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Narratives of Hurricane
Katrina in Context
Literature, Film
and Television
Arin Keeble
Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context
Arin Keeble
Narratives
of Hurricane Katrina
in Context
Literature, Film and Television
Arin Keeble
Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-16352-5 ISBN 978-3-030-16353-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16353-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Keebles and Kerns of the American Gulf
Coast for their inspiration, input, support and love. Though I grew up
in Washington State and lived there until I was twenty-one, and though
I have lived in the UK since 1998, I have a lifelong affinity with the
American Gulf Coast, where my mother’s family come from. They have
weathered some storms over the years, and their values persist in the face
of an increasingly imperiled American democracy. My mother and father
remain a constant source of inspiration—despite the thousands of miles
that separate us. I would like to thank my wife, son and stepson, for
putting up with my time-consuming and distracting obsessions. It is no
exaggeration to say that all my small professional achievements have been
made possible, in some way, by my wife’s love and support.
I’m blessed to have and to have had some wonderful colleagues, and
it would be remiss not to mention them here. I’d like to thank each one
of my much-loved colleagues in the English department at Edinburgh
Napier University and my former colleagues in English at Nottingham
Trent University—two truly wonderful, hardworking and collegial
departments. I would also like to thank the Gateshead-based char-
ity, Changing Lives, which works with homeless and vulnerable peo-
ple, where I worked for several years from the final stages of my Ph.D.
until getting my first academic job. Working at Changing Lives was
rewarding, humbling and perspective-giving. I have been very lucky to
have worked at such inspiring places with such talented people. I’d like
to pay particular thanks to Rachel Sykes and Diletta De Cristofaro, my
v
vi Acknowledgements
Contemporary Studies Network partners—it would be impossible to

overstate how much I’ve benefitted from working with them and how
much I value their friendship. I’d also like to single out Sam Thomas
and Ivan Stacy, with whom I have enjoyed richly rewarding collabora-
tions as well as Ellen Turner, Paul Smith, Craig Hankin, Toby Martinez
de las Rivas, Simon James, James Annesley, Neelam Srivastava, Stephen
Shapiro, Rory Waterman, Andrew Taylor, Sarah Jackson, Chris Mourant,
Paul Crosthwaite, Sadek Kessous, Patrick Errington, Tim Youngs and
Rachel Williams. Thank you for your friendship and support.
I’d like to also recognize some of the outstanding scholarship on
Katrina and on Katrina narratives. Anna Hartnell is a towering figure in
this field, and her numerous scholarly articles, media pieces and particu-
larly her recent book, After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism and the End of
the American Century (2017), comprise an invaluable set of resources.
Christopher Lloyd’s work across several scholarly articles and two books,
Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First Century
American South (2015) and Corporeal Legacies in the US South (Memory
and Embodiment in Contemporary in Contemporary Culture (2018),
also represent outstanding scholarship in the field of Katrina studies and
beyond and have been critically important to my project. I’d like to offer
a special thanks to Dr. Lloyd for reviewing early versions of some of two
of my chapters here.
A final thanks to the people at Palgrave and particularly to Ben Doyle
and Camille Davies for their patience and good faith.
Contents
1 Introduction: Narrating Katrina in Context 1
2 Intertextuality, Domesticity and the Spaces of Disaster

in Salvage the Bones and Zeitoun 31
3 “Won’t Bow: Don’t Know How”: New Orleans

and American Exceptionalism in Treme 65
4 Disposability, Criminality and Lawlessness in Bad

Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Beasts of the
Southern Wild and When the Levees Broke—A Requiem
in Four Acts 91
5 Conclusion: Traumatic Rupture and Slow Violence 119
Bibliography 127
Index 133
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
Narrating Katrina in Context
Abstract This introduction provides an in-depth outline of the book’s

approach to six key narratives of Hurricane Katrina across literature, tele
vision and film. It introduces the argument that these texts narrate the
human tragedy and political fallout of the Katrina crisis while simulta-
neously responding to issues that have characterized the wider, George
W. Bush era of American history, notably the aftermath of 9/11 and the
ensuing War on Terror. It works through an itinerary for exploring and
examining the striking preoccupations of this cycle of Katrina narratives
while addressing one of the urgent tasks of 9/11 studies: meaningfully
understanding the impact and legacy of the attacks without reinforcing
exceptionalist narratives. In doing so, it recognizes important challenges
to trauma studies as an interpretive framework, opening up a discus-
sion of the overlaps between traumatic rupture and systemic or “slow
violence.” Finally, it outlines the theoretical frameworks and ideas that
underpin this project of illuminating the fraught intersections and rever-
berations between two “cultural traumas” that have punctuated early
twenty-first-century history.
Keywords Hurricane Katrina · Trauma · 9/11 · The War on Terror ·

Neoliberalism · Slow violence · Literature · Television · Cinema
© The Author(s) 2019 1

A. Keeble, Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16353-2_1
2 A. KEEBLE
1 Two Cultural Traumas

The first mainstream film to be shot on location in New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina was Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006). A police procedural
with some speculative elements, it is notable for its questionable use of
images of flood-ravaged New Orleans neighborhoods and for its terror-
ism plot. Despite such a conspicuous use of location, the film’s spectacu-
lar central set piece and focus on terror evoked for many commentators,
America’s previous national tragedy. Mark Kermode’s Guardian review
was typical: “the major trauma that this movie is, in its way, clearly trying
to heal: 9/11.”1 I would argue, though, that Déjà Vu is compelled—
albeit clumsily—by underlying links between the Katrina disaster and
9/11 and the still-unfolding War on Terror. Though it lacks any clear
articulation of what these links are, it very deliberately locates this set
piece (a terror attack on a Mississippi River Ferry which kills over 500
citizens) before the backdrop of an American urban space whose vul-
nerabilities to disaster were fresh in the imagination in 2006. This book
examines cultural texts that also pursue an impulse to locate connections
between these two Bush-era events, but whose explorations are more
far-reaching and critically suggestive.
In-depth, scholarly accounts of the wider and underlying connec-
tions between 9/11 and Katrina have only begun recently and have been
characterized by a certain caution. This is understandable given that, as
Lucy Bond has noted, various assessments and narratives of 9/11 have
used historical analogy in reductive ways that have “exceptionalized,”
rather than meaningfully contextualized the attacks.2 There is some con-
sensus, though, that while many other seismic and tragic events around
the world have punctuated early twenty-first-century history, 9/11 and
Katrina and their aftermaths have a shared resonance as events that
have revealed certain truths about American power. They were differ-
ent in nature and indeed in some ways antithetical in that 9/11 engen-
dered a powerful nationalism while Katrina exposed stark division. Yet
clear lines of connection invite analysis. Both events evoked a sense of
American vulnerability; both posed questions about American citizen-
ship; both have challenged the myth of the American melting pot and
both have at least recalibrated—and in Donald Pease’s account, fatally
exposed, the myths of American exceptionalism. Additionally, the gov-
ernmental response to both events made the neoliberalization of the US
state starkly visible, particularly through the massive private contracts
1 INTRODUCTION: NARRATING KATRINA IN CONTEXT 3
awarded to the likes of Blackwater (how Academi) and Haliburton to

support the War in Iraq and various private contractors that undertook
the disaster management and rebuilding of New Orleans. The challenges
of meaningfully mapping out these connections, and the caution that has
characterized this undertaking, are linked to the fact that, as individual
moments of rupture or crisis, their meanings are still debated and their
consequences still unfolding. This book seeks to make advances on this
project by examining the ways six narrative representations of Katrina—
across literature, television and film—also respond to 9/11 and to the
ensuing War on Terror. Through close readings of these texts within
their cultural and political contexts, it illuminates some of the fraught
intersections and reverberations between these two “cultural traumas”
that have punctuated the early twenty-first century.3
Early representations of 9/11 consisted mostly of apolitical or
“domestic” narratives of trauma and loss that avoided explicit political or
social critique. Consequently, we might see the Katrina texts as addressing
a post-9/11 absence of meaningful political discourse in art and culture
that was still stark when they were produced. It is certainly the case that
while 9/11 was initially approached as if it had been an apolitical natural
disaster; in early novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close (2005) or films such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade
Center (2005), for example, Katrina, ostensibly an actual natural disas-
ter, was immediately politicized.4 But this inversion is reductive, and it
would be simplistic to suggest that these texts simply write back against
the early cultural depoliticization of 9/11. The resonances of 9/11 and
its political fallout in these texts are nuanced and multifaceted. Just as
they address the void of political discourse in early representations of
9/11, they also echo and build on the disorientation of disaster that
those narratives conveyed. The Katrina cycle does both of these things,
and the prevalence of 9/11 and the War on Terror in these narratives
demands attention. This book seeks to show how these texts tell the sto-
ries of Katrina while simultaneously adding texture to our understand-
ing of the enduring relevance and rhetorical power of 9/11. In doing
this, I argue, they offer important insights into contemporary American
exceptionalism, the trajectories of post-9/11 “states of exception,” the
rise of a strident American nationalism and the prevailing myth of the
American melting pot. Additionally, they offer vantage points from
which we might consider the overlapping of traumatic ruptures and the
“slow violence” or systemic violence of neoliberalism or Lauren Berlant’s
4 A. KEEBLE
claim that traumatic events “are better described by a notion of systemic

