In his January 2009 inaugural speech, President Obama alluded in one sentence to Hurricane Katrina, reminding the world of the unforgivable negligence of his predecessor. The Katrina disaster was a reference point throughout the Democrat campaign, and even featured in President George W. Bush's final press conference when he belligerently reminded America of all the people he had got airlifted off house roofs. “Katrina” has become an internationally recognized signifier of national disgrace and class and racial divisions – a reminder, as Paul Gilroy put it, of “the principles of the racial nomos which, as we saw in the aftermath of the New Orleans flood, is the silent dominant partner of stubbornly colour-coded US political culture.”Footnote ¹ In 2008, Bath Music Festival included Spike Lee's film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) in its themed programme on homelessness, rootlessness and “The Edge of Life.” British playwright Jonathan Holmes commemorated the storm's fourth anniversary with Katrina, a “promenade performance” in a disused warehouse on the Thames. These underlined the fact that Hurricanes Katrina and its immediate successor Rita of 2005 have infiltrated and haunted international consciousness ever since.

When the Levees Broke, perhaps the best-known cultural tribute to the post-Katrina city, has a title echoing the blues song of the same name by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, composed for the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.Footnote ² Befitting a city known as the birthplace of jazz, Lee's film has a haunting score by the New Orleans trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and a cast of both unknown and distinguished New Orleanians. They evoke the terrible experience of 29 August 2005, when – after the eye of the hurricane, then reduced to force-three strength, turned away from the city – the dirt, earth and concrete levees, built by the Army Corps of Engineers following that same 1927 flood, gave way and flooded an area seven times the size of Manhattan. It is a film that makes you weep, and rail against the cruel neglect of the Bush administration, the insurance companies, the incompetence of state and city government, and the tragic irony that – the Iraq War having eaten up so much of the nation's energy and wealth – even the Louisiana National Guard were out of town during the city's greatest crisis.

Since 2005, Hurricane Katrina has inspired an outpouring of international grief and anger, political and demotic tributes. Rather like the death in 1997 of Diana in Britain, or 9/11 in the US, it was a gargantuan loss that seemed to redefine a national and international mood, even if that change was temporary or considerably diluted in subsequent months and years. Katrina was seen as heralding the death of a unique city, exposing American racism and neglect of its poorest citizens; as the nation's loudest wake-up call to the realities of global warming; and the beginning of the end of Bush's popularity and credible presidency. In global television images and coverage, press photographs and personal interviews, daubs on T-shirts and sheets stretched across roofs, and scrawls on cars and saturated front doors, the world saw a city drowning and a national government and emergency services absent, fiddling and self-justifying. There was general outrage, followed by cynicism and hopelessness. Murders, suicides, and other forms of personal and social violence and disorder rose sharply in the city, and huge numbers of New Orleans citizens took to any prescribed or legal drug that would take away post-traumatic stress. People whispered that New Orleans might be America's Atlantis, its first lost city.

It is easy to feel deep sorrow and despair about New Orleans. Once, the very name made people smile – it was the City that Care Forgot, the Big Easy, Fat City of Mardi Gras, where you could laisser les bons temps rouler, doing all the things you ever wanted, out on the street, without anyone caring. After the deluge, New Orleans looked like a site of loss and doom. There was even discussion, in the face of the difficulties of rebuilding, of abandoning the city altogether. The global village, which had watched film of houses and cars trashed and piled on top of one another, while corpses floated in the streets and (most visibly African American) people screamed for help from the roofs and attics of their one-storey houses, mourned the drowning of a city perched precariously between huge bodies of water (the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain) and already sinking well below sea level. Spike Lee's film, released a year later, seemed to mark the end of a unique culture and people; his subtitle, “Requiem,” appearing to lay New Orleans to rest. In the first chapter of his post-Katrina novel The Tin Roof Blowdown, James Lee Burke described the storm that “with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana … [and then] one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature.”Footnote ³

And yet the whole history of New Orleans has been one of new starts, transformation, destruction and rebuilding. The oldest part of the city, Vieux Carré, has burned down more than once, it has flooded countless times, the river has changed course and its physical contours have been considerably shifted by the building of canals and bridges. It has been sinking ever since its foundation in 1718 in the swamps at the mouth of the world's third-largest river, and its fortunes have been as varied as its peoples – from the Native Americans who first inhabited the inhospitable lands, to the French and Spanish who colonized it, the Acadians who settled around it, the American Protestants who built the Garden District, and the African Americans who came here as free people of colour or slaves, and most vividly gave it cultural prominence and fame. Many times has the city's death been predicted, but it somehow rises again – even under the uncaring presidency of George W. Bush.

