Hurricane Katrina

CALL FOR PAPERS

Invisible Culture: A Journal For Visual Culture

Deadline for Papers: October 15, 2009

Guest Editors: Nicola Mann and Victoria Pass, University of Rochester

The Cultural Visualization of Hurricane Katrina

Over the past four years, various forms of visual media have
focused their lenses on the swathes of watery land that make up
the Mississippi delta. Since Hurricane Katrina devastated New
Orleans in summer of 2005, the region and its residents have been
subject to intense televisual, filmic, artistic, and media-based
scrutiny. From Geraldo Rivera's tearful live reports from the
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, to Kanye West's frustrated
declaration at the NBC Concert for Hurricane Relief that "George Bush
doesn't care about black people," to the widely acclaimed documentary
film Trouble the Water (2008), images of the hurricane, the people it
affected (and continues to affect), and the land it ravaged have been
projected into our living rooms through a series of visual
representations.

Much of the scholarship on this topic has focused on socio-cultural
Issues including rebuilding strategies, the failure of homeland
security, and testimonial accounts of "survivors" or "witnesses."
This issue aims to analyze representations of Katrina and its
aftermath using the methodologies of visual and cultural studies.
We are interested in the ways that analyses of the politics of
representation, as exemplified in the case of Katrina, opens up
into a discussion the evolution of visual and cultural studies in
the last ten or twenty years.

We seek papers that consider visual representations of Hurricane
Katrina in a ways unimaginable at earlier points in the intersection
between visual studies and cultural studies. From CNN.com's award
winning "Voices from the Gulf Coast" podcasts, to the various
discussion blogs that have emerged in the wake of the event, to
Google Earth's satellite imagery overlays of the devastation
in the affected region, to the television show "Extreme Makeover:
Hurricane Katrina Home Edition," we have seen in Katrina's aftermath
a plethora of new modes of visual diffusion. Furthermore, the
intensification of mass media, both in terms of the sheer quantity
of media outlets and in the reach of its dissemination, has given
rise to a new experience of historical time and geographic proximity,
in which we experience historical events through media
representations almost immediately as they happen and regardless of
where they occur.

Additionally, the interactivity of new media has reoriented the
producer/consumer binary of traditional media. We are interested
in the representational politics of these new visual rhetorics and in
the new and often hybrid apparatuses through which we experience them.
For example, a critical alternative to the mainstream news media's
coverage of Hurricane Katrina arose across multiple platforms. When
compared to more "traditional" documentary forms of disaster
representation such the Associated Press' controversial
global dissemination of "looting" photographs, does the immediacy
and interactive nature of new media responses render their vision
more absolute, real, and perhaps most importantly, "true"?

Is the semiotic approach of, for example, Roland Barthes on
photography-which arose in relation to a very different mode of
cultural production-still relevant? Can the even earlier model
of Frankfurt School-style ideology critique help us to understand
popular culture and its capacity for social change? How might these
now-familiar methodologies be refashioned for the current culture?
Or what methods have eclipsed them? One key concern of this
issue is whether technological shifts and advancements in the
dissemination of media over the past twenty years have changed the
way we see beyond the recognition of our interpretive paradigms. If
the object of visual studies has changed, how might we adapt the
discipline to engage with the current mode(s) of cultural production?

Accepted essays will accompany the transcript of an upcoming
Roundtable discussion between the founders of the Graduate Program in
Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester's
co-founders, on the occasion of the program's twentieth anniversary
(Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Kaja Silverman,
Constance Penley, and Janet Wolff; moderated by Douglas Crimp).

Possible avenues for the exploration include, but are not limited to:

Films:
-The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
-Trouble the Water (2008)
-When the Levees Broke (2008), Spike Lee
-Hellp, Darren Martinez

Blogs:
New Orleans Ladder
The Survival of New Orleans weblog
Nola blog

Televisual depictions of the hurricane and responses to it,
for example:

-news coverage of "looting"
-Comic Relief (2006)
-House (May 16, 2006), FOX
-Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, "The Christmas Show," (Dec. 4, 2006)
-The Daily Show

Artistic responses to Hurricane Katrina:
Prospect 1: New Orleans (international biennial)
News photographs
"Remembering Katrina," the official Hurricane Katrina souvenir
program.

Mainstream news journalism
Urban renewal efforts
Personal photographs

NOLA:
NOLA tourism
The disappearance of "authentic" indigenous NOLA culture
NOLA outside of Bourbon Street
Representations of local culture in New Orleans

Please send inquiries and completed papers (MLA style)
of 2,500 - 5,000 words to Nicola Mann
(nmann2[at]mail[dot]rochester[dot]edu) and Victoria Pass
(vpass[at]mail[dot]rochester[dot]edu) by October 15, 2009.

In Visible Culture is also currently seeking submissions
for book and exhibition reviews (600-1000 words).

To submit book or exhibition review proposals please
email ivcbookreviews[at]gmail[dot]com.

For a list of reviewable titles, see:
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Reviews/review_copies.html