At the End of the World: On the Temporal Limits of Katrina Recovery

Sex on a Doomed Beach

On April 18th, 2024, I was in New Orleans giving an impromptu tour of what is, at least to some, a special hideaway in the city. As my friend and I walked along the upper levee of the Industrial Canal—divided by the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward—we happened upon a large dinner table with nearly a dozen people. It was soon apparent that we had stumbled into a film set, not an unusual occurrence in New Orleans, and quickly moved on so as not to interrupt. Two years later, I learned the filming was part of an environmental documentary called The Welcome Table, written and directed by Josh Fox. The film brings together a transnational gathering of people displaced by climate disasters, recounting their experiences of forced migration against the backdrop of a city that knows this history too well. Its 2026 release is timely, arriving on the heels of Hurricane Katrina's twentieth anniversary. Surprisingly, the film does not historicize the primary site we encountered that day—a place some locals know as “The End of the World.” (Adams 2022; Maccash 2019).

Living in New Orleans, not unlike being a good musician, demands a good sense of time— an ear for the rhythms and tempo of the environment. Just before our encounter at The Welcome Table, I was recounting to my friend my history at the End of the World. On one moonlit night in 2009, I met a man in the French Quarter: two ships passing in the night. When we grew tired of dancing and looked for somewhere between the club and our homes, we were at a loss. Many of the queer after-hours spaces, spas, and darkrooms that had once existed were slowly disappearing—another consequence of gentrification and "renewal. My fellow traveler was skeptical about the mosquitos, possible yellow fever, or gators. To be honest I have always preferred a mattress, but having sex on a doomed beach is worth doing, if not for each other, just to build the plot. Fuck the mile high club. Where and when could two Black queers get it on in the temporal fissures of post-Katrina renewal?

We found ourselves downriver, on that spit of land hemmed in by the Mississippi and the Industrial Canal, The End of the World. The upper grassy levee had become an off-grid destination for dog walkers, clandestine carnival revelers, and more recently, film sets. You had to have good timing to enjoy the riverbank's ephemeral bottom, only revealed at low tide. It is an indeterminate coordinate, beautiful in its serendipity, but sadly running out of time as rising seawater levels affect the area

The transient life of such queer intimacies, mirrors that riverbank—fecund, precariously enclosed, temporally disposable, and, should the city experience another violent disaster, quite literally the end In this piece I want to take a seat at The Welcome Table to think through the extent to which racialized and queer futures can inhabit narratives of disaster and renewal, and, conversely, what a Black queer analytic has to tell us about living in uncertain times for those at the margins of community. I argue that within the limits of post-Katrina development in New Orleans lie the conditions of possibility—not only for the nonnormative Black queer, but for anyone learning to inhabit visions of the future not meant for them. Just as Black, queer, trans, and working-class people have learned to occupy and find pleasure on the geographic margins, we learn to inhabit and make time out of temporal limbo, creating our own rhythms against the dominant notions of tradition, progress, and modernity.

I arrive at a framing of post-Katrina temporalities through theorists who have approached questions of time via capitalism, heteronormativity, and white supremacy. I am particularly interested in how disaster capitalism and neoliberal gentrification feed into what queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman has called chrononormativity and chronobiopolitics, in which "the state and other institutions, including representational apparatuses, link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change. These are teleological schemes of events or strategies for living such as marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, childrearing, and death and its attendant rituals" (Freeman 2010, 4). In this study I engage chrononormative logics through the discourse of cultural preservation, neoliberal attacks to Black publics, and the discourse of post-disaster renewal via reproductive futurity.

Against these temporal limits, this essay centers on Black queer vernacular and cultural labor deemed too excessive, wasteful, or indeterminate to be temporally appropriate. Black and Queer scholars of Color have made important interventions within discussions of temporality (Adeyemi 2019; Agard Jones 2012; Keeling 2009; Mosley 2023; Muñoz 2001, 2019) including the spatial-temporal matrix that define Black ecologies Undergirding these practices are embodied encounters of what Samuel Delany has called contact: encounters that enable social reproduction, found in ephemeral and indeterminate meetings such as the one I have described at the End of the World (1999). These moments that exist in tension with dominant social institutions are often marked as dangerous, and thus necessitate regulation and discipline—which is significant precisely because, as Delany argues, "more ordinary sorts of contact yield their payoff in moments of crisis" (Ibid., 25). This notion of opportunity within crisis is distinct from what Naomi Klein has described in her theory of disaster capitalism, in which capitalists see crisis as an opportunity for change (2007). Whereas the former supports and expands a healthy public sphere, the latter seizes them in favor of privatization and market caprice. As much as Delany attributes contact with making up the truly multicultural heart of New York, he also views it scapegoated as culturally pathological and corrected through urban development. I see moments of Black queer contact as an important intervention in exclusive visions of a new New Orleans. I ask, how does the temporal logic of post-Katrina disaster recovery reproduce chrononormative structures of race, gender, and sexuality—and whose futures does that reproduction foreclose? What do Black queer vernacular practices reveal about the conditions of possibility for inhabiting and generating life outside the temporal horizons that dominant recovery logics produce? In what ways does the racialized history of infrastructural development in New Orleans—canals, levees, and waterways as spatial redlines—constitute temporal violence? How might a Black queer analytic reframe the coordinates of climate catastrophe as the product of an ongoing, rather than exceptional, condition? Through methods of participant observation, auto-ethnography, media analysis, and history we delve into the uncertain but hopeful times that characterize the last twenty years of post-Katrina recovery. The stories I share might instruct communities that have experienced disaster and reconstruction to define more habitable visions of the future.