crisis or ‘crisis ordinariness’ and followed out with an eye to seeing how
the affective impact takes form…”.5
The particular political itineraries of the Katrina narratives I discuss in
this book are striking given the extraordinary complexity of the catastro-
phe, the range of meanings it has accrued and array of global issues it
has raised. From the early aftermath, commentators pointed to per-
mutations that reached far beyond the immediate devastation and loss
of life. Wai Chee Dimock, for example, wrote that Katrina marked an
“unbundling” of the American nation-state and of the very concept of
statehood. Dimock’s essay, “World History According to Katrina,”
also argued that Katrina demanded new scholarly approaches to ideas
of “the national.” Citing the transnational nature of climate change-
related phenomenon and catastrophe, Dimock suggested that humani-
ties scholars “use these unbundlings as an occasion to think about the
circumference of our work.”6 Adjacently, Naomi Klein also saw global
resonance in Hurricane Katrina, as the first American homeland appli-
cation of Chicago School neoliberalism and its “shock and awe” tactics.
Klein identified the catastrophe as a moment when the perniciousness
of neoliberal ideology was exposed as a domestic phenomenon, bring-
ing her arguments to a substantial readership. In The Shock Doctrine
(2007), she showed how the “Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory”
for a “government-run-by-contractors,” while also drawing broad con-
nections between the privatization of disaster relief to the privatization
of security in Iraq.7 While Klein and Dimock’s arguments are linked, as
Christopher Lloyd has noted, to a wider transnational turn in American
Studies and contemporary literary studies scholarship, there were also
early responses that sought to locate the catastrophe within more capa-
cious histories of the American South.8 For the South and the Southern
Gulf Coast, Katrina exposed the enduring prevalence of racial hierarchies
and inequality and brought the region’s traumatic histories of racial vio-
lence vividly back to life. Clyde Woods argued, in a 2009 special issue
of American Quarterly, that Katrina was hard evidence that the violence
and oppression of this history were re-emerging powerfully: “no longer
content to haunt the American psyche, it aspires to be resurrected.”9
If Katrina evinced a crisis in the very notion of the nation-state,
brought the violence of neoliberalism into sharp focus and also exposed
the extents of inequality and racism in contemporary America, then what
are the reasons for this specific pattern of evocations and engagements
with 9/11 and the War on Terror in its cultural response? How do these
texts help us understand Katrina in a historical continuum that includes
the rupture of 9/11, an event that, despite the seismic—even epochal—
resonances of Katrina, is still more frequently seen as the definitive and
world-changing moment of the early twenty-first century?10 Given the
stark divisions and inequality of contemporary America, can we do this
productively without turning to what Michael Rothberg has called the
“zero sum struggle” of competitive memory?11 This book addresses
these questions directly.
2 Fictions of Katrina

I have alluded to some of the important and capacious analyses of
Katrina, but for scholars working on the various artistic or textual
responses to 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, Katrina was also
profoundly significant. Sensing this, Jeffrey Melnick pointed out, in his
monograph on 9/11 in art and culture, that: “it seems possible that the
pivotal moment for our study of 9/11 art will turn out to have been the
moment of our next American tragedy, Hurricane Katrina.”12 My own
work has previously suggested that Katrina marks a turning point where
fictional narratives of 9/11 begin to adopt more political approaches.13
Now, nearly ten years on from the comments by Dimock, Klein, Woods
and Melnick, Katrina continues to have profound permutations and links
to definitive global issues. Substantive studies such as Anna Hartnell’s
After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism and the End of the American Century
(2017) continue to illuminate the far-reaching meanings of the catastro-
phe. Indeed, Hartnell uses the Katrina crisis to reflect on the myths of
the “American century” and argues that Katrina “offers a unique van-
tage point from which to understand the narrative of U.S. decline that
is emerging as a pivotal feature of the twenty-first century.”14 However,
despite the proliferation of substantive accounts such as this, there are
still comparatively few literary or cultural narratives of Katrina.
The six texts I focus on here, Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones
(2011), Dave Eggers’ narrative nonfiction, Zeitoun (2009), Benh
Zeitlin’s film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Werner Herzog’s film
Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans (2009), David Simon’s tele-
vision series, Treme (2009–2013) and Spike Lee’s four-part HBO doc-
umentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), are
central to what I refer to as a “cycle” of Katrina narratives. This cycle
6 A. KEEBLE
of texts is characterized by its focus on the “human stories” of disaster,

on giving voices to the voiceless, a project which underpins its explicit
political critiques. While much of my argument in this book points to the
richness of this cycle, it is undoubtedly dwarfed by the still rapidly grow-
ing canon of 9/11 narratives. This contrast is perhaps most stark in the
novel. Some of the most acclaimed and studied contemporary authors
have published 9/11 novels: Claire Messud, Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jay McInerney, even Cormac
McCarthy and Ian McEwan if we read The Road (2006) and Saturday
(2005), as many critical accounts have, as allegories. 9/11 novels have
also helped to launch the careers of newer literary stars such as Mohsin
Hamid, Joseph O’Neil and Amy Waldman. Additionally, beyond these
more high-profile texts there is an array of compelling literary 9/11 nov-
els: Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) and
The Last Illusion (2014), J. M. Nacqvi’s Homeboy (2009) or Giannina
Braschi’s United States of Banana (2011), for example. In cinema,
renowned directors like Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass made 9/11
films—World Trade Center (2005) and United 93 (2005) respectively—
and the novels by Safran Foer and Hamid were adapted for film featuring
major Hollywood stars (Tom Hanks and Riz Ahmed). The list continues,
but the point is that while cultural narratives of 9/11 have been abun-
dant and continue to appear, gaining substantial audiences and critical
attention, narratives of Katrina are relatively few.
There are several compelling Katrina novels that have been catego-
rized as genre fiction. James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novel, Tin
Roof Blowdown (2008), and Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Meets Katrina (2006)
were among the most popular. Nevertheless, it is just Ward’s cele-
brated Salvage the Bones that has garnered a similar amount of critical
and scholarly attention as the 9/11 novels; Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge
(2008) is a distant next-closest. Given the hierarchies of literary pres-
tige, it is tempting to draw conclusions about Katrina being the pur-
view of crime fiction rather than literary fiction while 9/11 novels have
been “literary.” Indeed, this division seems to invite extrapolation: Does
the value that America places on New York compared to New Orleans
and the Gulf Coast somehow relate to the kinds of narratives that have
approached the respective events? More pointedly, is the stark disparity
between the prestige attached to these two very different American cul-
tural centers linked to the enduring value discrepancy between literary
fiction and genre fiction? While Nahem Yousaf has shown that Katrina
crime narratives, across media, form “an anthology of narratives in which

the city’s breakdown is relieved only by the resilience of its sleuthing pro-
tagonists,” any suggestion that Katrina has been perceived as unfit for
serious literary or artistic meditation would be misplaced.15 It might be
more useful to point to the fact that “literature” is also a genre with its
own rules, codes and subgenres and value distinctions between literary
fictions and previously disparaged genres are now frequently debated.
In fact, as Yousaf goes on to point out, following the critical success of
David Simon’s HBO series The Wire (2002–2008), television police pro-
cedurals have been held up as “the epitome of quality television,” and
Katrina crime shows like K-Ville (2007) certainly had sophistication and
nuance.16 Another way of understanding the prevalence of crime nar-
ratives of Katrina might be the narrative frameworks they provide for a
subject that has proven so complex and far-reaching. Crime narratives
can manage this unwieldy subject with its well-defined narrative frame-
works. In this sense, we might also note that the genre fiction approach
to Katrina is not dissimilar to the “literary fiction” approach of the early
9/11 novels, which operated in a specific kind of literary mode with
clearly defined generic tropes and themes. As Richard Gray has argued,
these texts “simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures.”17
The early literary fiction of 9/11 was in fact widely accused of depoliti-
cizing the attacks or of a “failure of imagination,” because of its repeated
use of relationship or marriage plots or wider family narratives.18 David
Cowart has gone so far as to identify a “mini-genre” of 9/11 novels,
and one might argue that this “genre” has no more narrative or thematic
potential than the Katrina police procedural.19
But this is a subject for another place as I turn to six Katrina narratives
that for a range of reasons—some potentially questionable—have been
seen as literary, “complex” or cultural. Though these texts have more
cultural capital than the police procedurals because of their prestigious
authors or auteur directors, because they have won awards, and have
been studied, taught and written about, I turn to them for their capa-
ciousness, for their rich intertextualities and shared concerns and particu-
larly their preoccupations with exploring the resonances of 9/11 and the
War on Terror in stories of the Katrina catastrophe. Additionally, though
there are many more 9/11 texts—across fiction and nonfiction forms—I
argue that this cross-media cycle of Katrina narratives is more politically
and rhetorically unified than the 9/11 canon. The Katrina narratives,
I contend, successfully map out an America that has been revealed or
8 A. KEEBLE
exposed by Katrina, 9/11 and the War on Terror, more than it has been
“changed.”
In very broad terms, these texts achieve this in two ways. First, many
of them either directly discuss the political fallout of 9/11 and the War
on Terror as a surface level part of the narrative or indirectly discuss it
through allegory or thematic allusion. The most explicit example is
Zeitoun, which deals with the true story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun who
was arrested as terror suspect after performing a series of heroic rescues
of stranded citizens, and eventually incarcerated at the Guantanamo-
esque, “Camp Greyhound.” Secondly, many of the Katrina texts also
respond to the early 9/11 texts, in part by challenging their lack of
explicit political engagement but also by critically echoing their trau-
matic impulses. In these undertakings, they participate in a wider scru-
tinizing of the inward turn of American culture after 9/11, which was
at least complicit with policy-level isolationism, nationalism and nostal-
gia. Most of the texts I discuss here, to some extent, operate on both of
these levels. However, before introducing my specific arguments about
them, I will first discuss some of the theoretical tools this book employs;
second, work through the ways in which Katrina, 9/11 and the War on
Terror have previously been analyzed comparatively; and finally, discuss
in detail what has been described as the “depoliticization” or “domesti-
cation” of 9/11.
3 Cultural Trauma and Multidirectional Memory

