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RefugeeǀCitizen: Mediating Testimony through Image and Word in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

When journalists reporting on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 referred to Black residents of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast as “refugees,” they claimed that the name expressed their shock at images of widespread suffering and even their sympathy for those in peril. Yet the claim to sympathy could not diminish the negative impact of designating overwhelmingly poor people of color by a name that robbed them of the status that other more descriptive names like resident, evacuee, or citizen would have provided. While refugee was a name that would confound, hurt, and linger, it would also reveal how Black precarity and survival are mediated through the “visual construction of the social field” in the real-time crucible of disaster-reporting (Mitchell, “Showing” 171). Journalists actively constructed imperiled residents as refugees by suturing images of Black embodied suffering to names and implied narratives of statelessness in a contemporary instantiation of the routine submersion of people of color in scenes of violence, trauma, and danger. I follow Saidiya Hartman’s identification of these forms as “scenes of subjection” in order call attention to how this “shocking spectacle” (Hartman 4) illuminated nothing new, but, instead, circulated a deadly and familiar trope of dispossession. Such dispossession targets Black bodies, as Hortense Spillers clarifies, by attaching names and narratives to Black bodies in order to retain them as captive flesh (67), and also to preserve rhetorically and materially the capacity to strip persons of their power to name themselves. The name as the site for the substitution or reversal of status and self-constitution is yoked to images and thus visualized within the “peculiar ocularity” of slavery, as Jasmine Nichole Cobbs defines the “raciovisual economy that determined ways of seeing and ways of being seen according to racial difference” (34). (The Clash” 1185) disjunction of Black bodies and “citizen” is legible within the history of visualizing and verbalizing Black life as an ontological limit. How does the verbal and visual testimony that collects at the site of Hurricane Katrina refute this construction and, by so doing, reference the long historical arc of Black self-naming, including the abolitionist use of life story? How did the verbal act of calling citizens refugees in combination with the circulation of images of Black precarity engender