This essay proceeds through four interconnected sections. The first concerns the politics of racial heritage: what gets preserved, what gets silenced, and who becomes the authorized custodian of Black cultural tradition when disaster strikes. The second concerns Black queer performance within bounce music and the counterintuitive temporal practices community members invest in. I show that Black queer and trans people play a central role in producing inclusive and anti-assimilatory visions of the future. The third concerns reproductive futurism, the biocentric logic by which post-Katrina recovery was imagined through the figure of the Katrina baby and the normative family that stood behind it, and what it means to reclaim that figure on different terms. Finally, I return to the End of the World and The Welcome Table to contextualize the missing history of a landscape that, while beautifully pastoral, is entrenched in the racialized and classed roots of the Katrina catastrophe. Across each, the organization of time serves as both the analytical frame and the terrain of struggle. These are not merely stories about what happened in New Orleans after the flood. They are accounts of how power organizes time, and what it costs when time is organized against you.

Defining Heritage and Preservation

In the fall of 2009, I attended a panel at the New Orleans Jazz and Cultural Heritage Foundation. The Tom Dent Congo Square Lecture Series featuring the late historian Robert Farris Thompson, musicologist Ned Sublette, and local artist and cultural activist Herreast J. Harrison, among others. The event was well attended and included media coverage, with musical exhibitions tracing New Orleans cultural traditions to their African diasporic roots and centuries of political struggle. It was clear that the mass displacement of Black communities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the precarious effort to return, had made urgent something central to the city's intellectual and cultural life: a crisis of memory, and an argument about what that memory was for.

As a junior scholar just entering my field research, I was moved by the discussion. When the time came for questions, I asked if anyone on the panel could speak to women and queer people's contributions to cultural performance in New Orleans. Mrs. Herreast J. Harrison was the first to respond. Her husband was the late Donald Harrison, Sr., Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and she spoke with the measured authority of someone with intimate knowledge of the very traditions under discussion She said that her husband had made it clear that she and their daughter were, in his words, "mere embellishment… you make me prettier." She noted that women had masked beginning in the 1950s, then invited her daughter to speak.

Cherise Harrison-Nelson repeated her mother's account almost verbatim: women were accessories, there to make the men look prettier. "If you were in their presence you were acknowledged; if you weren't there, you were not missed." A woman, she said, "was like a piece of the costume that you applied and removed." The elder Mrs. Harrison acknowledged that this public understanding differed from what happened behind closed doors. She named the power dynamic openly, but moved quickly past it. What mattered more, she insisted, was validating the men's experience: "They were the ones keeping the tradition going. They needed to be supported." Yet, Mrs. Harrison also spoke as someone who had inhabited the tradition from its interior: she had spent most of her life sewing and beading the suits, but had never attended a performance until her son's first masking ceremony. She said she was transcended, a feeling she could only compare to the first time she stepped on African soil.

I remained standing for a moment before realizing there would be no response to my question about queerness. The discussion quickly moved on. As it did, an audience member leaned over and said quietly: "Nobody is going to speak to that subject in this crowd." It was a familiar feeling, one many of us can recognize, that names the limits placed on a queer life against the imperatives of keeping traditions going.

I looked around and considered where we were. The Jazz and Cultural Heritage Foundation sits on Rampart Street, adjacent to Congo Square, one of the most symbolically charged sites in African diasporic history. A space where enslaved people once gathered to perform, trade, and maintain cultural memory within the matrix of plantocracy. But for centuries, Rampart Street has also been a diverse corridor—for some decades, a thoroughfare for Black queer New Orleanians. Connecting a network of clubs along the fringes of the French Quarter where a different archive of Black cultural memory exists, largely without institutional recognition. Could it be that Congo Square's history of African diasporic heterogeneity has also shaped notions of temporal fugitivity, informing the silences of queer sociality in present day New Orleans? The question hangs in the air of the lecture hall, unanswerable on the record, transmitted in the margins.