Happily, New Orleans is not being allowed to die, largely because it is globally adored and revered, and – more importantly – because its population is fiercely loyal to the only home most of them have ever had. Before the storm, 80 percent of residents had been born and bred there – an extremely high percentage for an American city. In a city of complex class and race histories and relations, with generations of families of many races and ethnicities living cheek by jowl, the extended, multigenerational family is a key focus. “How's your mama an' ’em?” remains a standard greeting and was one of the first questions people asked as they met again when the city reopened to residents. Even its most successful musicians who tour regularly (Dr. John, the Neville and Marsalis Brothers, Harry Connick Jr., Allen Toussaint, Etta James and others) rarely considered living elsewhere; they valued the unique nature of music-making in this “authenticity well” of jazz. Spontaneous global enthusiasm for the city's music – recognized as emanating from a truly collaborative group in Treme, Uptown and the severely damaged Lower Ninth Ward – led to invitations, fund-raising opportunities and gifts from many countries and US cities. New Orleans musicians have been feted as never before.

But they have not abandoned their stricken city. “Home” and the desire to “go home” have been the refrain in the years since the 2005 catastrophe. Four Rs – Recover, Rebuild, Rebirth, ReNew Orleans – are key to many familiar New Orleans songs and tributes: Dr. John's “Sweet Home New Orleans,” Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis's “Good to Be Home,” “Ain't Got No Home” (Clarence “Frogman” Henry), “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” (Louis Armstrong), and “Walkin’ to New Orleans” (Fats Domino). “The Road Home” is the name of a controversial project designed to get citizens back to their original houses and jobs (often sardonically labelled “The Roadblock Home”). The “Transforma Project,” supported by the Community Arts Network, boasts a “HOME, New Orleans?” theme offering installations and theatre snippets in front of and inside ruined houses, in four neighbourhoods and in collaboration with four universities (two black, Xavier and Dillard, and two white, Tulane and New York University). Many of these cluster around destroyed houses, with the theme of family and personal association – memorialized through quilt, painting, bus tour and dramatic performance.

Soul queen Irma Thomas, who lost her whole nightclub, the Lion's Den, voiced pride in a city that is both home and national symbol: “You had your white collars and your blue collars – but you also had your dirty collars. And that's where soul and groove and all that came from.” She went on to say,

In angrier vein, the anthropologist Jay Edwards spoke about the scandalous erasure of histories, ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide resulting from the planned bulldozing of those “shotgun” houses where the poor had produced the city's great heritage of brass bands and second lines.Footnote ⁴

There was widespread delight that Fats Domino was rescued from the attic of his own home, and funds poured into restoring his house and studio in the Lower Ninth Ward (though he now lives elsewhere in the city). Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis spearheaded the building of a new Musicians' Village in the Upper Ninth Ward, aided and abetted by Habitat for Humanity and various church groups like the Baptist Crossroads Project and thousands of college students from all over the country volunteering their labour. The plan was to have three hundred new homes for musicians available by the end of 2008, with a recording studio and rehearsal space for the first time in the city. (Ironically, the project has failed to attract sufficient musicians, who are too poor for the rents and, if they remain in the city, have had to seek cheaper housing). Brad Pitt established the Make It Right Foundation to help the Lower Ninth Ward recover by building 150 affordable, green, high-quality homes in the neighbourhood near the Industrial Canal levee breach. Used instruments were donated to players who had lost everything in the flood. Michael White, musician, music historian and academic, as well as collector of over a hundred years' worth of jazz memorabilia, lost all his life's work, but continued to play across the city and is now a popular media figure.

Allen Toussaint, the Neville Brothers, the Dixie Cups and Dr. John (Mac Rebennack) moved away initially, touring internationally and within the US, though – mindful of the new focus on the city's musical tradition – Toussaint described Katrina as “not only a drowning but a baptism.”Footnote ⁵ Many musicians travelled from other cities, however, to keep the music alive in a city where they no longer had homes to lay their heads. A music journalist, Fred Kasten, relocated in Atlanta, set up a makeshift studio in his apartment in conjunction with a local public radio station, in order to record live music shows. Musician Chris Thomas King, son of Louisiana bluesman Tabby Thomas, was flooded out and now lives in Prairieville, near Baton Rouge. Interviewed by the New Orleans Times-Picayune on 7 August 2009, he said, “I definitely should play in New Orleans more often. People seem to forget that I'm a New Orleans musician and that I live in Louisiana. But I'm here, and I've always been here.” Music clubs came back fitfully, and were succeeding quite well before the 2008 recession produced some inevitable setbacks. Enriched by newcomers and supported by loyal practitioners and audiences, the live music scene continues to flourish in the city.

