“They should have called Katrina ‘Gone with the Wind’”: Charles Burnett’s Quiet As Kept and the Neoliberal Racial State

This article explores Charles Burnett’s short film, Quiet As Kept (2007). I explore how the film examines the complex dynamics of the neoliberal racial state revealed by Hurricane Katrina. More importantly, the film also insists upon the intersection of neoliberalism’s cultural aesthetics and political economy. Ultimately, I argue that one must think of neoliberalism as a racial project and through the binary of mobility/immobility. That is, the neoliberal racial state operates, primarily, by mobilizing capital and wealth upward, and immobilizing poor communities of color. And while racial inequality is a hallmark of American history that long precedes the emergence of the neoliberal state, the unique forms it has taken since the 1970s is the product of social and economic policy specific to the neoliberal political project. I conclude with Burnett’s vision of a politics of independent cinema capable of contesting neoliberal politics and aesthetics moving forward.