The lecture series took place in a specific post-Katrina institutional moment. The panelists—musicologists, historians, cultural activists, scholars of the African diaspora—were gathered not merely to describe traditions but to preserve them. To establish their legibility, to make claims on behalf of a community whose cultural inheritance had been threatened by the forces of reconstruction, alternately figured as obstacle and amenity. The terms of that preservation were not self-evident; they had to be organized, and the organization was already doing interpretive work.

The discussion moved across a wide range of subjects: diasporic transculturation, African survivals in the New World, the relationship between Congo Square and plantocracy. The conversation was energetic and yet selectively framed. It offered the past as a resource for a multicultural future, focusing on racial pride and cultural continuity, without examining the conditions under which that past was being narrated, or by whom, or to what end.

The heritage sector—museums, archives, cultural centers, lecture series—is not a neutral cultural or political apparatus. It acquires artifacts, provides informal education, and performs the work of designation: determining which forms of culture are appropriate for which audiences, and calibrating a community's investment in its own past Discursive practices do not merely describe; they enact, acting continuously upon memory and the body itself (Austin 1975; Butler 2004; Sedgwick 2003). Omi and Winant's (1986) theory of racial formation addresses the institutionalization of these discourses and their direct and indirect shaping by the state. Social structures function as institutional sites where participation requires one to "accept a set of political rules about who is a political actor, what is a political interest, and how the broad state/society relationship is to be organized" (Omi and Winant 1986, 77). One might consider how formal institutions and organizations articulate tradition, heritage, and progress in the wake of socioeconomic and "natural" disasters globally.

Cultural institutions shape what counts as taste, tradition, and legitimate knowledge, and they do so along the rhythms of race, gender, and sexuality—perhaps especially when they claim otherwise. The event on Rampart Street that afternoon was no exception. The African diaspora was the organizing framework, Black male cultural resistance was the authorized content, and the event itself—multicultural in audience, diasporic in reference, post-Katrina in urgency—was offered, implicitly, as evidence of linear progress: from racial oppression to a liberal multiculturalism achieved through reconstruction.

This temporal narrative, in which a history of Black resistance moves teleologically toward institutional recognition and civic inclusion, rehearses Freeman’s chrononormativity: the arrangement of time to make certain bodies and certain formations of life legible as productive, continuous, and worthy of preservation. This also allows us to consider why even minoritarian experiences can be assimilated into normative structures of power — anthropologist Charles Hale (2005) described this inclusion into neoliberal development as neoliberal multiculturalism. What was at stake was not merely history but the production of a reliable past — one that could anchor a particular vision of Black cultural continuity and authorize particular figures as its custodians. The heteropatriarchal family, as the ideal unit of cultural heritage, is corporealized in figures like the Mardi Gras Indian: rendered iconic, consumable, and touristic. The roles of women are acknowledged as embellishment. The presence of queer subjects is not acknowledged at all.

After the lecture, I lingered and found in the margins significant points of contact. What I encountered told a different story about what kind of crowd was in the building and timelines that conflicted with the dominant narrative. Several people approached me separately with unsolicited information: two brothers, raised in New Orleans during the 1950s and 1960s, recalled a bar and possible brothel made up of queer people of all races, operating under the motto "the prettiest girls in the world are really men," which had eventually relocated to the lakefront before burning down; two local academics suggested I look into the Dew Drop Inn and its long history of showcasing drag performance. As the evening drew to a close, a Cuban priest of the Palo tradition led a drum circle and ceremony, and I found myself—unable to decline without impropriety—drinking from a cup of goat's blood. The irony was considerable: a gathering organized around the radical legacy of Black culture, in which a question about queer tradition could not be answered on the record, concluded with an unofficial ceremony drawing from the true diversity of the African Diaspora.

These moments—the whispered disclosures, the private approaches, the ceremony unfolding at the margins of the official event—constitute a temporal fugitivity that seeks to undermine or exceed official timelines. Memories of a queer past exist within those performative strategies often dismissed as too ephemeral to constitute meaningful knowledge. Diana Taylor (2005) defines the repertoire as all those enactments of gesture, movement, and dance usually seen as nonproductive knowledge—forms of transmission that depend on the capacity to "be there" at the moment of transmission, as opposed to the archive of recorded and retrievable memory. She points to the:

politics behind notions of ephemerality, a long tradition … of thinking of embodied knowledge as that which disappears because it cannot be contained or recuperated through the archive. Nonetheless, multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, reconstituting themselves—transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next. (Taylor 2005, 193)

