1. Introduction: Narrating Katrina in Context.- 2. Intertextuality, Domesticity and the Spaces of Disaster in Salvage the Bones and Zeitoun.- 3. 'Won’t Bow: Don’t Know How': New Orleans and American Exceptionalism in Treme.- 4. Disposability, Criminality and Lawlessness in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,Beasts of the Southern Wild and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.
Arin Keeble is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University, UK. He has published widely on the representation of terrorism and disaster and has published in scholarly journals including Modern Language Review, European Journal of American Culture, Comparative American Studies,Canadian Review of American Studies and Punk and Post-Punk.
'This immensely thought-provoking study engages with the representation of Katrina across a variety of narrative forms — from the literary fiction of Jesmyn Ward to the cinema of Werner Herzog. In doing so, it reveals a series of compelling links between a diverse selection of texts and a powerful, under-scrutinized connection between Katrina, 9/11 and that preceding disaster’s divisive legacies. This is urgent yet nuanced scholarship and Keeble navigates a path through complex debates about trauma, memory and nationhood in an unfailingly articulate and insightful fashion.' — Samuel Thomas, Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK
'Bringing race, place and politics into painful focus, Arin Keeble’s Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context offers an excellent and authoritative study of Katrina’s cultural legacy.' — James Annesley, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, Newcastle University, UK
'In Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context, Arin Keeble provides a vital examination of the “slow violence” linking cultural responses to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Approaching both events with a characteristic clearness and sensitivity, he expands a new and necessary field of studies that works harder to contextualise US responses to these “national” tragedies through the interrogative frameworks of neoliberalism, cultural trauma, and multidirectional memory.' — Rachel Sykes, Lecturer in Contemporary American Literature, University of Birmingham, UK