Katrina's Imprint : Race and Vulnerability in America

Katrina's Imprint highlights the power of this sentinel American event and its continuing reverberations in contemporary politics, culture, and public policy. Published on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the multidisciplinary volume reflects on how history, location, access to transportation, health care, and social position feed resilience, recovery, and prospects for the future of New Orleans and the Gulf region. Essays examine the intersecting vulnerabilities that gave rise to the disaster, explore the cultural and psychic legacies of the storm, reveal how the process of rebuilding and starting over replicates past vulnerabilities, and analyze Katrina's imprint alongside American's myths of self-sufficiency. A case study of new weaknesses that have emerged in our era, this book offers an argument for why we cannot wait for the next disaster before we apply the lessons that should be learned from Katrina.

KEITH WAILOO is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University, and the author and editor of several books, among them Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health.

KAREN M. O'NEILL is a sociologist and associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, and the author of Rivers by Design: State Power and the Origins of U.S. Flood Control.

JEFFREY DOWD is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Rutgers University.

ROLAND V. ANGLIN is the director of the Initiative for Regional and Community Transformation (IRCT) at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University.