The audience members who approached me that evening were transmitting knowledge that had survived not in any archive the heritage sector could hold, but in memory, in oral tradition, in the ongoing life of a community whose practices had never required institutional sanction to persist. The silence on the record and the disclosures that occupied the interval together constitute temporal discontinuities that official narratives of heritage and preservation cannot brush away. Black queer and feminist cultural life in New Orleans has long occupied this liminal position: acknowledged in whispers, legible to those who knew where to look, invisible to the official record. After the flood, with the city's Black population dispersed and its cultural institutions working urgently to establish what had been lost and what would be preserved, the terms of that erasure became more consequential. The question of what belongs to tradition—whose bodies, desires, and performances are admitted into the archive—is inseparable from the question of what kind of future is being built.

What I encountered at the Jazz and Cultural Heritage Foundation marked the beginning of a longer inquiry into the relationship between disaster and cultural memory. There is a hierarchy of knowledge concerning temporality and common sense in which some ways of life are considered natural and self-evident, yet in truth, are the products of historically situated power struggles. Even as cultural geographies are actively being reshaped through the discourse of preservation, neoliberal urban policies are working to erase the memory of a Black public sphere.

The Beat of a Different Drum

I fear it is easier to imagine a museum of the future filled with cultural objects representing the history of Black New Orleans than a future New Orleans with actual Black communities My primary research in bounce music compels such an inquiry: the genre worked to curate and sustain sites of working-class Black life against redevelopment logics that had transformed hope for community into private, individuated horizons for a few. Through processes of state abandonment and market encroachment, public schools, housing projects, and Black neighborhoods were eradicated or radically transformed. All while narratives of cultural pathology were deployed to cast Black collectivities as temporal dead ends—formations assumed to have no viable future or a threat in themselves. These visions of pathology most implicate Black women, queers, and trans people, who do not or cannot conform to chrononormative behaviors like heteronormative family reproduction and bootstrap economic progress. Bounce resists this logic, producing alternative visions of the public good and exposing urban renewal as a farce for all but a few.

Bounce rapper Kilo once said: "Bounce isn't hip-hop. It's not R&B. It's project music" (Miller and Thomas 2007). The distinction is critical and precisely temporal. Where nationally recognized Black musical genres circulate through the abstract space of commercial culture, project music is anchored to a specific space-time matrix—the public housing developments of 1990s New Orleans—and to the people who lived there before Katrina. When Republican congressman Richard Baker announced in the storm's aftermath, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did," he consigned this Black public to the past tense, making room for what he understood as God's true work: Airbnbs and charter schools? To call bounce "project music" in 2006, or 2010, or now, is to refuse that past tense—to insist that a community whose coordinates have been scattered and declared finished by opportunists remains, and that its existence is a claim on the present.

Throughout my research, I observed former public housing residents gather to collectively memorialize places that no longer physically exist, resisting normative timelines in which property rights overdetermine the return of Black New Orleanians. I was getting my hair cut in a makeshift shed-turned-barbershop when Black queer bounce artist Sissy Nobby's "Break It Down" came through the speakers. With no pretense toward the narrative devices of other hip-hop forms, Nobby drives home a single imperative:

Break it down, break it break it down, break it break it down . . . / I'm not finished, you know how we roll / Put your hands to the ground, now do it on the floor / Where's the uptown? You know how we roll / Put your hands to the ground, now do it on the floor

When the barber exclaimed, "Here go that sissy shit!" another patron replied, "Yeah, but you can't deny him. Nobody got a voice like Nobby." The patron and I began discussing the differences between bounce and hip-hop from elsewhere. He explained why he'd rather listen to bounce, even when it came from a self-proclaimed sissy. "Gay or not, I feel this," he said. "Because we don't got time for some long story. We still on the plantation down here, and you can hear it."

"We still on the plantation" is a vernacular theory of simultaneous time—one that refuses the linear narrative of racial progress structuring official recovery discourse. The plantation and the project are not sequential in this formulation; they are layered, a present inseparable from histories of racial capitalism. Where the Heritage Center symposium organized Black history as a legible progression from oppression toward inclusion, the patron was articulating what that narrative requires its subjects to forget: that the conditions producing Black dispossession did not end with emancipation, or desegregation, or post-civil rights liberal inclusion, and that the flood was not an interruption of normal life but an intensification of the terms under which Black New Orleanians had always been asked to live.

