The Katrina-Politans: A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and the Katrina Generation
Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, two years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests an access to economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina made its landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world?
What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed two years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.
When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he recently did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State, are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects.
Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Nwankwo argues that “the denial of access for people of African descent to cosmopolitan subjectivity coexisted with a denial of access for that same population to both national subjectivity and human subjectivity…effectively determining the possible parameters of identity for people of African descent.” (10) Thus the naming and misnaming of black Katrina survivors was as much an effort to deny them relief—as relevant in a natural disaster as it has been historically in relation to pursuing of legal recourse for racial and gender discrimination—as it was an attempt to dictate from above how those particular black bodies and all the black bodies who were forced to account for the images those black bodies projected, would be interpreted as political subjects. Thus the human misery that crusted and festered over in the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center was not viewed as failure on the part of the State, but the failure of civil rights era legislation that rendered those black bodies as incapable of taking care of themselves and perhaps more tellingly, indicted black leadership for their failure to police those black bodies.
Nwankwo’s notion that the collapsing of cosmopolitan possibilities is related to efforts to limit the breadth and diversity of black identity is particularly compelling in an era where black identities are intensely wedded to racial truisms, that while often legitimized by some of the most visible (and highly compensated) “celebrities”—Michael Vick, R. Kelly, Whitney Houston, and William “Flava Flav” Drayton to name a few and indeed the images that were transmitted from New Orleans—often distort the realities of contemporary black identity. For example, like most major urban areas, New Orleans contained sizable immigrant communities made up of African nationals and Afro-Caribbeans, which were reflective of the historic ethnic diversity of the city. Most media outlets glossed over the complexity of black identity in those days and weeks after Katrina’s landing, in part because such complexities challenge corporate media’s desires to manage evolving news stories. More broadly though, the mainstream press and the mainstream public at large, has rarely been willing to grant black bodies such complexity, choosing instead to embrace “exceptional” blacks, often at the expensive of the black masses.
In his memoir We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, Malian scholar Manthia Diawara tells the story of spending a recent sabbatical in Paris. Concerned about the historic treatment of Africans in the city, Diawara wore his Black American Intellectual status on his sleeve, but when stopped by a pair of law enforcement officers who rifled through his bag only to find his Malian passport, he was symbolically undressed. The passport was evidence in the minds of the officers that Diawara was just another African—another nigga—and thus not deserving of the common courtesies extended to citizens or visitors for that matter. Diawara’s exchange with the police was prefaced by a conversation with the cab driver, also an African, whose cab he was in when they were stopped by the police. “Where are you originally from?” the driver queried Diawara in response to Diawara’s earlier claim that he was from the United States.” Seemingly an innocent question, in many ways it was meant to demean Diawara’s site of origin and to undermine any privilege associated with his cosmopolitan identity.
If such a major Black American Intellectual is undressed in such a fashion, what can be said of those whose cosmopolitanism isn’t clothed in class and ethnic privilege. Indeed, I can’t imagine that there isn’t a day when the Katrina Generation, as it is dispersed throughout the country and denied access to its “homeland,” is not faced with the like-minded query: “Where are you really from?” For all of the good will offered to Katrina transplants and in light of Barbara Bush’s ridiculous claim that they had bettered their fortunes, the reality is that many municipalities viewed Katrina survivors as a further burden on already overtaxed resources. But the Katrina-Politians are citizens of the world, by the vestige of their humanity, and they have every right to make claims on that citizenship, wherever they choose or are forced to lay their heads.
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