Life Preservers: The Neoliberal Enterprise of Hurricane Katrina Survival in Trouble the Water, House M.D., and When The Levees Broke

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Abstract

Certain images of Hurricane Katrina have come to be ritually repeated when the storm and its aftermath are represented in the visual media: white flags and SOS signs being waved from rooftops, thousands massed in the heat outside the New Orleans Convention Center, an elderly African American woman dead in her wheel chair. For critics such as Henry Giroux, these images have inscribed in visual terms the imprisoning and lethal nature of neoliberal “biopolitics,” which corrals those who are unproductive as workers and consumers into zones marked out for death.1 In this reading of the intersection of governmentality, race, and poverty, neoliberalism positions the poor, particularly the nonwhite poor, as a constitutive outside in two related ways: on the one hand, neoliberal policies result in the creation of a disposable and often unacknowledged class living in unrelieved poverty, while on the other neoliberal rhetoric blames those persons for their fate by presenting them as lacking the characteristics required for successful, self-enterprising neoliberal subjectivity
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationOld and New Media After Katrina
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages89-112
Number of pages24
ISBN (Print)9780230102668
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010

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