Nobby's voice carries this temporality in its grain. Guttural, locally accented, shaped by Southern drawl and labored breath, it presses history into the body of the listener rather than narrating it from a distance. This is what the patron was responding to—not the lyrical content of Nobby's song, which makes no argument, but its mode of transmission. Bounce seizes the present moment with a disruptive immediacy that refuses the gradualism of officially sanctioned cultural time. Similar to the ephemeral and precarious pleasures I describe at The End of the World, Sissy Nobby demonstrates a way of inhabiting and making life within the temporal limits of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Hip-hop artists have long paid homage to New Orleans's public housing projects—artists from the Magnolia, or "Nolia," including Juvenile and Jay Electronica, carry that geography into national circulation, making demolished developments into a pilgrimage site that can no longer be physically visited. What bounce performs, in a more local and corporeal register, is a similar act of return to a site that now exists only in the repertoire: in the body, the voice, the dance floor, the shared memory of neighborhoods that post-Katrina development has worked deliberately to erase. To dance to project music in a post-project city is to practice what temporal fugitivity requires, inhabiting a present that carries the past within it, refusing the logic that says what is gone is over.

These acts of memorialization take place against a dominant narrative that has positioned Black collectivity not as a future-bearing formation but as a perpetual dead end. The culture-of-poverty framework—whose influence persists across popular culture, policy, and disaster response—attributes the material conditions of Black poverty to community norms and personal behavior rather than to structural forces. Public housing, pre-Katrina public schools, and the cultural geographies they anchored are figured within this framework as racialized ghettos: spatially confined and temporally arrested, sites of broken homes and stunted development held to blame for their own lack of a future. It is not simply that these communities are excluded from dominant projections of the future; they are positioned as the reason progress has been slow. Within this chrononormative logic, the presumed failure of the Black heteropatriarchal family and the failure to assimilate into nationalist and capitalist hierarchies of value account for their abandonment—and Black women, queer subjects, and trans people become the primary scapegoats, the visible evidence that working-class Black communities cannot or will not fall in step.

Between 2005 and 2011, the material consequences were rapid. Nine of ten public housing projects were demolished or converted into "mixed-income" developments, most allowing only 20 percent of units to remain subsidized. Without an adequate social safety net, private means, family networks, and churches became last resorts—resources that neither reach everyone nor can be assumed to normalize those who need them toward their terms of belonging. As sociologist Rachel Luft has observed, "When public housing recipients encounter neoliberal privatization of public services, their life chances are greatly impacted by whims of capital rather than human need" (Luft 2006). These are the subjects doubly displaced: first from their homes, then from the temporal horizons of a recovery never organized around their return.

Neoliberal policies had long preceded Katrina, but the storm created conditions under which their acceleration became both possible and legible as progress. Residential segregation had first paired large, racialized geographies with systematically neglected infrastructure. Disaster then created the opening for what David Harvey has called accumulation by dispossession: the demolition of public housing, the redevelopment of vacated land, and the entry of private capital into spaces the state had abandoned (2017). The before Katrina / after Katrina periodization naturalizes this process, narrating a rupture rather than a continuation. Bounce artist Vockah Redu's testimony makes clear that the rupture had already been underway:

We received notice that the [Magnolia] project was being torn down. Everybody received notice they were tearing it down to rebuild it, and they made people an offer to move back. They were taking it down to rebuild it—but we knew it was the government and how they wanted to make the area white…Some went to Houston. Houston messed up a lot of people's lives after Katrina. Some people still don't have a place to stay. If you couldn't fulfill your lease and you were on Section 8 and the lease was broke, you'd have no place to stay.

The reforms of the 1990s had already been working to scatter working-class Black communities; the levee breaks provided the pretext to complete what had begun.

Vockah Redu and the late Magnolia Shorty honored their former home not as eulogy but as insistence. Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby return, in performance after performance, to Josephine Street. Katey Red, the first openly trans woman within the genre, hails the Melpomene in "Where the Melph At?" DJ Jubilee, who preceded all of these artists and has long worked within the New Orleans school system as a coach and mentor brings that world into his performances through festive call-and-response—"What's the name of your school?"—to which listeners call back: "Broussard! Rabouin!" They name former public schools, many now closed or converted into charter institutions. These are acts of collective memorialization and regeneration: communities that dominant timelines had declared finished, reconstituted through block parties, parades, and performances that insist, in the vernacular mode, that what is gone is not over.

That insistence meets its sharpest institutional challenge in the domain of education. As anthropologist Justin Hosbey has examined in "We Don't Do the Recovery School District," the neoliberal reorganization of public schooling became a central goal of post-Katrina redevelopment. Rather than invest in a chronically underfunded public school system, Louisiana Governor Blanco and the Bush administration directed resources toward tax incentives for conservative corporate interests, including the Heritage Foundation (Buras 2014). What emerged as the Recovery School District displaced both the United Teachers of New Orleans union and the Orleans Parish School Board. As Hosbey writes:

As these teachers, staff members, and school administrators were reeling from Katrina and the uncertain future caused by the storm, they received termination papers, an immediate loss of income, and were demonized as incubators of the pathological conditions of New Orleans pre-Katrina public schools as charter schools moved in. (2026, 5)

The shift abolished neighborhood districting in favor of a selective application process that could place children anywhere in the city regardless of where they lived. The white flight that had followed twentieth-century school desegregation now found a revanchist horizon in the charter system, deepening racial and class asymmetries and leaving the least institutionally connected families with the fewest choices.

