"My FEMA people": Hip-hop as disaster recovery in the Katrina Diaspora

American Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 671-692

  Kish, Zenia ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950418700     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Mos Def, "Dollar Day," True Magic, Geffen, 2006
2. Jayson Rodriguez, "Mos Def Arrested After Impromptu Performance Outside VMAs," MTV News, September 1, 2006, http://www.mtv.com/news/ articles/1539981/20060901/mos-def.jhtml (accessed June 30, 2007)
3. John L. Beven II et al., "Annual Summary: Atlantic Hurricane Season of 2005," Monthly Weather Review 136.6 (March 2008): 1110-73
4. "Katrina's Diaspora," The New York Times, October 2, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/10/02/national/nationalspecial/ 20051002diaspo ra-graphic.html (accessed April 28, 2007)
5. "Katrina Index Monthly Summary of Findings: March 2, 2006," Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/200603- KatrinaIndexes. pdf (accessed April 26, 2008)
6. Another 750 were still missing and presumed dead more than a year later. Michelle Krupa, "Presumed Missing," Times-Picayune, March 5, 2006
7. Jason David Rivera and DeMond Shondell Miller, "Continually Neglected: Situating Natural Disasters in the African American Experience," Journal of Black Studies 37.4 (March 2007): 502-522
8. See Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii
9. On the development of the migration narrative in black music, see Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
10. The term refugee was ubiquitous in the mass media in the week following the storm, and was generally deployed to reinforce the exceptionality of the event in American history. Media watchdog Global Language Monitor released findings one week after the storm that the term refugee appeared in world media five times more frequently than the more neutral term evacuee. "Media Abounds with Apocalyptic-Type References in Coverage of Katrina," Global Language Monitor, September 7, 2005, http://www.languagemonitor.com/Katrina.html (accessed October 17, 2005)
11. Peter Nyers, "Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement," Third World Quarterly 24.6 (December 2003): 1078-1093
12. Griffin, "Who Set You Flowin'?" 4
13. "Delta Geography," Delta Cultural Center of the Department of Arkansas Culture, http://www. deltaculturalcenter.com/geography/ (accessed October 8, 2008)
14. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 1998), 29
15. Hazel Carby, "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context," Critical Inquiry 18.4 (Summer 1992): 738-56. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the themes of historical migration and diaspora are absent in hip-hop. Indeed, much American hip-hop production (as well as earlier blues, jazz, dub, and arguably electronic music and rock) is very much interested in themes of displacement, exile, and longing for distant homelands, usually in the South, the Caribbean, and Africa; just listen to Afrika Bambaataa or the Fugees or Talib Kweli, for example. Such music, however, generally relates diasporization to imagined and experienced historical displacements rather than contemporary migration
16. William Jelani Cobb, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 4
17. Robert Walser, "Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy," Ethnomusicology 39.2 (Spring-Summer 1995): 193-217
18. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 171
19. Quoted in Bonisteel, Sara. "F - Katrina: New Orleans Hip-Hop Remembers the Hurricane." Fox News, August 28, 2006. Retrieved June 27, 2007, from http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,210845,00. html
20. Juvenile/Skip/Wacko, "Nolia Clap," The Beginning of the End, Rap-A-Lot Records, ASYO 42046-CD, 2005
21. 100 percent of public housing residents were black. See David Dante Troutt, "Many Thousands Gone, Again," in After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina, ed. David Dante Troutt (New York: New Press, 2006), 3-28
22. A Brookings Institution study shows that in the 1990s, New Orleans was second among the nation's large metropolitan areas for locating tax-credit subsidized housing in extremely poor neighborhoods, and ranked first for locating such housing in predominantly black neighborhoods; Lance Freeman, "Siting Affordable Housing: Location and Neighborhood Trends of Low Income Housing Tax Credit Developments in the 1990s," Brookings Institution (April 2004), http://www.brookings.edu/metro/katrina.htm (accessed April 13, 2007)
23. For more on the relations between the history of bounce and the geography of New Orleans, see Matt Miller, "Bounce: Rap Music and Cultural Survival in New Orleans," HypheNation 1.1 (April 2006): 15-31
24. In 2004, New Orleans logged a murder rate of 56 per 100,000 people, four and a half times the average for cities of similar size in the United States. The New Orleans police force has long been known for racism, internal corruption, and abuses of power. Nicole Gelinas, "New Orleans Still Drowning in Crime," Dallas Morning News, May 13, 2007, http://www. dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/ opinion/points/stories/DN-gelinas-13edi. ART.State.Edition1.4310bb0.html (accessed November 15, 2008)
25. Commenting on Blanco's order and media reports of wanton criminality among the stranded, rightwing pundit Robert Tracinski wrote, "There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit. But they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals - and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness." "Hurricane Katrina Exposed the Man-made Disaster of the Welfare State," Pittsburgh Tribune Review, September 11, 2005
26. th Ward Weebie, "Fuck Katrina (The Katrina Song)," "Bounce Back," 2005. Retrieved June 10, 2007 from http://www.myspace. com/fifthwardweebie
27. Master-P and Halleluyah, "Bounce Back," Hurricane Katrina: We Gon' Bounce Back, Guttar, 2005
28. Lisa De Moraes, "Kanye West's Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC," Washington Post, September 3, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090300165. html (accessed June 30, 2007)