This book deploys two widely used—and widely debated—theoretical
ideas as frameworks to aid its textual analysis, though I use them critically
and with some caveats. Firstly, following the work of Kai Erikson, Jeffrey
C. Alexander and, more recently, Ron Eyerman, I locate the Katrina cri-
sis as a “cultural trauma.” Distinct from individual psychological trauma
and collective trauma, cultural traumas are characterized by intense and
ongoing public reflection and debate over meaning. In other words, the
inability to understand or agree on the specific nature of the event is
what is traumatic. For Eyerman, cultural traumas are best understood as
“processes,” rather than events:
Cultural traumas are not things, but processes of meaning-making and

attribution, contentious contests in which various individuals and groups
struggle not only to define a situation but also to manage and control
it. That is, they struggle to push collective understanding in particular
directions.20
It is clear from the critical accounts that I have already discussed that this
is and continues to be the case with Katrina: Its meanings are divergent
and contested. This specific definition of cultural trauma also, of course,
allows us to reckon the memory and impact of 9/11 and the War on
Terror and a range of residual issues such as torture, detention, biopol-
itics, bare life—or what Henry Giroux has called “disposable life”—sur-
veillance, neoliberal securitization and xenophobia—as a fundamental
part of this process of “meaning making.”21 Also integral to Eyerman’s
definition of cultural trauma is the idea that these processes are pub-
lic, visible and narrative: “[c]ultural traumas are public articulations of
collective pain and suffering that require representation through word,
sound and image.”22 Eyerman is a cultural sociologist, and his book, Is
this America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma (2015), focusses on media
representation, but it is clearly the case that literary fiction and nonfic-
tion, cinema and quality, or what Jason Mittell calls “complex” televi-
sion, can play important roles in the processes and negotiations of
cultural trauma too.23
By distinguishing cultural trauma as key to understanding inter-
sections between the stories of Katrina, 9/11 and the War on Terror,
I do not wish to dismiss notions of Katrina (or 9/11) as psycholog-
ically traumatic—individually or collectively. There is no doubt that
this kind of trauma has and continues to be experienced by victims of
Katrina and equally; there are clearly overlaps between individual, col-
lective and cultural traumas. Nevertheless, this book sees Katrina as
an unresolved national cultural crisis, a perennially contested subject
with which these textual representations are engaging. In particular, it
seeks to explore the way they figure the residual impacts of 9/11 and
the long-running systemic issues that the two crises expose, into their
affective responses and political messages. Eyerman’s configuration of
cultural trauma aids this aim and moves away from the kinds of popular
usages of the term “trauma” which, as Hartnell has pointed out, in spe-
cific relation to 9/11, have emphasized American victimhood and func-
tioned as a “barrier” to a more “ethical” understanding of the attacks
and their aftermath.24 Notably, Hartnell extends this critique of trauma
10 A. KEEBLE
to Naomi Klein’s notion of “shock” as a driver of neoliberal policy shifts

around the world. For Hartnell, an emphasis on shock “neglects the role
of consent” and “fails to track the progression of neoliberal policies as
forms of ‘slow violence’ that had been in train for decades before the
storm.”25 Hartnell reiterates this in a later chapter:
…trauma as a paradigm often conceals the slow, nonspectacular and

human-engineered violence walled out be levees and a discursive context
wedded to a false sense of security punctuated by violent and sometimes
catastrophic interruptions.26
However, where an emphasis on psychological trauma alone might

(unwittingly or not) reinforce exceptionalist rhetoric or reduce culpabil-
ity to a few neoliberal figureheads, or divert our attention away from sys-
temic malaise or slow violence through an emphasis on shock or rupture,
the interpretive framework of cultural trauma is open and inclusive.
The texts I examine make a range of trenchant political critiques
through moving human stories, making powerful claims within the
ongoing “negotiations” of cultural trauma. For example, Chapter 2 will
consider the domestic setting and structure of Salvage the Bones and
the way it mirrors and comments on those of the early domestic nov-
els of 9/11. These novels, and we can include Safran Foer’s Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), McInerney’s The Good Life (2005),
DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Messud’s The Emperor’s Children
(2006) as exemplary, focus on the domestic spheres of privileged, white,
Manhattanites and mostly on the anxieties of male characters. The
domestic world of Salvage the Bones is starkly different and instead of an
urban, white, rich, culturally elite, male perspective, Ward’s novel takes
place in inner-coastal Mississippi, amid crushing systemic poverty, and is
narrated by a young black teenager, trying to guide her family through
the immediate threat of the storm while coming to terms with her own
pregnancy. However, by mirroring the domestic architecture of the
early 9/11 novels, its depiction of coastal Southern poverty is situated
in a larger intertextual discussion of inequality and American domesticity
and its depiction of individual psychic trauma overlaps with the slow vio-
lence of state neglect. These dialogic references to the early 9/11 novels,
I argue, represent specific claims within the process of cultural trauma
about the forgotten Americans of the Gulf Coast.
But yet, as I will argue in Chapter 2, Ward’s novel subtly evokes 9/11
culture without engaging in competitive memory politics and the second
part of this book’s theoretical approach helps us to understand how this

text, and the others I examine, negotiates this aporia. While Eyerman’s
theory of cultural trauma is developed in direct response to Katrina,
Michael Rothberg’s thesis in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) focusses on the intersec-
tions between memories of the holocaust and international colonialism
and seeks to address the friction that occurs when “different histories
confront each other in the public sphere.”27 Rothberg’s approach argues
that through critical comparison, memories of separate historical events
have potential to inform or illuminate each other in productive ways. In
this case, rather than considering the “different histories,” of Katrina and
9/11 we might use a multidirectional approach to position the events
within the same history. Rothberg’s work is part of a broad movement
toward comparative, global or “analogical” approaches and has been fre-
quently cited and sometimes misused or oversimplified.28 While there is
no doubt that it is intended to “advocate non-closure and open-ended-
ness and to oppose uses of memory that are all too monolithic” or that
“aim to enlist particular memories for the promotion of particular enti-
ties,” it is necessary to use Rothberg’s ideas reflexively and with certain
caveats.29
Firstly, it is important to note the disparity between the almost uto-
pian ideals of multidirectionality and the way public memory actu-
ally functions, and secondly, it is essential that comparative strategies
of remembrance enhance rather than obscure, local or specific mem-
ories. On this first point, Andreas Huyssen has noted that while the
twenty-first century has seen increased “acknowledgement of the past”
and “apologies for the past,” this has come at a time when “social jus-
tice and economic equality have been eroded to an unprecedented
degree in western societies.”30 Furthering this broad critique of the
practical and ethical failures of public memory, Lucy Bond argues that,
despite Rothberg’s productive lines of inquiry (and Bond points to
Rothberg’s assertion that the practice of torture and indefinite deten-
tion in the War on Terror evoked the Holocaust), “these accounts have
yet to form a convincing counter-narrative in public discourse.”31 For
Bond, Rothberg’s ideas are laudable but rarely practically productive.
Richard Crownshaw echoes this and also speaks to my second concern
in his assertion that many public memories remain “unidirectional in
the way that, for example, Holocaust memory becomes the paradigm
which other traumas are remembered, both framing and eclipsing local
histories.”32 These concerns and critiques of multidirectionality are
12 A. KEEBLE
clearly valid, and, writing specifically about one of the contexts of this
book, Bond has convincingly shown how analogical memory has helped
exceptionalize 9/11, turning “complex historical events into empty sig-
nifiers” that can and have been ideologically mobilized in various ways.33
I argue here that by understanding Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 as
unresolved cultural traumas, events whose memories are still routinely
subject to various forms of mediation, the potential of Rothberg’s the-
ory of multidirectionality can be harnessed. It presents an opportu-
nity to challenge exceptionalist narratives of 9/11 that have, as Joseph
Darlington states, “ideologically severed 9/11 from history” and to
build connections and arguments that must acknowledge this ongoing
mediation.34 By focussing on cultural texts that resist unilateral narratives
and that emphasize the marginalized voices of disaster, a multidirectional
approach can resist competitive memory and avoid the risks of eroding
localized histories. Conversely, the particular texts under discussion here
enhance the potential of a multidirectional understanding of Katrina,
9/11 and the War on Terror, by providing what Vermeulen describes as
an “affective opening” that sees memory interact with “non-memories”
leaving the future “rigorously open.”35 In other words, the texts ana-
lyzed here are artefacts that facilitate this affective opening up of multidi-
rectional memories.
Rothberg’s book does include some analysis of contemporary
texts and contexts, and a more recent article, “From Gaza to Warsaw:
Mapping Multidirectional Memory” (2011), offers a sustained applica-
tion of his theory in a particularly fraught contemporary conflict. It is
interesting though, given Rothberg’s writings about 9/11 (2003, 2009)
that he does not discuss it in any depth in Multidirectional Memory:
Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009). This
may be to resist the pitfalls of exceptionalization that, as Bond has
identified, have perennially plagued pubic memories of 9/11. It is my
contention, though, that a critical application can not only resist these
pitfalls, but effectively counteract them by showing how representations
reveal or expose narrow, exceptionalist narratives. Such an application
relies on Rothberg’s insistence that public memory is “structurally multi-
directional” and that it is mediated and excavated by various kinds of
texts via what he calls “imaginative links.”36
In his follow-up article, Rothberg asserts that “public memory is…
always marked by transcultural borrowing, exchange, and adaptation.”37
It is about exchange and represents a way to work through cultural
trauma through acts of comparison, and this clearly benefits from textual
representation:
The logic of comparison explored here does not stand or fall on connec-
tions that can be empirically validated for historical accuracy; nor can we
ensure that all such connections will be politically palatable to all con-
cerned parties. Rather, a certain bracketing of empirical history and an
openness to the possibility of strange political bedfellows are necessary
in order for the imaginative links between different histories and social
groups to come into view; these imaginative links are the substance
of multidirectional memory…producing new objects and new lines of
sight…38
The texts I discuss in this book offer these “imaginative links” and,
I argue, open up “new lines of sight” in relation to the underlying con-
nections between the cultural traumas of Katrina, 9/11 and the War
on Terror. Finally, and of particular importance given the division that
characterizes contemporary American society, Rothberg sees comparison
as an essential process for moving beyond a model of cultural memory
that has relied on the logic of the “zero-sum struggle.”39 He argues that
only by “opening up the separate containers of memory and identity that
buttress competitive thinking,” can a productive multidirectionality be
achieved.40 This is critically important in relation to these two events,
given the potential for race-based and class-based competitive memory.
The literary, cinematic and televisual narratives under discussion here
have specific formal and aesthetic qualities that lend them to multidirec-
tional analysis. Treme’s stories of the jazz musician Delmond Lambreaux
(Rob Brown) and chef Jeanette Desautel (Kim Dickens), for example,
feature what we might call a textual paralleling that invites and lends
itself to multidirectional analysis. Benefiting from the serial television
format, and slow pacing of the program, the narrative follows these
two characters over thirty-six episodes, moving back and forth between
New York and New Orleans in the interest of their professional/creative
pursuits. Their journeys are explicitly analogous and build rich vec-
tors of comparison that extend to the narrative’s ongoing comparison
between the two cities. What emerges is a series of contrasts linked to
New Orleans and New York stereotypes: between tradition and innova-
tion, authenticity and commercialism, parochial insularity and cosmopol-
itanism, and integrity and ambition. Ultimately, I argue, this is one of
14 A. KEEBLE
a series of key narrative strands in Treme that build a compellingly neutral