What emerges across public housing, education, and disaster relief is a consistent logic: the designation of Black collectivity as a problem to be managed rather than a community to be sustained. The future produced by post-Katrina recovery—mixed-income developments, charter schools, reconstructed neighborhoods—presupposes the dispersal of the very communities it displaces. Black women, queers, welfare recipients, and the working poor are not incidental casualties of this reorganization; they are its structural targets, the figures whose exclusion is required for the new New Orleans to cohere as a legible temporal project. Progress does not merely marginalize these formations—it retrospectively frames them as the cause of their own marginalization, the arrested past that linear time must transcend. What bounce music and its communities continue to perform is that this foreclosure is never total: these fugitive practices are transmitted not through the archive but through embodied contact, the block party, and the call-and-response that carries the beat of a different drum. The question that remains—the one that the Recovery School District could not answer and did not intend to—is whose children were being imagined into that future. It is to that question, and to the figure of the child as a chrononormative device, that we turn next.

For the Kids

In the year following the levee breaks, news reports began covering a rise in New Orleans birth rates. Local and national journalists found that the city's birth rate had increased 39 percent from May 2005 to May 2006, with one hospital reporting a 25 percent increase in births nine to twelve months after the storm Some parents attributed these births to the practical difficulty of accessing contraception and medical care in a city whose infrastructure had collapsed; others described them as a conscious decision, a deliberate reaching toward the future in the wake of catastrophic loss. Local obstetricians took the surge as a sign of renaissance, citing the desires that prompted it as a "stress reliever," a way to "fill the time. In August 2006, a CBS broadcast titled "Katrina Brides and Babies" depicted a white family of seven from the Metairie suburb, framing their new additions as emblems of human nature's capacity for renewal in the aftermath of Mother Nature's destruction. The broadcast paralleled the birth rate increase to a growth in the city's wedding industry, offering both as evidence that where physical reconstruction lagged, biological reproduction could carry the work of recovery forward. Reporters, doctors, and parents reached for the same vocabulary: "evacuation babies," and more commonly, "Katrina babies."

The Katrina baby is a temporal discourse before it is anything else. It narrates recovery as a generational project, one that moves forward through the reproduction of legible, productive bodies housed in legible, productive family formations The broadcast made the politics of that narration unusually visible. The family it featured was white, suburban, and middle-class, positioned as the vanguard of a post-flood renaissance. But the temporal logic it enacted was not unique to that program. It replicated the same structure that had organized the Heritage Center symposium: certain forms of life are designated as continuers of culture; others are designated as burdens and/or risks. The Katrina baby, in this dominant register, is the figure around whom recovery's promise coheres—a child who will inherit a reconstructed city, proof that heteronormative productivity, briefly interrupted by disaster, has resumed. The flood, in this framing, was a temporary suspension of normal time; the birth and the consummation of nuclear families are evidence that linear time has resumed.

What this narrative requires, and cannot acknowledge, is that for many residents of New Orleans, “progress” had never met them where they were at. The levee breaks did not inaugurate dispossession; they concentrated it, making it suddenly legible to national audiences who did not know what time it really was. The discourse of Katrina babies, with its investment in renewal through white reproductive heteronormativity, replicated—in the language of hope—the same logic of exclusion that had structured the city before the storm. Both the CBS broadcast and the Heritage Center symposium treat the disaster as a rupture from which recovery can proceed, rather than as the latest expression of an ongoing condition. Both offer linear time—generational continuity, cultural restoration—as the medium through which life is reproduced and the future secured. And both require the designation of certain bodies and certain forms of life as insufficient carriers of that future.

I reclaim the term "Katrina babies" to ask what it conceals. In Black queer vernacular, "the kids" or "the children" refers to queer and trans youth and young adults—not as a category defined by age but as a position within structures of power and vulnerability The kids are those who have been pushed out, cast as unproductive, treated as a burden; a category that extends, in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, beyond queer people to include single mothers, sex workers, Black poor and working-class populations displaced from the city, and all those whom the discourse of reconstruction did not address. Refugees, ghettoized youth, welfare babies, anchor babies: these are the figures who appear in the political imagination not as inheritors of the city's future but as drags on it. If the dominant Katrina baby signals that the heteronormative family has survived the storm, the Katrina babies I am concerned with are those for whom that signal was never available—those who experienced the flood as one crisis amidst a series, and who have nonetheless reproduced the conditions of collective survival by other means.