29. In his later lectures, Foucault discusses how, to manage the question of who will live and who will die, governmentality increasingly regulates populations along the axis of race, with racism functioning as "the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States." This mechanism consists in "making live and letting die." Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003): 254, 247
30. Peter Nyers brings this discussion to bear on the question of refugees: national sovereignty consists, in part, in the power to decide membership - the right to permit or refuse entry and citizenship. Nyers, "Abject Cosmopolitanism," 1071
31. Jay-Z, "Minority Report," Kingdom Come, Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam, DEJ B000804502, 2006
32. Juvenile, "Get Ya Hustle On," Reality Check, Atlantic, 2006
33. The Legendary K.O., "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People," 2005, digital download at http://www.rappersiknow.com/2005/09/06/ day-24-myone-hands-up-featuring-kay-producedby-symbolyc-one-bw-the-legendary-ko- george-bush-doesnt-care-about-black-people-produced-bykanye-west/
34. Visiting the Houston Astrodome, where many evacuees were being sheltered, Barbara Bush commented to the media, "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." "Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off," New York Times, September 7, 2005, 22
35. Press release, www.k-otix.com, September 11, 2005 (accessed October 11, 2008)
36. Kanye West, "Gold Digger," Late Registration, Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam, 2005
37. Ray Charles, "I Got a Woman," Hallelujah I Love Her So, Atlantic 8006, 1962
38. Ironically, when Bush did finally make it to the Gulf, he went straight to Biloxi, Mississippi, which is 71 percent white and has a Republican mayor and governor and two Republican senators. It took him another couple of days to get to New Orleans and other hard-hit areas that were majority black and Democrat before the storm. Jacob Weisberg, "An Imperfect Storm: How Race Shaped Bush's Response to Katrina," Slate, September 7, 2005, http://www.slate. com/?id=2125812 (accessed May 17, 2007)
39. Feminization is repeatedly deployed in post-Katrina hip-hop as a form of intense denigration. Bush is often figured as a woman, as in Lil Wayne's "Georgia Bush." Another trope is the personification of Hurricane Katrina (and sometimes category 3 Hurricane Rita, which devastated parts of the Louisiana coastline on September 24, 2005) as a bitch or hoe. For example, 5th Ward Weebie raps in "The Katrina Song," "I say fuck Katrina that ho is a creeper for hangin' with Rita."
40. "A Dollar a Day," BBC World Radio Service, December 7, 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/ documentaries/2007/12/071227-dollar-a-day-1. shtml (accessed November 15, 2008)
41. Lil Wayne and DJ Drama, "Georgia Bush," Dedication 2, 101 Distribution 2120, 2006
42. Papoose, "Mother Nature," The Best of Papoose: The Mixtape, 2006
43. Jeremy Alford, "In One Parish, Divide Over Housing Newcomers," New York Times, September 28, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/national/ nationalspecial/ 28race.html?ex=1182571200&en= fbd4073ff3592a7c&ei=5070 (accessed June 18, 2007)
44. Quoted in John Valery White, "The Persistence of Race Politics and the Restraint of Recovery in Katrina's Wake," in After the Storm, ed. Troutt, 41-62
45. Prem Kumar Rajaram, "Making Place: The 'Pacific Solution' and Australian Emplacement in the Pacific and on Refugee Bodies," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24.3 (November 2003): 290-306
46. Public Enemy, "Hell No (We Ain't Alright)," Rebirth of a Nation, Guerilla Funk 31021, 2005
47. New Orleans rapper Chopper narrates the self-reproducing cycle of racialized poverty that trapped him growing up: "I came from the slums where we were on welfare because we had to be," he said in an interview with MTV. "It's hard for a black man to get a job. I'm 19, but I've never had a job in my life. I applied for them when I was 16, but no one wants to hire you. So you gotta do what you can 'cause bills won't wait. It's hard for black people there. Louisiana is ranked the #2 worst-educated state. Mississippi is #1. You come on the battlefield and see how it really is." Corey Moss, "Juvenile, 3 Doors Down Among Those Affected by Disaster," MTV.com, September 7, 2005, http://www. mtv.com/news/articles/1509095/ 20050907/juvenile.jhtml (accessed October 12, 2008)
48. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the country, with 816 sentenced prisoners for every 100,000 residents. Although Louisiana's population is made up of 32 percent African Americans, 72 percent of inmates are black, and most of them end up in the main penitentiary of Angola, a former slave plantation. Henry Giroux, "Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability," College Literature 33.3 (Summer 2006): 171-196
49. I would like to thank Darwin Bond-Graham for pointing out this argument. Mark Anthony Neal, New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2005), 135
50. Lou Dobbs, "Seeking Refuge from Political Correctness," September 8, 2005, http://www.cnn. com/2005/US/09/08/politcal.correctness/index. html (accessed October 8, 2005)
51. Hazel Rose Markus remarks that "the talk of refugees and the third world allows people to imagine that poverty and non-whiteness are non-American things." "Race and Representation" (lecture delivered October 24, 2005, for "Confronting Katrina: Race, Class, and Disaster in American Society," Stanford Special Course), http://ccsre.stanford.edu/EV-events. htm#katrina (accessed March 29, 2007). It is important to note that the racism laid bare in the "refugee" controversy was not only directed against African Americans, but simultaneously revealed how refugees generally have been so degraded in popular opinion as to automatically summon the image of an abject, racialized, and expendable population
52. Lil Wayne, "Tie My Hands," Tha Carter III, Cash Money B0013ABI48, 2008
53. Several commentators, including rap reviewer Steve "Flash" Juon and Steven Waddy of the National Hip Hop Political Convention, suggest that many mainstream rappers were scared away from writing about Katrina for fear of censorship or political backlash. Steve "Flash" Juon, "Papoose: The Best of Papoose," RapReviews.com, April 10, 2007, http://www. rapreviews.com/archive/2007-04-bestofpapoose. html (accessed November 18, 2008); Bonisteel, 2006
54. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 27