Black Geographies of Disaster and the Precarity of Citizenship
Topics: Black Geographies
, Political Geography
, Environmental Justice
Keywords: Black geographies, Critical Citizenship, Disaster, Crisis
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61
Authors:
Kela Caldwell, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Abstract
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall off the coast of Louisiana as a Category 3 storm. Hurricane Katrina’s powerful winds, storm surge, and flooding brought devastation and suffering to Gulf Coast communities in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Underlying the immediate landfall of the hurricane are racial geographic histories that inform a recontextualization of Katrina as a disaster through the lens of a racial state analysis. Hurricane Katrina, as a moment, exposed the different ways race marks and orders the state and revealed that apparatuses and technologies employed by the racial state predates specific moments of crisis, informing narrations and articulations of disasters and crises in themselves. In this paper, I consider the ways Katrina as a moment informs Black citizenship and broader conditions of vulnerabilities to citizenship. I offer a black geographic theory of the refugee as a framework to contend with the entanglements of disaster, relief, and the reproduction of violence through citizenships exclusions and restrictions of mobility. Finally, I also contend with the potentiality of the black refugee, providing an opening to imagine and create alternative relations and conditions that transcend the restrictive and violent natures of bounded and restrictive citizenships.
Black Geographies of Disaster and the Precarity of Citizenship
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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