vision of New Orleans exceptionalism—an exceptionalism that contrasts
markedly with the exceptionalist rhetoric of the Bush White House. The
chapters ahead will use and be broadly guided by the theoretical works of
Eyerman and Rothberg to aid analysis and support the central claims of
this book. To illustrate both the value of my approach to these texts, and
the significance of my arguments, I now turn to a general outline of how
Katrina, 9/11 and the War on Terror have been understood in relation
to each other over the last decade.
4 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina

Though there are few substantive comparative accounts of Katrina and
9/11, preliminary comparisons have proliferated in academia, the news
media and other public forums, through a spectrum of discrete argu-
ments and often a justified sense of outrage. In an early episode of Treme
(1.4), the character Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) begins what
will be a series of angry YouTube posts about the political fallout of
Katrina. This part of that character’s story was based partly on Ashley
Morris, a well-known Katrina blogger and, like the fictional Bernette,
a New Orleans-based academic. In Bernette’s first post, which quickly
gains substantial local recognition, he compares the federal govern-
ment’s rebuilding efforts following the great fire in Chicago (1871) and
earthquake in San Francisco (1906), to the efforts in New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast, accusing it of abandoning the city and region. He also
includes a comparison to the more recent federal response to 9/11: “to
New York, fuck you too. You get attacked by a few fundamentalist fuck-
ing assholes and the federal money comes raining down like rose p etals.
Our whole fucking coast gets destroyed and we’re still waiting for some-
body to give a good goddamn.” This rhetoric was by then (the episode
first aired in 2009) common and conveyed a visceral sense of injustice.
While Chapter 3 of this book will show that Treme’s overarching
comparison of New Orleans to New York is more nuanced and repre-
sents an important part of the program’s exploration of the wider per-
mutations of Bush-era exceptionalism, it is important to understand the
prevalence of this comparison particularly in relation to the way Katrina
revealed racial and class inequality in America. Though I argue that
Treme and this cycle of Katrina texts transcend the rhetoric of competi-
tion or competitive memory—not by reverting to what Lynnell Thomas
has described (in her analysis of Treme) as “the old tourist tropes of racial
harmony, racial exceptionalism, and racial respectability,” but through a
comparative critique of US exceptionalism—there is no doubt that, par-
ticularly in the immediate aftermath, the discourse of competitive mem-
ory was prevalent.41
One of the more striking notions that emerged was that of Katrina
as the “black 9/11.” This is a problematic concept as just as it might
imply a challenge to hierarchies of American catastrophes that priv-
ilege whiteness or 9/11, it also risks flattening some of the important
and stark differences between the two events. Moreover, it lends itself
to competitive memory discourse. Salidin Muhammed argued, in an
essay called “Hurricane Katrina: the black nation’s 9/11! A strategic
perspective for self-determination,” that the 9/11 attacks had actually
stifled the momentum of the African-American Liberation Movement,
which had garnered new global support at the World Conference Against
Racism in South Africa in 2001.42 Muhammed saw 9/11 as disrupt-
ing the growth of this movement and identifies Katrina as the moment
to regain momentum. Similarly, Michael Ralph noted that Katrina re-
invigorated discussions about “what it meant to be African American,”
just as 9/11, he argues, had “forced Americans to rethink democ-
racy and citizenship.” Ralph went so far as to argue that the “flooding
of the Gulf Coast quickly became something like the black communi-
ty’s 9/11.”43 But the rhetoric of Katrina as “the black 9/11” mostly
sought to highlight the racial oppression and inequality which Katrina
exposed, rather than deploying the zero-sum tactics of competitive mem-
ory. That is to say that, instead of any attempt to diminish the sense
of 9/11 as a moment of national tragedy, it sought to ascribe equal
importance to Katrina or to use the disparity in how the two cultural
traumas have been approached to make a point. Michael Eric Dyson’s
Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
(2006) deployed this strategy at several points, and his arguments have
gained further exposure through his appearance in When the Levees Broke:
A Requiem in Four Acts. Dyson sought more to expose the extents of
racial inequality than to critique the importance attached to 9/11.
Nevertheless, the title of the book’s prologue, “Pompei and 8/29,” is
pointed. The prologue describes how the author’s memory of a recent
trip to Pompei, and knowledge of its history of disaster and slavery, was
evoked by the unfolding of the Katrina catastrophe. It also invites the
reader to consider Katrina in comparison with 9/11 in its title’s use of
16 A. KEEBLE
the date-name “8/29,” which implicitly argues that the same significance
or urgency that shaped the national response to “9/11” should have
been attached to Katrina.
Dyson’s most powerful comparative analysis focusses on the 9/11
Victim’s Fund. He points out that the US government has offered noth-
ing like this fund, which provided an average of two million dollars for
eligible claimants, to Katrina victims. Dyson states that 9/11 victims
were “people of means, people who had names, people whose bodies
were identified with a picture in the papers – more than can be said for
the largely nameless, faceless, victims of 8/29.”44 Here, Dyson again
uses “8/29” and also makes reference to the New York Times “Portraits
of Grief,” a series of elegiac snapshots of the lives of 9/11 victims which
ran from September to December 2001. Dyson builds on this through
analysis of Kanye West’s famous claim in the immediate days after the
flooding of New Orleans, that “George Bush doesn’t care about black
people,” and points out that it is difficult not to think of 9/11 when
considering Bush’s approach to the Katrina crisis. After all, his response
to 9/11 was, for all its faults, decisive and urgent. That he was so mem-
orably visible after 9/11 magnified his lack of action in the immediate
aftermath of “8/29.” However, a foreboding line of continuity was clear
in the militarized nature of the relief effort when it finally was launched.
Dyson’s book is a key engagement or “negotiation” with the ongo-
ing “cultural trauma” of Katrina, rather than an act of competitive
memory. He is rightly angry at America’s failure to protect the citizens
of the Gulf Coast after Katrina, the broken covenant which Eyerman
sees as the center of the cultural trauma of Katrina: “the failure of those
charged with collective responsibility.”45 But while Dyson’s discus-
sions of 9/11 do not operate in the “zero sum struggle” that Rothberg
mentions, and while they could easily do, he only occasionally ges-
tures toward what is to be learned through comparison. I say this not
to point to a weakness in Dyson’s analysis—which has a range of other
important critical functions—but to the latent potential of multidirec-
tional analysis. Diane Negra’s edited collection of essays, Old and New
Media After Katrina (2010), builds fruitfully on some of Dyson’s key
lines of inquiry and at several points invites further multidirectional anal-
ysis. One of its more persuasive arguments highlights the divergence
in post-event media representation of citizens of the two cities. Negra
shows an acute contrast in depictions of the heroic survivors of 9/11 to
the depictions of New Orleanians as somehow complicit in the Katrina
crisis. Such characterizations drew crassly from the fact that the victims
of 9/11 were mostly workers in the elite center of American financial
power while victims of Katrina were predominantly poor people who
were perceived to have chosen to stay at home (though of course most
victims didn’t have means to travel and many were in fact disabled or
infirm). Negra cites the pervasive logic underpinning such depictions:
“[n]ational disapproval of New Orleans post-Katrina has consistently
caricatured its ‘do-nothing’ citizens, relying upon neoliberal discourses
of self-sufficiency and studious avoidance of structural features that pro-
duce social vulnerability.”46 This kind of disparity put enormous pressure
on the American melting pot myth which was harnessed, after 9/11,
to evoke unity. Indeed, after 9/11 concerted efforts such as the previ-
ously mentioned “Portraits of Grief” feature in the New York Times
eulogized victims in a way that was, according to editor Janny Scott,
“utterly democratic” in their inclusion of window washers and cafeteria
cashiers alongside the financial elites.47 However, Scott is also quick to
attach distinctly neoliberal rhetoric to her description of the “men”: “[s]
o many were men, traders and brokers, in their thirties and early for-
ties, people who had ridden the bull market out of the lower middle class
and into comfortable homes in suburban New Jersey.”48 A provisional
multidirectional analysis of this shows that both assessments of the vic-
tims are limited and that both point powerfully toward wider systemic
prejudice. While Negra is right to point to this media disparity, it is the
case that the mainstream media responses to both events were designed
to advance specific—but linked—agendas characterized by racialized
neoliberal rhetoric of meritocracy.
The “Portraits in Grief” were only small parts of a larger and
widely propagated post-9/11 narrative of America as a bastion of free-
dom and democracy—ideals which were said to be under attack after
9/11. However, these ideals inevitably leaned on the melting pot
myth of plurality and inclusion, and the unpalatable post-9/11 surges
in xenophobia, Islamophobia and nationalism were written out of
such narratives. This discrepancy between representation and reality,
between post-crisis unity and rising racism, was exposed by Katrina, as
positive representations of the American melting pot were replaced by
images of the extreme poverty of mostly black Americans. Negra shows
how Katrina “punctured” the prevalent 9/11 myths, and this notion
is taken up by Hartnell.49 Hartnell argues that where 9/11 “consol-
idated a sense of national unity and led to a powerful resurgence of
18 A. KEEBLE
U.S. exceptionalist discourse,” Katrina, in contrast, “challenged some

