Not Written in Stone: Tenth-Anniversary Commemorations of Katrina

This chapter focuses on material and customary responses to Katrina, and examines how they tend to oversimplify complex narratives of suffering and recovery. Specifically, the author reflects on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the 10th anniversary of Katrina (in 2015), and observes how memorials, commemorative events, and everyday activities express multiple modes of remembering Katrina. This multiplicity was not exhibited in official discourse regarding the 10th anniversary, which stuck with a single campaign message of “Resilient New Orleans.” Vernacular commemoration illustrates that people affected by disaster are already engaged in negotiating how that disaster gets remembered, and it is important to listen to those negotiations and not erase them from public representations and discourse.