“Before the Storm”: Hurricane Katrina, the BP Oil spill, and the challenges to racial hierarchies in rural Louisiana

Bates, S. (2017) “Before the Storm”: Hurricane Katrina, the BP Oil spill, and the challenges to racial hierarchies in rural Louisiana. Nature and Culture, 12(1), pp. 65-85. (doi: 10.3167/nc.2017.120105)

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Abstract

By conceptualizing the recovery from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill as forming part of ongoing processes of “becoming” and the everyday, this article explores how the relative power of a historically privileged group of White males in rural Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, faced significant challenge. First, through the breakdown of informal racial segregation in local social institutions, and through the newly ubiquitous nature of mobile homes threatening their rejection of “trailer trash” culture. Second, however, this impact must be understood within ongoing changes across wider American society, where a locally valorized ideal of normative 1950s culture was seen to be in conflict with the civil rights and feminist movements of the late twentieth century. This imagined cultural hegemony was therefore in serious decline long before these catastrophes, yet has now been confined to the time “before the Storm.”

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Bates, Mr Seumas
Authors: Bates, S.
College/School:College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences
Journal Name:Nature and Culture
Publisher:Berghan Journals
ISSN:1558-6073
ISSN (Online):1558-5468

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