In New Orleans, centuries-old patterns of Black precarity and spatial violence took on new meanings in the post-Katrina context, as disaster capitalism proliferated. Since 2005, the arrival of new demographics paralleled the expansion of new infrastructures—schools, hospitals, the tourist industry—oriented toward a growing market base. In 2015, economist Ben Casselman described the post-disaster demographic shifts, drawing on US Census Bureau estimates:

More than 175,000 Black residents left New Orleans in the year after the storm; more than 75,000 never came back. Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white population has nearly returned to its pre-storm total, and the Hispanic population, though still small compared with other Southern cities, has grown by more than 30 percent. Together, the trends have pushed the African-American share of the population down to 59 percent in 2013, from 66 percent in 2005.

These demographic shifts make clear how much of the city's post-Katrina reconstruction centered on the return and growth of middle-class white families. A Black youth once told me that in New Orleans, the N and O stand for "no opportunity"—a characterization that did not apply equally to all newcomers. New residents arrived to participate in a range of reconstruction projects and found that despite its precarity, the city held considerable possibility. As Rachel Luft notes:

Narratives of the storm, both those that emerged while the catastrophe was unfolding and those that have explored the ongoing aftermath, have frequently pointed to the glaring racial and economic inequality that contextualized the catastrophe. The emphasis has been a critical corrective to the pervasive racist colorblindness that helped produce such devastating consequences. Unfortunately, however, most of the discourse has also been limited by its neglect of substantive feminist, intersectional analysis. By intersectional I mean a gender- and race-conscious framework that exposes the way in which structural sexism and racism came together to produce the disaster and even the social justice response to it. (2016, 2)

Reproductive futurism naturalizes white heteropatriarchal responses to disaster and recovery, furthering catastrophe for those who do not fit within its horizon. Yet such pressures do not foreclose the emergence of alternative social formations. For Katrina babies, contact—Delany's term for the nonbiological forms of social reproduction found in ephemeral and embodied encounters—is key to survival. Contact presumes a corporeal relation in a public space of indeterminate encounter, and is especially resonant in moments of disaster, when bodies are most vulnerable. Blackness and queerness are not productive within dominant frames of family and future; they represent a form of incoherence that threatens nuclear bonds and the coherent self. Therein lies the potential of Black queer sociality as a site of reproduction simultaneously designated nonproductive by the dominant order.

Temporal discourse, as the Heritage Center symposium, neoliberal development, and the Katrina babies narrative together make clear, is a structure that produces futures for some by foreclosing them for others. The quiet voice that leaned in at the Heritage Center—"nobody is going to speak to that subject in this crowd"—was naming, precisely, whose futures were being protected by that silence. The Katrina babies I am thinking about are not waiting for that protection to be lifted. They are building futures from materials the official narrative or progress has not authorized, through relationships it has not recognized, in time it has not accounted for. Their reproduction is social and often ephemeral, transmitted not through the archive but through the body, the repertoire, the conversation held in the room adjacent to the one where the official record is kept.

Conclusion: At The End of the World

My nocturnal visits to the riverbanks at the End of the World were not simply pleasurable leisure but opportunities to undermine notions of tradition and modernity– never meant for the Black working class, let alone a horny queer. The same forces that enclosed this landscape determined what would be remembered about it. To return to the End of the World at the close of this essay is to insist on the connection between geographic marginality and temporal disposability: both are produced, contested, and inhabited by those for whom the dominant order offered no other option.

Despite The Welcome Table's use of the area as a beautiful backdrop to global conversations about climate change, its own history goes unspecified. The film includes a narration of Katrina's aftermath delivered by the singer-songwriter John Boutté but misses an opportunity to excavate the history of the Industrial Canal as a site of infrastructural violence—a history inseparable from the climate vulnerability the film documents. That omission is itself a temporal act: the erasure of how this landscape came to be, and of who bore the cost of its making. A willful distortion of reality is required to suggest that Hurricane Katrina or even neoliberalism suddenly created the social vulnerability of Black New Orleanians, as if racist and capitalist public policy were incidental to Black death rather than constitutive

The distinction between the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards did not exist until the building of the Industrial Canal in 1923 (Campanella 2017, 126). At the site where The Welcome Table is set, the Ursuline Convent and plantation had stood for most of the early nineteenth century, until 1912, when the New Orleans Levee Board displaced it. This arrangement was partly compelled by "canal fever" following the construction of the Panama Canal in 1914, and by natural erosion at sharp bends in the Mississippi. Maritime planners saw an opportunity to create an inner harbor connecting the river to Lake Pontchartrain, and in the 1960s to extend this to the Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the MRGO. These projects led to an economic boom but also provided a pathway for Gulf saltwater to move inland, initiating the coastal erosion that continues to threaten southern Louisiana today. Progress, as this essay has argued from its opening, was organized around certain lives while damning others. The Industrial Canal is a prime example of logics that necessitate Black ecological precarity, toward urban development.

