Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative by Kate Parker Horigan (review)

In an age when environmental and weather disasters are becoming more common and increasingly lethal, Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast nearly 15 years ago, still remains the public disaster of record for many Americans. For scholars as well, Katrina has remained the disaster through which to understand the complicating factors of race, gender, and class, with books such as What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (South End Press Collective, ed., South End Press, 2007), Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Michael Eric Dyson and Paul Elliott, Basic Books, 2006), and There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (Gregory Squires and Chester Hartman, eds., Routledge, 2006)—all of which were published within 2 years following the disaster—still maintaining their relevance. These studies, among others, have become essential reading in an expanding disaster studies field. Kate Parker Horigan’s excellent book provides a critical and necessary addition to the existing body of Katrina and disaster narrative scholarship. Focusing on personal narratives of trauma stemming from disaster, Horigan asks her readers to consider not just the content of these narratives, but also the mechanisms of their circulation and the public contexts in which they circulate. Specifically, her intervention calls for increased attention to those public contexts that exert pressure on narratives of individual experiences of disaster. She argues for and applies in her work “a model that takes these public dynamics of disasters into account and, consequently, suggests a more ethical approach to circulating the personal narratives that describe them” (p. 11).

Horigan’s study is about both disaster and the stories we tell about it. Effectively utilizing the metaphor of consumption, the book identifies the massive pressures that freight the stories told by survivors of disasters. Consuming Katrina asks us to think about the public nature of disaster and personal narrative. Individuals who relate their own personal experiences of disaster must contend with the demands of the ravenous audience waiting to devour them, and this audience is by no means a neutral one. Survivors have their stories, but what happens when these stories become public? Horigan suggests there is a danger, for example, in the fact that often the narratives that least resist dominant cultural narratives are those most likely to be consumed by a public audience eager to “feel sympathy for survivors, without feeling complicit in their conditions of suffering or compelled to act” (p. 5). Focusing on the implications of circulations such as this, Horigan guides the reader through several examples of personal narratives made public, analyzing the dynamics of the interactive contexts those narratives must negotiate.

Ultimately, Horigan, building on theories about reflexive ethnographic practice, argues that “survivors’ challenges to their own generalized representations should be incorporated into the discourses of disaster” (p. 15). She sees this as a way to avoid survivor representations being unduly shaped by dominant narratives that exist outside of their control. The demands of the public in the wake of disasters are fierce and have the power to warp survivors’ narratives in ways that they themselves cannot control. For example, public representations of disaster narratives often, as Horigan argues, “depict individuals as exemplary of massive suffering but also as disconnected from the social structures that produce it and the social networks that can mitigate it” (p. 9). As a result, she continues, “only survivors’ most recent grievances are acknowledged and remediated, rather than those underlying structural issues that predate and predetermine the crisis” (p. 9). Survivors’ narratives may serve, then, to reinforce the very structures they seek to critique in their stories of survival as they themselves are held up as estimable exceptions to the problematic stereotypes that plague their fellow community members and the communities they live in.

Horigan presents the narratives of several different survivors of Katrina, including individuals participating in the Surviving Katrina and Rita in...