of the most deeply held ideas about what it means to be American.”50
However, this analysis of Katrina can also be productively extended back
to 9/11, and while Hartnell is undoubtedly right to point to the resur-
gence of exceptionalist discourse and nationalism, it was also the case
that this included—and made more visible—extreme racial inequality
and discrimination, particularly toward Muslims, Arabs, Asians, Asian-
Americans and Arab-Americans. Both events have revealed systemic rac-
ism in different but clearly related ways, particularly through government
rhetoric and policy, and media representation. Moreover, the specific
pressures these crises placed on the myths of American multicultural-
ism have aggregated, and the erosion continues apace. Yet, one of the
abiding reasons why 9/11 appears so powerfully in the imaginations of
artists/writers tackling Katrina, manifesting explicitly in Katrina narra-
tives or lurking in their subtexts, is that the lies of national unity and
togetherness that were so emphatically harnessed by the political and cul-
tural elites after 9/11, remained largely intact until Katrina. In fact, one
notion that emerges strongly in several of these texts is the idea that the
intense investment in the War on Terror, which was the focal point of
this rhetoric of unity, came at the expense of the protection of and pro-
vision for vulnerable Americans. Reprioritizations for federal funding and
restructuring of federal departments (which infamously meant that the
Federal Emergency Management Association fell under the remit of the
Department of Homeland Security) as well as major foreign policy shifts,
including new surveillance programs like the Patriot Act and a focus on
counterterrorism and the foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, inevitably
left many domestic projects underfunded. In other words, the nation’s
focus on securitization after 9/11 ironically made it less secure and more
vulnerable to “natural disasters” like Katrina while infrastructure contin-
ued to degrade. An extreme variant on this rhetoric posed the possibility
that Katrina was a distraction from the American military’s vigilance in
the War on Terror leaving the nation vulnerable to further terror attacks.
These are the kind of fundamental links between the two cul-
tural traumas that multidirectional analysis can elucidate in depth. We
might proceed to compare the processes of memorialization and puz-
zle over the reasons why, as Taylor and Levine point out, the discourse
of “human error was wholly absent from 9/11 memorialization.”51
Similarly, while it is clear that neoliberal ideology has underpinned the
conservative American media’s portrayal of the “do-nothing” citizens of
New Orleans, there are clear connections to the way the media advanced
inverted, ideologically driven depictions of 9/11 victims as hardworking,
self-made “men.” In both cases, the priority has been to convey national
strength. Just as depictions of Katrina victims characterized them as
“other” or outside the strong homeland mainstream, depictions of 9/11
victims embodied it and powerfully reinforced the larger “official narra-
tive of 9/11,” as a simple, “them” against “us” conflict or even a “clash
of civilizations” between Islam and the West, couched in the rhetoric of
heroism and national unity.
My project in this book is to carry forward such analyses on the key
texts of the Katrina cycle. These kinds of texts offer more than politi-
cal positions and arguments as they are about the human experience of
crisis and survival. Even the documentary or nonfiction texts which I
analyze are built around human experience rather than political polemic
and are particularly invested in conveying the experience of the voice-
less. The approach I adopt in this book opens up exciting interpretive
possibilities and can also build substantively on existing scholarship. An
example might be the focus of my final chapter, which examines three
key cinematic engagements with Katrina, Beasts of the Southern Wild,
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and When the Levees Broke:
A Requiem in Four Acts, in relation to what Henry A. Giroux has
described as a “new and dangerous” Bush-era politics of disposability.52
This analysis will build on discussions of what Christopher Lloyd has
identified as a contemporary “Southern biopolitics” as well as the specific
biopolitical practices and policies of the War on Terror.53 Lloyd’s analy-
sis, and that of Holly Cade Brown, has demonstrated the need for this
kind of approach in relation to Katrina and the Katrina texts.54 My dis-
cussion of these films builds on these ideas and outlines subtle but com-
pelling links to the biopolitics of the War on Terror, using the work of
Giorgio Agamben and Alex Adams, particularly his recent intervention in
the post-9/11 torture debate, Political Torture in Popular Culture: The
Role of Representations in the Post-9/11 Torture Debate (2016).55
5 The Depoliticization of 9/11

A final preliminary task is to outline what I have already described as the
“depoliticization of 9/11,” a phenomenon that has been the subject of
much critical discussion, and which the Katrina texts respond to in var-
ious ways. That 9/11 was depoliticized—or in Richard Gray’s words
20 A. KEEBLE
“domesticated”—by its early literary and cultural representation, is an

argument that has been made repeatedly but which has been challenged
with some force. Fundamentally, there is an argument that domesticity is
never apolitical. This idea is at the heart of work by scholars like Nancy
Armstrong who argue that formations of the domestic are always polit-
ical or ideological.56 It is certainly the case that contemporary discus-
sions of “domestic literature” such as Kristin J. Jacobson’s Neodomestic
American Fictions (2010) and Susan Fraiman’s Extreme Domesticity:
A View from the Margins (2017)—both discussed in Chapter 2—identify
many richly political and sometimes powerfully resistant literary domes-
ticities. Nevertheless, there is a stark division in the early 9/11 novels,
which were in many ways conservatively insular and certainly nation-
ally “domestic,” and the later post-Katrina texts which are much more
explicitly political and/or international in scope. The high-profile exam-
ples of 9/11 fiction that were released or conceived of before Katrina
avoid explicitly political themes in a way that later, post-Katrina 9/11
novels, such as Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) or Thomas
Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013), do not. In one of the first overviews of
9/11 fiction, “The End of Innocence,” Pankaj Mishra, actually discuss-
ing Ken Kalfus’s, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006) expresses his
frustration at this so-called domestic fixation, focussing on the repeated
deployment of marriage plots: “Are we really meant to think of domestic
discord, also deployed by DeLillo and McInerney, as a metaphor for post
9/11 America?”57 Mishra’s argument was developed by both Richard
Gray and Michael Rothberg in a special issue of American Literary
History. In “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a
Time of Crisis,” Gray cites Falling Man, The Good Life and The Emperor’s
Children in his prognosis that in early 9/11 fiction, “the crisis is in every
sense of the word domesticated.”58 For Gray, the lack of engagement
with “otherness” after 9/11 was deeply problematic. Rothberg, respond-
ing to Gray’s article, builds on this and in keeping with his work on
multidirectional memory calls for a “fiction of international relations and
extraterritorial citizenship” in order to mitigate the perceived dominance
of privileged American domestic settings and a “failure” of the American
literary imagination.59 This diagnosis of “failure” was extended by
Martin Randall who argued in 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (2011)
that the failure was more about the limits of a conservative realism and
a reticence to tackle the specter of otherness: “a certain kind of realist
fiction generally failed to identify and describe the ‘wounds’ left after the
attacks.”60
As stated, the depoliticization of 9/11 by its literary representation
is a concept that is contested. John Duvall and Robert P. Marzec, in
their introduction to a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, take issue
with this position: “Gray and Rothberg are both unwilling to look very
closely at what 9/11 fiction sets out to do because they are both sure
that they know what 9/11 fiction ought to be doing.”61 The key tenet
of their argument, which Duvall further develops in his contribution to
The Cambridge Companion to American Literature After 1945 (2011),
is that political traumas have historically been dealt with through private
and personal struggles and through domestic settings:
If one retrospectively applied their perspective to fiction after World War I,

one might be forced to say that Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ernest
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises are failures for their oblique treatment
of the root cause of a historical trauma, since Woolf’s Septimus Smith
and Hemingway’s Jake Barnes only imagine the private traumas of war
veterans.62
Catherine Morley has also raised concerns about the critical analysis of
Gray, Rothberg and Mishra, specifically. Morley points to recent exam-
ples of US fiction that deals with political themes through domestic set-
tings and, most urgently, challenges the idea that fictional texts should be
obliged to a kind of didactic politics:
Perhaps most troubling is the suggestion that fiction is no more than a

political tool, through which writers can understand (and educate readers
about) the United States’ place in the world. Of course fiction certainly
can play precisely this role, but one of the joys of fiction is that its power
goes well beyond the narrowly political.63
Morley’s latter point is particularly compelling as it requires us to con-

sider what we expect the fiction of disaster or trauma to do.
While Morley is clearly right to raise questions of this nature, it
remains of significant interest that authors such as Don DeLillo,
Claire Messud, Jay McInerney and Ken Kalfus all focussed on the
microcosms of marital and family relationships in their 9/11 novels.
Similarly, it is striking that such political filmmakers as Oliver Stone and
22 A. KEEBLE
Paul Greengrass would focus strictly on the immediate emergency of