Returning home will prove impossible for the thousands of people who were bussed out of New Orleans and dumped in Houston, Baton Rouge and other cities, and who have no home to go back to – since insurance companies behaved disgracefully and Federal compensation via FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) has been slow and minimal. The population is now roughly two-thirds what it was before the storm, with huge numbers of African Americans resettled elsewhere. But there is no doubt that, if it is at all possible, most New Orleanians will do their utmost to get back home to start again. International attention focussed on the City That Care (supposedly) Forgot has led to the return of some groups, such as the Vietnamese population in eastern New Orleans, who quickly rebuilt their flooded neighbourhoods, as well as drawing in new immigrants, particularly large numbers of Hispanic workers, who supplied much of the labour in rebuilding the city, and young professionals, often arriving for a weekend to gut mouldy houses but staying on, inspired by the idea of starting over in a place that is starting over. T-shirts and posters reflect mixed cynicism about national neglect and also a triumphalist sense that this city cannot be kept down: “New Orleans – proud to swim home,” “New Orleans is coming back,” and “We're home.”

What has strengthened and given substance to the return home – and to the affirmation by the remaining, or returning, residents – is the cultural outpouring that quickly followed the storm. When I first visited the post-Katrina city in March 2006, I was aware of community activity, numerous blogs, reading groups, storytelling workshops and the fitful return of restaurants, night clubs and bars where music was played. Five years on, it seems, these things are everywhere – and (as in the past) the city has found new life and identity through its cultural activities, which it is hoped will attract tourists, convention trade and new business. Musicians swiftly released hurricane-themed albums: Dr. John and the Lower 911, Sippiana Hericane, 2005; Marsalis Music, A Celebration of New Orleans Music (to Benefit Musicares' Hurricane Relief), 2005; Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, The River in Reverse (2006); Terence Blanchard's A Tale of God's Will (a Requiem for Katrina), 2006 (the soundtrack for Spike Lee's film); Michael White's Blue Crescent, 2008, and more. Bill Taylor, owner of music club Tipitina's, established a foundation to get musicians back in town. Monk Boudreaux (Mardi Gras Indian) anticipated a reunion with his tribe, Golden Eagles: “[T]he music's gonna get gritty, because when we all get together, we're gonna be so happy to see each other that we're just gonna roll it out.”Footnote ⁶ At the first post-storm Jazz Fest, 2006, Bruce Springsteen brought the audience to tears when he dedicated to New Orleans his song written about New Jersey, “My City of Ruins”:

The world's attention has focussed mainly on the city's music, but other cultural forms have emerged strongly. Plays on the subject of Katrina have been written and performed: most notable has been the work of John Biguenet, whose Rising Water: A New Orleans Love Story first appeared at Southern Rep in March 2007 during the Tennessee Williams Festival and later achieved international recognition; a second play (in his proposed trilogy), Shotgun, highlighting the aftermath of the storm, was produced in May 2009. Novels are being published: a well-known local writer, Tony Dunbar, produced the first Katrina novel (Tubby Meets Katrina: A Tubby Dubonnet Mystery, 2006) in his series about New Orleans lawyer Tubby Dubonnet, while James Lee Burke, internationally acclaimed Louisiana creator of the Dave Robicheaux crime series, produced what some call his finest work, The Tin Roof Blowdown. Tom Piazza's City of Refuge (2008) was featured as city-wide reading in the One Book/One New Orleans programme. Poppy Z. Brite, gothic turned crime writer about New Orleans restaurants, completed the third of her “Liquor” trilogy, Soul Kitchen, the night before Katrina hit. “In the aftermath of the storm,” she writes in a prefatory authorial note, “it soon became obvious that I must dedicate the book to the readers and friends who kept us afloat during impossible times.” She goes on to list musicians, restaurants, bars, Dixie beer, all the “irreplaceable” who may or may not come back. There are collections and anthologies of essays by locally renowned journalists and writers such as Rosemary James, Andrei Codrescu, Chris Rose and Philip C. Kolin, many of whom donated all profits to hurricane relief. Bookstores overflow with personal reminiscence pamphlets, picture books of animals rescued from derelict houses, and photo collections of the damaged wards, homeless people and lost, maggot-riddled slogan-plastered refrigerators placed on the sidewalk to moulder.Footnote ⁷ Essay and photograph collections, pamphlets, fridge magnets, CDs, websites and blogs galore recorded people's experiences and memories, as well as anger about what happened to their beloved hometown. Katrina is still a reference point in Mardi Gras parades.

