Our Leviathan, Ourselves: Global South as "Tropical City on a Hill'?

This essay provides critical elaboration of post-Katrina New Orleans as a way to begin theorizing the appearance of a new political order predicated on total warfare. Along these lines, the "gulf war at home," or what has also been called the "Leviathan in Louisiana," are phrases that mark a new form of national order adrift between the militarization of civil society and the ruins of the welfare state. The emergence of the "warfare state" puts into play new political problems, introduces new enigmas of temporality, and fully saturates knowledge with violence and infinite conflict. My argument is that the "strategic polyvalence" implicit to global southern "urbanized insurgence" reveals potential for what might be called a post-white Digger ontology. The lessons of Katrina call for a pan-ethnic, radically militant, minoritarian future that is internal to the decomposition of the welfare state. Such a future holds forth, I suggest, according to an appropriate historical mutation, what Mike Davis calls, a "tropicaliz[ed]... version of the 'City on a Hill'."