9/11, effectively operating in the disaster movie genre, in their high-
profile cinematic representations of 9/11. As stated, later, post-Katrina
9/11 novels, films and other cultural narratives would become much
more political and outwardly facing, responding to the calls of Gray,
Rothberg and Mishra, and we might note the importance of Katrina in
opening up more trenchant political approaches. My contention here,
though, is that when Katrina happened the wider story and permuta-
tions of 9/11, the stories lying beneath and around the “official nar-
rative,” and the underlying truths which the attacks exposed, all things
that we might reasonably expect literary authors to tackle, were unex-
plored and mostly untold. I argue that the cycle of Katrina texts analyzed
here, which appeared between 2006 and 2013, does significant work in
addressing this absence while also “going beyond the narrowly political.”
As stated, the Katrina cycle remains fundamentally built on human
stories and resists slipping entirely into didactic polemics. This is partly
related to the specific formal strategies that they take up. One of these
is the documentary or nonfiction mode, which ordinarily we might see
as signaling a movement to more overtly political themes. The Katrina
documentaries, and I include the two Spike Lee films, When the Levees
Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) and sequel, If God Is Willing and
Da Creek Don’t Rise (2010), Eggers’ Zeitoun as well as Tia Lessen and
Carl Deal’s celebrated film Trouble the Water (2006)—among others—in
this cluster of texts, are built profoundly on oral history traditions. While
they are undoubtedly politicized, their force comes from this oral his-
tory element. Zeitoun was developed from one of McSweeney’s (Eggers’
publishing house) oral history projects, “Voices From the Storm,” which
was published as a collection in 2006. Similarly, Lee’s documentaries
are overwhelmingly human stories—the strapline for When the Levees
Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts is actually “A Human Tragedy”—leaning
heavily on its panorama of oral testimonies of the experience of the
flooding of New Orleans and its aftermath. Hartnell points to the Lee
and Eggers narratives as paradigm cases of what she sees as the major
Katrina narrative mode: “documentary has emerged as the choice mode
for meditating on this event.”64 Though it is undoubtedly right to point
to the prominence of this wave of meditative, human story-led docu-
mentary or nonfiction narratives, the documentary/nonfiction texts
sit thematically alongside important fictional Katrina texts. It is worth
noting, also, that the documentary mode was also popular after 9/11.
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line the paragaster as fast as its original covering of choanocytes
retreats into the newly formed chambers.
Fig. 81.—S. setosum. Young Sponge, with one whorl of radial tubes. o, Osculum;
p, pore; sp1, monaxon; sp4, quadriradiate spicule. (After Maas.)
With a canal system precisely similar to that of Sycon, Ute (Fig. 83)
shows an advance in structure in the thickening of the dermal layers
over the distal ends of the chambers. The dermal thickenings above
neighbouring chambers extend laterally and meet; and there results
a sheet of dermal tissue perforated by dermal ostia, which open into
the inhalant canals, and strengthened by stout spicules running
longitudinally. This layer is termed a cortex; it covers the whole
sponge, compacting the radial tubes so that they form, together with
the cortex, a secondary wall to the sponge, which is once more a
simple sac, but with a complex wall. The cortex may be enormously
developed, so as to form more than half the thickness of the wall
(Fig. 84). The chambers taken together are spoken of as the
chamber layer.
Fig. 82.—Sycon raphanus. A, Longitudinal section of young decalcified Sponge
at a stage somewhat later than that shown in Fig. 81. B, Transverse section
of the same through a whorl of tubes. d, Dermal membrane; g, gastral
membrane; H, paragaster; sp4, tetraradiate spicule; T, radial tube. (After
Maas.)
Fig. 83.—Transverse section of the body-wall of Ute, passing longitudinally
through two chambers. a.p, Apopyle; d.o, dermal ostium; fl.ch, flagellated
chamber or radial tube; i.c, inhalant canal; p, prosopyle. (After Dendy.)
We have already alluded to the resemblance between a young

Ascon person and a radial tube of Sycon—a comparison which calls
to mind the somewhat strange view of certain earlier authors, that
the flagellated chambers are really the sponge individuals. If now we
suppose each Ascon-like radial tube of Sycon to undergo that same
process of growth by which the Sycon itself was derived from the
Ascon, we shall then have a sponge with a canal system of the type
seen in Leucandra among British forms, but more diagrammatically
shown in the foreign genus Leucilla (Fig. 85). The foregoing remarks
do not pretend to give an account of the transition from Sycon to
Leucilla as it occurred in phylogeny. For some indication of this we
must await embryological research.
In Leucandra the fundamental structure is obscured by the

irregularity of its canal system. It shows a further and most important
difference from Leucilla in the smaller size and rounded form of its
chambers. This change of form marks an advance in efficiency; for
now the flagella converge to a centre, so that they all act on the
same drop of water, while in the tubular chamber their action is more
widely distributed and proportionately less intense (see p. 236).
Fig. 84.—Transverse section through the body-wall of Grantiopsis. d.o, Dermal
ostium; fl.ch, flagellated chamber; i.c, long incurrent canal traversing the
thick cortex to reach the chamber layer; p, apopyle. (After Dendy.)
Fig. 85.—Transverse section through the body-wall of Leucilla. d.o, Dermal

ostium; ex.c, exhalant canal; fl.ch, chamber; i.c, inhalant canal. (After
Dendy.)
Above are described three main types of canal system—that of

Homocoela, of Sycon, and of Leucandra and Leucilla. These are
conveniently termed the first, second, and third types respectively,
and may be briefly described as related to one another somewhat in
the same way as a scape, umbel, and compound umbel among
inflorescences. These types formed the basis of Haeckel's famous
classification.[221] It has, however, been concluded[222] that the
skeleton is a safer guide in taxonomy, at any rate for the smaller
subdivisions; and in modern classifications genera with canal
systems of the third type will be found distributed among various
families; while in the Grantiidae, Ute and Leucandra stand side by
side. This treatment implies a belief that the third type of canal
system has been independently and repeatedly evolved within the
Calcarea—an example of a phenomenon, homoplasy, strikingly
displayed throughout the group. It is, remarkably enough, the case
that all the canal systems found in the remainder of the Porifera are
more or less modified forms of one or other of the second two types
of canal system above described.
The families Grantiidae, Heteropidae, and Amphoriscidae, all

possessing a dermal cortex, are distinguished as follows:—The
Grantiidae by the absence of subdermal sagittal triradiate spicules
and of conspicuous subgastral quadriradiates; the Heteropidae by
the presence of sagittal triradiates; the Amphoriscidae by the
presence of conspicuous subgastral quadriradiates.
Two families of Calcarea, possibly allied, remain for special mention

—the Pharetronidae, a family rich in genera, and containing almost
all the fossil forms of the group, and the Astroscleridae.
The Pharetronidae are with one, or perhaps two exceptions, fossil

forms, having in common the arrangement of the spicules of their
main skeletal framework in fibres. The family is divided into two sub-
families:—
I. Dialytinae.—The spicules are not fused to one another; the exact

mode of their union into fibres is unknown, but an organic cement
may be present.
Lelapia australis, a recent species, should probably be placed here

as the sole living representative. Dendy has shown[223] that this
remarkable species has a skeleton of the same fibrous character as
is found in typical Dialytinae, and that the triradiate spicules in the
fibres undergo a modification into the "tuning-fork" type (Fig. 86, C),
to enable them to be compacted into smooth fibres. "Tuning-forks,"
though not exclusively confined to Pharetronids, are yet very
characteristic of them.
Fig. 86.—Portions of the skeleton of Petrostroma schulzei. A, Framework with
ensheathing pellicle; B, quadriradiate spicules with laterally fused rays; C, a
"tuning-fork." (After Doederlein.)
II. Lithoninae.—The main skeletal framework is formed of spicules

fused together, and is covered by a cortex containing free spicules.
Fig. 87.—A spicule from the skeleton framework of Plectroninia, showing the
terminally expanded rays. (After Hinde.)
The sub-family contains only one living genus and a few recently
described fossil forms. Petrostroma schulzei[224] lives in shallow
water near Japan; Plectroninia halli[225] and Bactronella were found
in Eocene beds of Victoria; Porosphaera[226] long known from the
Chalk of England and of the Continent, has recently been shown by
Hinde[226] to be nearly allied to Plectroninia; finally, Plectinia[227] is a
genus erected by Počta for a sponge from Cenomanian beds of
Bohemia. Doederlein, in 1896, expressed his opinion that fossil
representatives of Lithoninae would most surely be discovered. The
fused spicules are equiangular quadriradiates; they are united in
Petrostroma by lateral fusion of the rays, in Plectroninia (Fig. 87) and
Porosphaera by fusion of apposed terminal flat expansions of the
rays, and in some, possibly all, genera a continuous deposit of
calcium carbonate ensheaths the spicular reticulum. Thus they recall
the formation of the skeleton on the one hand of the Lithistida and on
the other of the Dictyonine Hexactinellida (see pp. 202, 211).
"Tuning-forks" may occur in the dermal membrane.
Fig. 88.—Astrosclera willeyana, Lister. A, the Sponge, × about 3. p, The ostia on

its distal surface. B, a portion of the skeleton showing four polyhedra with
radiating crystalline fibres. C, an ostium; the surrounding tissue contains
young stages of polyhedra. (After Lister.)
The Astroscleridae, as known at present, contain a single genus

and species, apparently the most isolated in the phylum. Astrosclera
willeyana[228] was brought back from the Loyalty Islands, and from
Funafuti of the Ellice group. Its skeleton is both chemically and
structurally aberrant. In other Calcarea the calcium carbonate of the
skeleton is present as calcite, in Astrosclera as aragonite, and the
elements are solid polyhedra, united by their surfaces to the total
exclusion of soft parts (Fig. 88). Each element consists of crystalline
fibres radially disposed around a few central granules, and
terminating peripherally in contact with the fibres of adjacent
elements. Young polyhedra are to be found free in the soft parts at
the surface. The chambers are exceptionally minute, especially for a
calcareous sponge, comparing with those of other sponges as
follows:—
Astrosclera chambers, 10µ × 8µ to 18µ × 11µ.