Everyone recognized the importance of recording this historic event, and shared a pride in New Orleans's exceptionalism. Following the 9/11 Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank was established by the University of New Orleans and George Mason University, creating an open-access, online database for photographs, stories, oral history audio and video files and transcriptions relating to Katrina and Rita. In the introduction to the photography exhibition catalogue of “Katrina Exposed,” the curator claims, “We saw it with our own eyes,” but concludes how hard it is to see them as “historical record”: “there may never be a time when looking at these photographs will seem like an analytical, rather than an emotional experience.”Footnote ⁸ Writers and critics from outside the city are playing their part in offering new perspectives on a unique period of urban history.Footnote ⁹

Film and television are playing an even greater role in informing the world and keeping the spirit alive. Apart from Spike Lee's great film, there have been two acclaimed documentaries. One is Tootie's Last Suit (2006), focussing on the life and sudden death (while testifying in court against white police racism) of the celebrated African American Allison “Tootie” Montana, former chief of the Mardi Gras Indian tribe Yellow Pocahontas Hunters. The second is Trouble the Water (2008), a homemade video documentary by two impoverished, drug-dealing African Americans who recorded their heroic struggle to survive Katrina and whose film, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, won the Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize.

Perhaps the most significant cultural event to bring the city to global attention will be the American television series Treme for the HBO network, which began airing in April 2010 and which follows Fox TV's K-Ville, the post-Katrina detective drama of 2007–8. Treme is the brainchild of the writers of the phenomenally successful series The Wire, David Simon and Eric Overmyer, the latter a part-time New Orleans resident. It focusses on the cultural life of musicians and cooks (in two of the city's major industries), and features The Wire star Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native, playing Antoine Batiste, a trombonist, while his girlfriend is played by Phyllis Montana, the moving and passionate spokeswoman in Spike Lee's Levees. The series is advised by musician Kermit Ruffins (who appears in the pilot as himself) and renowned New Orleans chef Susan Spicer. It is set three months following Hurricane Katrina, and addresses such issues as political and police corruption, the public-housing controversy and the city's attempts to revive its vital tourism industry. If as successful at educating mass audiences about New Orleans as The Wire was about Baltimore, Treme might give New Orleans its highest ever global profile.

In a cultural form not usually regarded as the city's strongest, the visual arts have been central to its self-expression and its new celebration of itself. Most striking was the determination of many revivalist organizations to democratize the culture-led regeneration. In the NOLA RISING campaign, everyone – however untutored or amateurish – was encouraged to display publicly works of art “for the purpose of rebuilding and restoring the human spirit in our city.” There are many community ventures aimed at giving new life to closed or deserted buildings – such as the Apostolic Project (2007) in the gutted parsonage of the Upper Room Apostolic Church, the interior of which was filled with thousands of hand-folded paper boats, some with pomegranate symbols on them speaking of birth, death and rebirth.

And many of these ventures were created or complemented by artists from across the nation. The Brooklyn artist Maxime Demetrio created two sister murals, one of New York brownstones which will be placed in the Lower Ninth Ward, the other a Lower Ninth stoop leading to an absent house in New Orleans, to be sited in Brooklyn. In his installation, “An Interlude to Stillness,” Pittsburgh artist Sean Derry reanimated an abandoned parking lot with thirty-five multicoloured balloon automobiles inflated by handmade air pumps powered by motorbikes. The New Orleans-born artist Kathy Randels performed “Spaces in Between” in her old Lakeview home submerged by eight feet of water. She played the Black Lady, a spirit moving between the realms of the living and the dead, inspired by a Serbian performance she gave in 1999, which ended when NATO bombed Serbia and Kosovo and she fled with her costumes back to the States. In August 2009, artist Kristen Struebing-Beazley installed in New Orleans's Contemporary Art Center a three-window light-work, ART-IN-ME-MO-RI-AM, using backlit text from Yusef Komunyakaa's poem “Requiem” to illuminate the August anniversary of Katrina.

