Reading The Awakening after Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

“Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land.” “The problem of the Anthropocene is a problem of perception, but it is also a problem of the politics of denial, the administration of forgetting.” “It is not a healthy book.” Long before Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005, another hurricane decimated the region. In 1893, the Hurricane of Cheniere Caminada, also known as the Great October Storm, swept away virtually all the structures on the barrier islands and flooded the city. Throughout coastal Southeastern Louisiana, more than two thousand people perished in the storm, mostly from the storm surge; homes and ships were demolished. One contemporary newspaper article described the scene in stark terms: “Everywhere one could see graves, wherein as many as ten people were buried. Some were drowned; others killed in the wreckage. There are hundreds of bodies that are still unburied” (Savannah). Such descriptions were commonplace in national publications, which circulated eyewitness accounts of the devastation, and numerous writers published narratives of the storm. The Great October Storm was the worst natural disaster in US history up until that point and remains one of the costliest, most lethal hurricanes on record.