Smallest chambers in Silicea, 15µ × 18µ to 24µ × 31µ.
Smallest chambers in Calcarea, 60µ × 40µ.
In its outward form Astrosclera resembles certain Pharetronids. The
minute dimensions of the ciliated chambers relegate Astrosclera to
the Micromastictora, and the fortunate fact that the calcium
carbonate of its skeleton possesses the mineral characters not of
calcite, but of aragonite, renders it less difficult to conceive that its
relations may be rather with the non-calcareous than the calcareous
sponges.
BRANCH II. MICROMASTICTORA

All sponges which do not possess calcareous skeletons are
characterised by choanocytes, which, when compared with those of
Calcarea, are conspicuous for their smaller size. The great majority
(Silicispongiae) of the non-calcareous sponges either secrete
siliceous skeletons or are connected with siliceous sponges by a
nicely graded series of forms. The small remainder are entirely
askeletal. All these non-calcareous sponges are included, under the
title Micromastictora, in a natural group, opposed to the
Megamastictora as of equal value.
The subdivision of the Micromastictora is a matter of some difficulty.

The Hexactinellida alone are a well circumscribed group. After their
separation there remains, besides the askeletal genera, an
assemblage of forms, the Demospongiae, which fall into two main
tribes. These betray their relationship by series of intermediate
types, but a clue is wanting which shall determine decisively the
direction in which the series are to be read. The askeletal genera are
the crux of the systematist. It is perhaps safest, while recognising
that many of them bear a likeness of one kind or another to various
Micromastictora, to retain them together in a temporary class, the
Myxospongiae.
CLASS I. MYXOSPONGIAE
The class Myxospongiae is a purely artificial one, containing widely
divergent forms, which possess a common negative character,
namely, the absence of a skeleton. As a result of this absence they
are all encrusting in habit.
One genus, Hexadella, has been regarded by its discoverer

Topsent[229] as an Hexactinellid. The same authority places
Oscarella with the Tetractinellida; it is more difficult to suggest the
direction in which we are to seek the relations of the remaining type,
Halisarca.
Hexadella, from the coast of France, is a remarkable little rose-

coloured or bright yellow sponge, with large sac-like flagellated
chambers and a very lacunar ectosome.
Oscarella is a brightly coloured sponge, with a characteristic velvety

surface; it is a British genus, but by no means confined to our
shores. Its canal system has been described by some authors as
diplodal, by others as eurypylous. Topsent[230] has shown, and we
can confirm his statement, that though the chambers have usually
the narrow afferent and efferent ductules of a diplodal system, yet
since each one may communicate with two or three canals, the canal
system cannot be described as diplodal. The hypophare attains a
great development, and in it the generative products mature. The
pinacocytes, like those of Plakinidae, and perhaps of Aplysilla, are
flagellated.
Halisarca, also British, is easily distinguished from Oscarella by the

presence of a mucus-like secretion which oozes from it, and by the
absence of the bright coloration characteristic of Oscarella. It
naturally suggests itself that the coloration in the one case and the
secretion in the other are protective, and in this respect perform one
of the functions of the skeleton of other sponges. The chambers are
long, tubular, and branched. There is no hypophare.
CLASS II. HEXACTINELLIDA[231]
Silicispongiae, defined by their spicules, of which the rays lie along
three rectangular axes. The canal system is simple, with thimble-
shaped chambers. The body-wall is divided into endosome,
ectosome, and choanosome.
Some authors would elevate the Hexactinellida to the position of a

third main sub-group of Porifera, thus separating them from other
siliceous sponges. In considering this view it is important to realise at
the outset that they are deep-water forms. They bear evident traces
of the influence of their habitat, and like others of the colonists of the
deep sea, are impressed with marked archaic features. Yet they are
still bound to other Micromastictora, first by the small size of their
choanocytes, and secondly by the presence of siliceous spicules.
This second character is really a double link, for it involves not
merely the presence of silica in the skeleton, but also the presence
in each spicule of a well-marked axial filament. Now this axial
filament is a structure which is gaining in importance, for purposes of
classification, in proportion as its absence in Calcarea is becoming
more probable. The Hexactinellida are the only sponges, other than
the bath sponge, which are at all generally known. They have won
recognition by their beauty, as the bath sponge by its utility, and, like
it, one of their number—the Venus's Flower-Basket—forms an
important article of commerce, the chief fishery being in the
Philippine Islands. This wonderful beauty belongs to the skeleton,
and is greatly concealed when the soft parts are present.
We have said that the Hexactinellids are deep-sea forms; they are
either directly fixed to the bottom or more often moored in the ooze
by long tufts of rooting spicules. In the "glass-rope sponge," the
rooting tuft of long spicules, looking like a bundle of spun glass, is
valued by the Japanese, who export it to us. In Monorhaphis the
rooting tuft is replaced by a single giant spicule,[232] three metres in
length, and described as "of the thickness of a little finger"! Probably
it is as a result of their fixed life in the calm waters of the deep
sea[233] that Hexactinellids contrast with most other sponges by their
symmetry. It should not, however, be forgotten that many of the
Calcarea which inhabit shallow water exhibit almost as perfect a
symmetry.
Fig. 89.—Longitudinal section of a young specimen of Lanuginella pupa O.S.,

with commencing formation of the oscular area. × 35. d.m, Dermal
membrane; g.m, gastral membrane; pg, paragaster; sd.tr, subdermal
trabeculae; Sg.tr, subgastral trabeculae. (After F. E. Schulze.)
The structure of the body-wall in Hexactinellida is so constant as to

make it possible to give a general description applicable to all
members of the group. It is of considerable thickness, but a large
part is occupied by empty spaces, for the actual tissue is present in
minimum quantity. In the wall the chamber-layer is suspended by
trabeculae of soft tissue, between a dermal membrane on the
outside and a similar gastral membrane on the inner side (Fig. 89).
Thus the water entering the chambers through their numerous pores
has first passed through the ostia in the dermal membrane and
traversed the subdermal trabecular space; on leaving the chambers
it flows through the subgastral trabecular space and the ostia in the
gastral membrane, to enter the paragaster and leave the body at the
osculum. The trabeculae and the dermal and gastral membranes
together constitute the dermal layer. This conclusion is based on
comparison with adults of the other groups, for in the absence of
embryological knowledge no direct evidence is available. According
to the Japanese investigator, Isao Ijima,[234] the dermal and gastral
membranes are but expansions of the trabeculae, and the
trabeculae themselves are entirely cellular, containing none of the
gelatinous basis met with in the dermal layer of all other sponges.
There is no surface layer of pinacocytes, the cells forming the
trabeculae being all of one type, namely, irregularly branching cells,
connected with one another by their branches to form a syncytium.
In the trabeculae are found scleroblasts and archaeocytes.
The chambers have a characteristic shape: they are variously

described as "thimble-shaped," "tubular," or "Syconate," and they
open by wide mouths into the subgastral trabecular space. Their
walls have been named the membrana reticularis from the fact that,
when preserved with only ordinary precautions, they are seen as a
regular network of protoplasmic strands, with square meshes and
nuclei at the nodes. This appearance recently found an explanation
when Schulze, for the first time, succeeded in preserving the collared
cells of Hexactinellids.[235] Schulze was then able to show that the
choanocytes are not in contact with one another at their bases,
where the nuclei are situated, but communicate with one another by
stout protoplasmic strands. The form of the choanocyte can be seen
in Fig. 91.
Fig. 90.—Portion of the body-wall of Walteria sp., showing the thimble-shaped

flagellated chambers, above which is seen the dermal membrane. (After F.
E. Schulze.)
To Schulze's description of the chamber, Ijima has added the
important contributions that every mesh in the reticulum functions as
a chamber pore or prosopyle; and that porocytes, such as are found
in Calcarea, are wanting. This structure of the chamber-walls, the
absence of gelatinous basis in the dermal layer, and the slight
degree of histological differentiation in the same layer, added to the
more obvious character of thimble-shaped chambers, are the chief
archaic features of Hexactinellid morphology.
Fig. 91.—Portion of a section of the membrana reticularis or chamber-wall of

Schaudinnia arctica, × 1500. (After F. E. Schulze.)
The skeleton which supports the soft parts is, like them, simple and
constant in its main features. It is secreted by scleroblasts, which lie
in the trabeculae, and is made up of only one kind of spicule and its
modifications. This is the hexactine, a spicule which possesses six
rays disposed along three rectangular axes. Each ray contains an
axial thread, which meets its fellow at the centre of the spicule,
where they together form the axial cross. Modifications of the
hexactine arise either by reduction or branching, by spinulation or
expansion of one or more of the rays. The forms of spicule arising by
reduction are termed pentactines, tetractines, and so on, according
to the number of the remaining rays. Those rays which are
suppressed leave the proximal portion of their axial thread as a
remnant marking their former position (Fig. 94). Octactine spicules
seem to form an exception to the above statements, but Schulze has
shown that they too are but modifications of the hexactine arising by
(1) branching of the rays of a hexactine, followed by (2)
recombination of the secondary rays (Fig. 92).
Fig. 92.—A, discohexaster, in which the four cladi a, a', b, b', c of each ray start
directly from a central nodule. B, disco-octaster, resulting from the
redistribution of the twenty-four cladi of A into eight groups of three. (After
Schulze, from Delage.)
The various spicules are named, irrespective of their form, according

to their position and corresponding function. The arrangement of the
spicules is best realised by means of a diagram (Fig. 93).
Fig. 93.—Scheme to show the arrangement of spicules in the Hexactinellid

skeleton. Canalaria, microscleres in the walls of the excurrent canals;
Dermalia Autoderm[alia], microscleres in the dermal membrane; D.
Hypoderm[alia], more deeply situated dermalia; Dictyonalia, parenchymalia
which become fused to form the skeletal framework of Dictyonina; Gastralia
Autogastr[alia], microscleres in the gastral membrane; Gastralia
Hypogastr[alia], more deeply situated gastralia; Parenchymalia Principalia,
main supporting spicules between the chambers; P. Comitalia, slender
diactine or triactine spicules accompanying the last; P. Intermedia,
microscleres between the P. principalia; Prostalia, projecting spicules; P.
basalia, rooting spicules, from the base; P. marginalia, defensive spicules,
round the oscular rim; P. pleuralia, defensive spicules, from the sides. (From
Delage and Hérouard, after F. E. Schulze.)
The deviations from this ground-plan of Hexactinellid structure are
few and simple. They are due to folding of the chamber-layer, or to
variations in the shape of the chambers, and to increasing fusion of
the spicules to form rigid skeletons. A simple condition of the
chamber-layer, like that of the young sponge of Fig. 89, occurs also
in some adult Hexactinellids, e.g. in Walteria of the Pacific Ocean
(Fig. 90). Thus is represented in this order the second type of canal
system described among Calcarea. More frequently, however,
instead of forming a smooth sheet, the chamber-layer grows out into
a number of tubular diverticula, the cavities of which are excurrent
canals; these determine a corresponding number of incurrent canals
which lie between them. In this way there arises a canal system
resembling the third type of Calcarea. By still further pouching so as
to give secondary diverticula, opening into the first, a complicated
canal system is formed, as, for example, in Euplectella suberea.
To return to the skeleton, the most complete fusion is attained by the

deposit of a continuous sheath of silica round the apposed parallel
rays of neighbouring spicules. This may be termed the dictyonine
type of union, for it occurs in all those forms originally included under
the term Dictyonina, in which the cement is deposited pari passu
with the formation of the spicules. In other cases connecting bridges
of silica unite the spicules, or there may be a connecting reticulum of
siliceous threads, or, again, rays crossing obliquely may be soldered
together at the point of contact. These more irregular methods occur
in species where the spicules are free at their first formation.
Spicules originally free may later be united in a true Dictyonine
fashion. The terms Lyssacina and Dictyonina are useful to denote
respectively: the former all those Hexactinellida in which the spicules
are free at their first formation, and the latter those in which the
deposit of the cementing layer goes hand in hand with the formation
of the spicules. But the terms do not indicate separateness of origin
of the groups denoted by them, for there is evidence that Dictyonine
types have been derived repeatedly from Lyssacine types, and that
in fact every Dictyonine was once a Lyssacine.
Fig. 94.—Amphidisc, at a are traces of the four missing rays.
The real or natural cleft in the class lies between those genera
possessing amphidiscs (Figs. 94, 97) among their microscleres, and
all the remainder of the Hexactinellida which bear hexasters (Fig.
96). The former set of genera constitute the sub-class
Amphidiscophora, the latter the Hexasterophora.
Fig. 95.—Portion of body-wall of Hyalonema, in section, showing the irregular

chambers.
Sub-Class 1. Amphidiscophora.—Amphidiscs are present,

hexasters absent. A tuft of rooting spicules or basalia is always
present. The ciliated chambers deviate more or less from the typical
thimble shape, and the membrana reticularis is continuous from
chamber to chamber (Figs. 94, 95, 97).
Fig. 96.—Hexasters. A, Graphiohexaster; B, floricome; C, onychaster.
Sub-Class 2. Hexasterophora.—Hexasters are present,

amphidiscs absent. The chambers have the typical regular form, and
are sharply marked off from one another (Figs. 90, 96).
All the Amphidiscophora have Lyssacine skeletons; in the

Hexasterophora both types of skeleton occur. The subdivision of the
Hexasterophora is determined by the presence or absence of
uncinate spicules. An "uncinatum" is a diactine spicule, pointed at
both ends and bearing barbs all directed towards one end. This
method of classification gives us a wholly Dictyonine order,
Uncinataria, and an order consisting partly of Dictyonine, partly of
Lyssacine genera, which may be distinguished as the
Anuncinataria. Ova have rarely been found, and sexually produced
larvae never; but Ijima has found archaeocyte clusters in abundance,
and his evidence is in favour of the view that they give rise asexually
to larvae, described by him in this class for the first time (see p. 231).
Both sub-classes are represented in British waters: the

Amphidiscophora by Hyalonema thomsoni and Pheronema
carpenteri; the Hexasterophora by Euplectella suberea and
Asconema setubalense, and of course possibly by others.
Hyalonema thomsoni, one of the glass-rope sponges, was dredged

by the Porcupine off the Shetland Islands in water of about 550
fathoms. The spindle-shaped body of the sponge is shown in Fig. 97.
Its long rooting tuft is continued right up its axis, to end in a conical
projection, which is surrounded by four apertures leading into
corresponding compartments of the paragaster.
Fig. 97.—Hyalonema thomsoni. A, Whole specimen with rooting tuft and

Epizoanthus crust; B, pinulus, a spicule characteristic of but not peculiar to
the Amphidiscophora, occurring in the dermal and gastral membranes; C,
amphidisc with axial cross; D, distal end of rooting spicule with grapnel.
(After F. E. Schulze.)
The crust of Anthozoa of the genus Epizoanthus (p. 406) on the

rooting tuft is a constant feature in this as in other species of
Hyalonema. It contributed to make the sponge a puzzle, which long
defied interpretation. The earliest diagnosis the genus received was
the "Glass Plant." Then the root tuft was thought to be part of the
Epizoanthus, which was termed a "most aberrant Alcyonarian with its
base inserted in a sponge"; next we hear of the sponge as parasitic
on the Sea Anemone. Finally, the root tuft was shown to be proper to
the sponge, which was, however, figured upside down, till some
Japanese collectors described the natural position, or that in which
they were accustomed to find it.
Pheronema carpenteri was found by the Lightning off the north of

Scotland in 530 fathoms. The goblet shaped, thick walled body and
broad, ill-defined root tuft are shown in Fig. 98, but no figure can do
justice to the lustre of its luxuriant prostalia and delicate dermal
network with stellate knots at regular intervals. The basalia are two-
pronged and anchor-like.
Fig. 98.—Pheronema carpenteri. × ½. (From Wyville Thomson.)
Both the Hexasterophoran genera were dredged off the north of

Scotland, and both conform to the Lyssacine type without uncinates.
Euplectella suberea is a straight, erect tube, anchored by a tuft of
basalia. The upper end of the tube is closed by a sieve plate, the
perforations in which are oscula, while the beams contain flagellated
chambers, so that the sieve is simply a modified portion of the wall. It
is a peculiarity of this as of one or two other allied genera that the
lateral walls are perforated by oscula. They are termed parietal gaps,
and are regularly arranged along spiral lines encircling the body.
Fig. 99.—Sieve plate of Euplectella imperialis. (After Ijima.)
Ijima, who has dredged Euplectellids from the waters near Tokyo,
finds that in young specimens oscula are confined to the sieve plate;
parietal gaps are secondary formations. The groundwork of the
skeleton is a lattice similar to that shown in Fig. 100. The chamber-
layer is much folded. Various foreign species of Euplectella afford
interesting examples of association with a Decapod Crustacean,
Spongicola venusta, of which a pair lives in the paragaster of each
specimen. The Crustacean is light pink, the female distinguished by
a green ovary, which can be seen through the transparent tissues. It
is not altogether clear what the prisoner gains, nor what fee, if any,
the host exacts.
Ijima relates that the skeleton of Euplectella is in great demand in

Japan for marriage ceremonies. He also informs us that the
Japanese name means "Together unto old age and unto the same
grave," while by a slight alteration it becomes "Lobsters in the same
cell," and remarks that the Japanese find this an amusing pun.
Fig. 100.—Skeletal lattice of Euplectella imperialis. (After Ijima.)

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Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in

Context Literature Film and Television

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1 Introduction: Narrating Katrina in Context 1

2 Intertextuality, Domesticity and the Spaces of Disaster

3 “Won’t Bow: Don’t Know How”: New Orleans

4 Disposability, Criminality and Lawlessness in Bad

5 Conclusion: Traumatic Rupture and Slow Violence 119

Abstract This introduction provides an in-depth outline of the book’s

Keywords Hurricane Katrina · Trauma · 9/11 · The War on Terror ·

© The Author(s) 2019 1

1 Two Cultural Traumas

awarded to the likes of Blackwater (how Academi) and Haliburton to

claim that traumatic events “are better described by a notion of systemic

2 Fictions of Katrina

of texts is characterized by its focus on the “human stories” of disaster,

crime narratives, across media, form “an anthology of narratives in which

3 Cultural Trauma and Multidirectional Memory

Cultural traumas are not things, but processes of meaning-making and

to Naomi Klein’s notion of “shock” as a driver of neoliberal policy shifts

…trauma as a paradigm often conceals the slow, nonspectacular and

However, where an emphasis on psychological trauma alone might

part of this book’s theoretical approach helps us to understand how this

a series of key narrative strands in Treme that build a compellingly neutral

4 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina

U.S. exceptionalist discourse,” Katrina, in contrast, “challenged some

5 The Depoliticization of 9/11

“domesticated”—by its early literary and cultural representation, is an

If one retrospectively applied their perspective to fiction after World War I,

Perhaps most troubling is the suggestion that fiction is no more than a

Morley’s latter point is particularly compelling as it requires us to con-

Paul Greengrass would focus strictly on the immediate emergency of

We have already alluded to the resemblance between a young

In Leucandra the fundamental structure is obscured by the

Fig. 85.—Transverse section through the body-wall of Leucilla. d.o, Dermal

Above are described three main types of canal system—that of

The families Grantiidae, Heteropidae, and Amphoriscidae, all

Two families of Calcarea, possibly allied, remain for special mention

The Pharetronidae are with one, or perhaps two exceptions, fossil

I. Dialytinae.—The spicules are not fused to one another; the exact

Lelapia australis, a recent species, should probably be placed here

II. Lithoninae.—The main skeletal framework is formed of spicules

Fig. 88.—Astrosclera willeyana, Lister. A, the Sponge, × about 3. p, The ostia on

The Astroscleridae, as known at present, contain a single genus

Astrosclera chambers, 10µ × 8µ to 18µ × 11µ.

BRANCH II. MICROMASTICTORA

The subdivision of the Micromastictora is a matter of some difficulty.

One genus, Hexadella, has been regarded by its discoverer

2 Fictions of Katrina

3 Cultural Trauma and Multidirectional Memory