There is also a new determination to memorialize the city's political history, with an installation on the grass lot between Press and Royal Streets, the site where Homer Plessy boarded a whites-only East Louisiana railroad car at the intersection, leading to the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws. As has been the case in New Orleans during calmer times, public spaces are being seen as a new kind of sociopolitical theatre, the city's ravaged wards rendered a vast creative cultural playground and site of politically charged engagements.

Between November 2008 and January 2009, led by veteran curator Dan Cameron, the city hosted what was described as “the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States … in museums, historic buildings, and found sites throughout New Orleans.” Prospect.1 New Orleans was conceived as following in the tradition of great international biennials such as Venice, showcasing new artistic practices as well as programmes benefiting the local community. However, its clear political intention was to

The New York Times review of this “Kaleidoscopic Biennial for a City” described the way “something magical” happened – “a merging of art and city into a shifting, healing kaleidoscope,” mingling “so-called site-specific art and portable art objects whose meanings are expanded by their settings” with “a tour of the city's rich past, recent trauma and often struggling arts organizations.”Footnote ¹¹ International artists participated with casts of domestic architecture by Britain's Rachel Whiteread, New York painter Adam Cvijanovic's wall paintings of Louisiana swamps, photographs by French artists Pierre et Gilles, Brazilian Rosângela Rennó's video of older black and white men and women discussing Cajun cooking, and the beaded Mardi Gras costumes of Victor Harris, Big Chief of the Fi-Yi-Yi Mardi Gras Indians.

Striking a more sour and a bleaker note, the internationalist music producer Nik Cohn published a second edition of his celebratory 2005 tome Triksta, about New Orleans rap artists, in which he claims disillusionment with the post-storm city, as the rap artists he feels – for mainly commercial reasons – deserted the city at its time of need. In an epilogue to the second edition, “Aftermath: The Paradigm of Fucked,” he concluded,

It is all too easy to foresee the death of New Orleans, not only in spirit, as Cohn describes, but also from the scandalous neglect of the Louisiana wetlands, which are the real reason why the city was so vulnerable to flooding and will become ever more so. Since the terrible floods of 1927, disastrous redirection of the Mississippi River, the faulty building of levees which could never withstand even a category three hurricane (Katrina at its worst was five), and the damage to the ecosystem of oil companies' thousands of miles of pipework to supply the nation's gas and oil, Crescent City has become daily a deeper fishbowl. Randy Newman's 1974 song “Louisiana 1927,” from the album Good Old Boys, seemed particularly prescient in September 2005:

Mystery writer Julie Smith opens her 2004 novel Louisiana Lament with the following:

This sense of a state and city doomed eventually to disappear into the maw of its great waters haunts writings, photographs, films and advertisements, which see the city by turns as gothic, romantic, tragic and mythic.Footnote ¹⁴

Until the end of Bush's presidency, there was much paranoia in the city about the desire of his administration to “wash away” New Orleans – or at least to turn a blind eye to its problems. At the 2007 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, journalist Mike Tidwell told his largely affluent New Orleans audience, “You're living in the most dangerous city in the world.” In 2003 Tidwell had been seen as a startlingly accurate prophet of doom when he published his first book, Bayou Farewell,Footnote ¹⁵ a travel tale used to foretell a serious ecological disaster through narratives of the very people closest to the land – fishermen who observed the collapse of their ancestors’ houses and a graveyard into the waters, and who noticed the dramatic changes in flight and movement passages of birds and fish. He cited alarming data. New Orleans had not always been below sea level, but is subsiding daily. The coastal barrier islands and buffering marshes continue to disappear, exposing the city to storms; every day in Louisiana, fifty acres of land turn to water; every ten months, an area of land the size of Manhattan falls into the Gulf of Mexico.

Just before Katrina struck, Congress finally appropriated $570 million spread over four years (against the objections of the White House). In a revised edition of Bayou Farewell, Tidwell added an Afterword in which he described his reactions to seeing the “Big One” hit New Orleans, and realizing that the homes and possessions (if not lives) of his informants and friends in south Louisiana were gone – Dean Blanchard's shrimp shed; the shrimp boats and crab cages of Charlie Broussard, Wayne Belanger and Papoose Plaisance; and nine thousand homes in Terrebone Parish. Tidwell's next book, published the year after Katrina, marked his personal move from storytelling journalist to ecological campaigner. Noting that three of the most powerful hurricanes in the previous 150 years (half of them) had occurred in fifty-two days in 2005 (Katrina, Rita, Wilma), he argued that

There is still alarm that the unique eco-culture of the city – with its mixed population of African, mixed-race, white, