Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina

SECTION 3

Interconnections

Amy Koritz

ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, this section tells the story of how I stopped worrying about whether I was still being an English professor. As a young assistant professor, I'd been through the exhilarating years of feminist theory, cultural studies, and transdisciplinary postcolonialism, a time when we all thought that reading and writing differently would have an enormous and immediate impact on the world. Please don't laugh; I was sincere. But it was becoming clear to me, well before disaster struck for real, that a slow, nuanced disaster was creeping up on my relationship with my professional identity. Close reading will only get you so far.

This is not an anti-intellectual or even an anti-academic statement. The point I want to make as we close this volume is that the humanities are fundamentally concerned with interconnection. Canons of literature are one mode for pursuing this goal. There are many others, and the humanities should participate in them all. In order to do so, however, humanists have to be willing to place themselves in uncomfortable situations—in meetings with artists, social service providers, even businesspeople—where no one in the room is sure why you are there, including yourself. I found myself making a career of discomfort in the year following Katrina. While, with one important exception, this made the bureaucratic structures of my university uneasy, I've never seen more possibilities for connecting the academic work of the university with opportunities to build and revitalize community. The pieces included in this section trace, from a perspective not my own, some of the worlds I moved into as my interests and commitments became more centrally responsive to a city in crisis.

Carole Rosenstein was until recently a cultural policy analyst and researcher with the Urban Institute. She came to New Orleans to participate in a conference cosponsored by the Urban Institute and the Louisiana Association for Non-profit Organizations (LANO). Her panel, on which I served as well—along with Carol Bebelle, Don Marshall, and the director of the Contemporary Arts Center, Jay Weigel—focused on bringing cultural sector research to bear on how New Orleans was being rebuilt. This was not supposed to happen, the panel I mean. When, because I showed up at meetings where I did not belong, I was appointed to the local advisory committee for this conference, it quickly became clear that nobody else thought the cultural sector was particularly important. After all, health care, housing, environmental remediation, disaster preparedness, these were the crucial topics, no? Somebody had to be at that table, and in this case it was me, who could say, “Wait a minute, this is New Orleans. How can culture not be crucial to its recovery?” What Carole had to say did not turn out to be what most of the people in the room wanted to hear. Her focus on attending to small, close-to-the-ground cultural organizations and looking for ways to honor and support the value of vernacular cultural traditions and practices was not going to help museums and symphonies or even individual artists in need of galleries and performance space. Her voice was drowned out by calls for special treatment for artists and for further strengthening major players.

There is a rich research project here, which I'll get to sometime, but almost immediately I was called to another meeting I had no business attending. Ron Bechet, an art professor at Xavier University, asked me to join a conversation about a possible arts project in New Orleans that would draw on the ideas of celebrity artists to create a large performance of the pre-Katrina lives of devastated houses in the city. This made little sense to me given the pragmatic attitudes beaten into me by my contact with social service providers, but in my new identity as utter outsider I figured I had nothing to lose by keeping an open mind. The meeting did not go well. But by the end Ron John Barnes, a sculptor from Dillard University; Jan Cohen-Cruz, a theater practitioner from New York University; and I had decided to put something together for the local universities. The story Jan tells in her mixed-genre reflection on creating university projects that partner with community-based artists and cultural organizations expresses the potential, as well as the difficulty, of such work. Without her assertive focus on pulling us together and keeping us productive, HOME, New Orleans would not have survived its first year. It has, as of this writing, survived its second and been awarded Ford Foundation funding, which will secure its future for at least two more. Ron, John, and I have just finished teaching Building Community through the Arts, a cross-institutional course on community arts, for the second time. We continue to deepen and broaden our relationships with the neighborhood projects established in HOME, New Orleans' first year. Through Jan's new position as the director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (a consortium of universities interested in furthering public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design fields), she will bring the possibilities of this kind of endeavor to a national audience.

Without the energy, imagination, and courage of Ron, Jan, and John during this time, I would have been less happy, less productive, and less cognizant of the possibilities of community-directed art in creating strong, sustainable communities. I owe them all my deepest gratitude. Without Don Marshall, the executive director of the Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation in New Orleans, we would all be in much more trouble than we are. When I began attending community events focused on the arts and culture, Don was the only leader of a major cultural organization in the city who would turn up not only at the high-powered Cultural Economies Summit sponsored by Louisiana's lieutenant governor but also at the Seventh Ward neighborhood festival. His understanding of the full range of the city's culture is extraordinary, but even more so has been his willingness to fund the smallest indigenous expressions of that culture in the same breath as the largest, most influential players. This cross-class, cross-race inclusiveness is rare in New Orleans, which, as he notes in his interview, really has three cultures, three education systems, and three business sectors: white, black, and Creole. Don's commitment to bringing us all together has inspired me with hope during those times when it seemed as though power politics and turf battles were going to scuttle any possibility for real progress in New Orleans.

What the crisis of this disaster and its long, slow aftermath has taught me about civic engagement is that its best hope, the one that genuinely connects the resources of universities with their communities, builds on sustainable partnerships toward shared goals, and develops the strength to withstand the many ways in which institutions shut out engagement and shut down those who seek it out, is interconnection. I mean this on many levels. Not only have the reach and focus of my relationships within New Orleans expanded but so has my awareness of project models, research, and potential partners around the country. This is a good thing not only for me but for the future of civic engagement.

By the way, the one important exception within my university to the general uneasiness my work seemed to provoke has been the Tulane/ Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research. Go figure. This group of science- focused researchers immediately saw the relevance of my activities to their interest in sustainable urban ecosystems and understood how integral the arts and culture are to the healthy, vibrant city we all desire.