls of government and across internet commentaries, arguing that the city doesn’t deserve to be rebuilt. Is this also part of the disavowal of New Orleans, because it’s just too _____ (fill in adjective here: poor, black, gay, decadent, Catholic, racist, Democratic, different, low-lying)? Why have editorials and political speeches over the past year had to constantly, including on the one-year anniversary, repeat economic facts and figures as well as emotional appeals trying to convince the American public that a major American city is worth saving (see Amoss; Barry; “Death of an American City”; Gross; “It’s Time for a Nation to Return the Favor”)? How is that even in question? And how can we as specialists in US culture, history, and national identity imagine the motivations for such rhetoric? Many commentators agree that the fiasco surrounding Katrina are a horrifying but logical end result of years of right-wing boot-straps individualism and “small government” ideology paired with corporate welfare and privatization of government services. Mayor Nagin admitted that he delayed ordering the mandatory evacuation because he feared legal repercussions from businesses over lost revenues (Horne). The editors of the Nation point out: “what the Gulf Coast disaster has laid bare is not just the shame of racial and economic inequities in the world's richest nation but a wider breach of the social contract that once bound us to one another, however loosely and imperfectly.” In a similar vein, British journalist Gary Younge writes: To truly grasp how events in New Orleans unraveled, America would have to grapple with its ahistorical understanding of race, ambivalence toward class and antagonism toward government. But those rabbit holes proved too deep and too ugly, and in the end it was a journey the country had neither the will, curiosity nor leadership to make. Americanists by definition study America: its history, society, politics, culture, literature, media. Why aren’t Americanists leaping down those rabbit holes eagerly, armed with a formidable scholarly archive on precisely these: race, class, antigovernment antagonism, the social contract itself? And what do we, as Americanists, think about this silence at our own conference? V. The “Hole in the Ground” vs. the Drowned City Responding to criticism of the pace of recovery, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously quipped, “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair” (“New Orleans Mayor”). That was just the most recent in a number of comparisons between 9/11 and Katrina in terms of national trauma, lives lost, economic impact, media frenzy, government incompetence, and more. I’m drawn to 9/11 as a parallel example within academic circles as well: almost immediately there were online discussions about how to teach it, how to respond to it as individual academics and as groups and institutions, what each person in American studies could do to contribute to understanding, recovering from, and preventing another 9/11. At the H-AMSTDY listserv archives, a search for keywords “September 11” yields 395 messages. Granted some of the hits might not be related to the terror attacks on the US of 2001, but a keyword search on “Katrina” gets on 44 hits (3 of them apparently because Katrina van den Heuvel’s name appears in them), and true that 9/11 was five years ago while Katrina was more recent. Nevertheless, it seems to me an odd lack of discussion of Katrina on the biggest Americanist listserv: the most popular threads among the 44 “Katrina” posts are about Oprah Winfrey (each with 7 posts, some including multiple replies) and about the mass media’s coverage of Katrina. The enthusiastic discussion of the influence and conservatism of Oprah as an African American woman media mogul shows some of the ASA’s strengths: the insights and analytical skills of its members. Likewise the posts about the media representations of Katrina showed the agility of the Americanist intellectual enterprise, to question and critique the status quo and to document moments of rupture in the mainstream media’s discourses of race, class, and power that pervade US culture, particularly the cable news networks. Yet these were only two somewhat active threads; they trickled out and there are now only occasional mentions of Katrina in a CFP. On the other hand, questions of accountability and complicity in both the events of 9/11 and in the US responses to it are still reverberating around mailing lists and in academic journals and conferences. What about Americans’ accountability and complicity in the “failure of initiative” in preparing for and coping with Katrina, as the Congressional report is titled? What can Americanists say about the “breach of faith” evident in the post-Katrina aftermath, to echo the title of Jed Horne’s book. Does the ASA as an institution— and don’t the members who make up the ASA—have a scholarly interest in this? What does the American Studies Association—officers and regular members—do when “America” happens? What can we do? What aren’t we doing? And why not? Works Cited Amoss, Jim. “Do Not Forsake Us.” Washington Post 27 Nov. 2005 B07 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/11/25/AR2005112500963.html 30 Nov. 2005. Barry, John. “A City Worth Saving.” USA Today 28 Aug. 2006 http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-29-katrinaforum_x.htm 30 Aug. 2006. Brooks, Rosa. “Our Homegrown Third World.” Los Angeles Times 7 Sept. 2005 Archived at Common Dreams News Center http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0907-24.htm 10 Oct. 2005. “Call for Proposals: Crossing America’s Internal Borders.” American Studies Association of Korea. 41st Annual International Conference. 2 Feb. 2006. http://www.asak.or.kr/board/board_read.asp?dbname=notice&key_box=&k ey_word=&GotoPage=1&StartPage=1&bnum=52 19 Sept. 2006. “Death of an American City.” Editorial. New York Times 11 Dec. 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/opinion/11sun1.html?ex=1291957200 &en=4b8c43b28c1afc8d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss 12 Dec. 2005. Dominguez, Virginia. “Seeing and Not Seeing: Complicity in Surprise.” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. 11 Sept. 2005. http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Dominguez/ 29 Sept. 2005. A Failure of Initiative: The Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. US House of Representatives. 15 Feb. 2006. http://katrina.house.gov/ Hones, Sheila, and Julia Leyda. “Towards a Critical Geography of American Studies.” Comparative American Studies 2.2 (2004): 191. Haraguchi, Yayoi. “Extraordinary Disaster, But Not an Isolated Case: Hurricane Katrina, Environmental Protection, and New Orleans.” Paper delivered at Japanese Association of American Studies Annual Conference. Nagoya, Japan. 11 June 2006. Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of an American City. New York: Random House, 2006. Interim Report of the 2006 Program Committee. June 2006 Newsletter. American Studies Association. http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/AmericanStudiesAssn/newsletter/a rchive/newsarchive/interimreport2006.htm 19 Sept. 2006. “It’s Time for a Nation to Return the Favor.” Editorial. Times-Picayune 19 Nov. 2005. http://www.nola.com/news/tp/editorials/index.ssf?/news/content/editorial112005.html 20 Nov. 2005. “Katrina One Year After.” Editorial. The Nation. 18 Sept. 2006. http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20060918&s=editors 6 Sept. 2006. Gross, Daniel. “The Katrina Premium: Why the Hurricane Could Hurt the Economy More than 9/11.” Slate 1 Sept. 2005. http://www.slate.com/id/2125474/ 12 Oct. 2005. “New Orleans Mayor Takes a Swipe at NYC: Nagin Cites Failure to Rebuild at Ground Zero While Defending Katrina Cleanup.” CBS News Online. 24 Aug. 2006. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/24/60minutes/main1933092.sht ml 15 Sept. 2006. Younge, Gary. “New Orleans Forsaken.” The Nation 18 Sept. 2006 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/younge 6 Sept. 2006.