The stories of New Orleans have always unfolded as a tale of two cities-the booming, vibrant, best-known neighborhoods famous for their Mardi Gras traditions, juxtaposed alongside the poverty, violence, dislocation, and racial segregation experienced by the city's most vulnerable populations. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the distinctions between these narratives became even more stark. There's yet another story, however, and that is the one that the people of New Orleans tell about themselves.
Public memory is a multifaceted and dynamic social process, often composed of multiple elements. The diverse and mutable forms of memory derived from the first-hand experiences of communities is known as vernacular memory. In the case of the memory of Hurricane Katrina, where the particularized, nuanced experiences of the most marginal of the city's population, were subsumed into dominant discursive modes, vernacular memorials serve an indispensable purpose. Through their culturally specific construction, many of the vernacular memorials created out of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina turn public memory--and therefore attention--not just toward the future, but animates it in the present.
Through a set of insights I derive from a close reading of the Hurricane Katrina Memorial for the Lower Ninth Ward, in both juxtaposition to and alongside other vernacular memorials, including the iconic jazz funeral and its accompanying second line as well as the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, I argue that active, vernacular practices of remembrance have the potential to promote more collective and therefore ethical modes of memorialization following the traumatic event of Hurricane Katrina. Rethinking what constitutes ethical and productive memory work can allow us to understand that vernacular commemorative practices are not invested in diminishing the influence of a traumatic past. By cordoning off trauma and relegating it to the past, as passed, we foreclose upon the opportunity to engage with the traumatic event, in this case, Hurricane Katrina, in a way that renders it as experience, rather than the collapse of it as such. Rather, the memorials explored in this project allow the memory of such a past to emerge in the memorial process enabling it to act as a potential source for conceiving of new and different ways of memorialization.
