Eye of the Storm: Commemorating Katrina as Political Praxis

This section of Souls, “After the Storm: 20 Years since Hurricane Katrina,” is prompted by the 25th-anniversary volume’s theme of “Divest/Invest.” As the journal’s call states, this theme is “occasioned by the case of Israel’s siege and starvation of Gaza, as it catalyzes historical comparisons to South African Apartheid and other political moments in which the call to materially and ideologically divest becomes central to public debate and organizing.” In this section, we join our contributing authors in focusing on specific conjunctural processes in post-Katrina New Orleans to interrogate commemoration as a political praxis. By studying the historical material relations and social practices that conditioned the post-Katrina political landscape, we invigorate and elaborate the revolutionary planning and counter-archiving of the Black Radical Tradition.