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries New Orleans greatly expanded. The Ninth Ward was steadily populated by a mixture of recent immigrants and Black people pushed to the eastern fringes of Orleans Parish. The area became increasingly Black amid the failures of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the consolidation of Jim Crow, and white flight following school desegregation. Whereas the later use of federal freeway infrastructure has been well documented as a means of displacing communities and hardening color lines, less discussed are the uses of waterways as infrastructural redlines. With the building of the Industrial Canal and later the Intracoastal Waterway, this community eventually found itself encircled by three bodies of water while sitting on steadily sinking land (Feireiss et al. 2009, 94). The Lower Ninth Ward—one of the largest concentrations of Black homeownership in the United States—was, by design, a disaster waiting to happen.

The End of the World, indeed: a watery, pastoral, and ultimately lethal barrier between stark racial and classed lines. In a 2022 opinion piece, local writer Nathaniel Adams observes:

The source of the name is a mystery. Several other areas downriver had been called World's End and similar things in the past, so it could be that newcomers, unfamiliar with the geography, heard that term and applied it to the local levee, especially because the semi-apocalyptic landscape fits the moniker so aptly. A more critical look notices that the name is referring to the land between the more recently white-majority Bywater and the Black-majority neighborhoods across the canal. (Adams 2022)

The End of the World as an “apocalyptic” cultural object has furthered racial and capitalist lines of difference, which begs: is it easier to envision an ecological apocalypse or the end of socio-political domination? This geography was organized through decades of policy decisions about whose neighborhoods would be protected and whose would be exposed. The front side of the canal, the Bywater, has experienced a markedly different trajectory since 2005. Local anthropologist and resident Matt Sakakeeny notes:

Prior to Katrina, the Bywater was one of the city's most mixed neighborhoods in terms of race and class, but the Black population decreased 64% between 2000 and 2010 and home prices have risen over 75% since the flood. Not coincidentally, the Bywater and adjoining Marigny and St. Roch neighborhoods are where the largest concentration of new transplants have settled, driving up rental prices at even higher rates than the rest of the city. (2015)

This is the same demographic logic documented by Ben Casselman in the previous section: the return of white residents, the non-return of Black ones, the spatial reproduction of racial hierarchy through the language of recovery and renewal. Development logics not only organize time; it organizes land. It determines which neighborhoods anchor a future and which are left to the water.

What The Welcome Table does not name is that this landscape already tells the story of climate displacement—not as approaching catastrophe but as an already accomplished fact. The transnational gathering of people expelled from their homes by flooding and infrastructural failure was staged, however inadvertently, at the precise site where that history was made. The canal that divided the Ninth Ward, the saltwater that entered through the MRGO, the levees that failed in 2005: these are not backdrop to the story of climate injustice. They are the story.

To return to the End of the World is to return to the argument with which this essay began. Within these interstitial riverbanks—this liminal strip between the river and the canal, between the Bywater and the Lower Ninth—were and are meaningful points of contact. These stories I have shared speak to people inhabiting space that dominant narratives of past and future have tried to wash away. What they were doing cannot be fully preserved in any archive; their actions depend, on the body, on transmission, on being there. And persist—in memory, in practice, in the ongoing refusal to accept chrononormative notions of recovery.

The national, state, and local negligence that led to the breaking of the levees not only destroyed homes and displaced communities; it ruptured the coordinates by which residents organized memory, continuity, and belonging. The crisis of reconstruction projects globally is inseparable from a crisis of time: a reckoning with assumptions of linear progress in the wake of disaster. The temporal ideologies I analyze claim neutrality while naturalizing a future where whiteness, the heteropatriachal family, and middle to upper class subjects are the inheritors of a safer, more secure environment. These are not simply ideas but processes that take shape in (infra)structural objects such as in media, housing, and schools. I take the Black queer subject as a primary figure of these exclusive processes, one that informs us about the broader treatment and possibilities of non-normative futures. The persistent threat of flooding due to climate catastrophe is irrevocably linked to the maintenance of modernity and its normalizing processes: classed, racialized, and sexual ways of life pursued in the name of a future for some, even as they overwhelm other ways of life, threatening to submerge our communal imaginations and material worlds.