Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina - Softcover

Adams, Vincanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822354497 ISBN 13: 9780822354499

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is an ethnographic account of long-term recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is also a sobering exploration of the privatization of vital social services under market-driven governance. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, public agencies subcontracted disaster relief to private companies that turned the humanitarian work of recovery into lucrative business. These enterprises profited from the very suffering that they failed to ameliorate, producing a second-order disaster that exacerbated inequalities based on race and class and leaving residents to rebuild almost entirely on their own.

Filled with the often desperate voices of residents who returned to New Orleans, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith describes the human toll of disaster capitalism and the affect economy it has produced. While for-profit companies delayed delivery of federal resources to returning residents, faith-based and nonprofit groups stepped in to rebuild, compelled by the moral pull of charity and the emotional rewards of volunteer labor. Adams traces the success of charity efforts, even while noting an irony of neoliberalism, which encourages the very same for-profit companies to exploit these charities as another market opportunity. In so doing, the companies profit not once but twice on disaster.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has written and edited numerous books in medical anthropology, including Sex and Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective (coedited with Stacy Leigh Pigg) also published by Duke University Press.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

MARKETS OF SORROW, LABORS OF FAITH

New Orleans in the Wake of KatrinaBy VINCANNE ADAMS

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5449-9

Contents

1 It's Not about Katrina......................................................12 The Making of a Disaster....................................................223 "If This Could Happen to Us, It Could Happen to Anyone".....................554 Navigating the Road Home....................................................745 Getting to the Breaking Point...............................................996 Faith in a Volunteer Recovery...............................................1267 Charity, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Affect Economy.......................1538 Katrina as the Future.......................................................176Acknowledgments...............................................................191Notes.........................................................................193Bibliography..................................................................213Index.........................................................................225

Chapter One

IT'S NOT ABOUT KATRINA

Why should [we] continue to carry the full burden of this recovery on [our] backs? ... We are in a dead standstill, as there is no money for building materials. We were devastated both physically and emotionally. Our mental health is in crisis. The depression has shifted from the storm to the hopelessness and stress of the Road Home. Yes, it is that bad.... A little girl came to volunteer with her mom from Boston. She was nine years old. And she asked her mother on the third day of working in [our community], "Mom, when are we going back to America?" You know ... that really ... [crying]. Sorry. I said I wasn't going to do this. But it's overwhelming.... [taking a deep breath].... So I think I'm here to ask you all.... We are Americans. We are homeowners and we pay taxes and we are citizens. My question to you is: when can we rejoin the country?—CAROLINE REEVES, community organizer, testimony for the U.S. Senate, May 2007

This book is not about Hurricane Katrina. It is about Americans who have managed to survive a second-order disaster that was precipitated by the success of profit-driven solutions to a crisis of need at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is about the disaster of stalled and prolonged recovery, not the disaster that preceded it. It is about the price that is paid in human terms for the success of processes set in motion long before Hurricane Katrina, about the effects of privatizing our most public social services, and about the failure of these services to respond to Americans in need because they are tied to market forces guided by profit. It is also about the other face of privatization: the grass-roots, community, and faith-based responses that rose up in the wake of these failures and the new economy that has emerged in the wake of such responses. This economy is based on the circulation of an affective surplus—the emotional responsiveness and ethical inducement to action generated by a recognition of ongoing need among Americans—and the unpaid labor force it mobilizes. Finally, this book is about the infringements of market logic that impinge on even the charity sector in ways that promise, once again, profits gained from the spoils of a disaster and its victims. New Orleanians are in a good position to tell us this story, and perhaps none are better qualified to do so than the Bradlieus.

The Bradlieus

In August 2005, Henry and Gladys Bradlieu lived comfortably in retirement in one of the oldest properties in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. Henry had served in Vietnam, had been shot several times, and was a three-time Purple Heart recipient. He then became a civil servant for the U.S. Postal Service; after he retired he spent his free time golfing at the public course. Gladys had worked different clerical and assistant jobs her whole life and had last been a data entry clerk at City Hall. They owned their two-bedroom home on a corner lot in what was, in 2005, a densely packed mixed-race neighborhood. They were a success story of middle-class comfort that surpassed many of their relatives who lived across town in Mid-City and the Upper Ninth Ward. The Bradlieus had no idea how quickly everything they had lived and saved for in order to retire in modest comfort could be taken away from them.

On August 27, 2005, the Bradlieus evacuated to Texas and watched the storm on television; they didn't know yet that their home would survive the hurricane but would be swallowed up by the floods resulting from the collapse of the levee system thereafter. Their home filled with ten feet of water, and it sat like that for three weeks. When they finally came back to the city a few months later, Gladys recalled it was so quiet. "No birds, no trees, no color. Nothing. Just gray, everywhere gray." Furniture was covered in layers of lifeless mud. Silverware that had floated off of kitchen counters was strewn about in layers of smelly, gooey sludge. Family photographs were blackened and moldy. Clothing, linens, books, and shoes were indistinguishable from the walls, which had wallpaper peeling away in sheets from the stained brown-gray sheetrock beneath. Worst of all, Gladys said, were the trees. Most of the trees had been uprooted, and the rest were covered in brownish-gray mud. They were as lifeless as the neighborhood around them.

Like a lot of returning residents, Henry and Gladys didn't really know where to begin. They had received a check for $2,400 and a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The church folks in Texas who helped the Bradlieus while they were displaced sent them home with some $500 taken up in collection from parishioners, a few items of clothing, some dishware, glasses, and linens. In December 2005, they moved into their three-hundred-square-foot trailer parked lengthwise on what was once their front lawn. As African Americans who had lived through the years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they were used to pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, or at least with nothing if not the Lord's help. Henry said, "We'll rebuild."

Five years later, in January 2011, at the age of seventy, Henry Bradlieu died, having spent most of the last three years of his life in his cramped bed at one end of a FEMA trailer, paralyzed by a stroke that he suffered in 2008 on the day he learned that he would be denied, for the second time, federal assistance for rebuilding from the Louisiana Recovery Authority's Road Home Program. Gladys recalled her husband's anger on that day in 2008. "He was beside himself," she said. His two-and-a-half-year struggle to prove to Road Home that he owned his home, including getting an affidavit from the previous owner, months and months of lost paperwork, repeat visits to agency offices, being treated like a criminal, and the sheer discomfort of living in his little FEMA trailer, was too much. Gladys had tried to reason with people at the office of the Road Home Program, providing the paperwork and the bond-for-deed sale records showing that they owned their home. Bond-for-deed sales were common among those who had been denied opportunities for mortgages through conventional banks. Despite the fact that Gladys had retrieved documentation from City Hall that showed such transactions were legal and conferred ownership, she was unable to convince them. She was resigned, but "Henry...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822354497
• ISBN 13: 9780822354499
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande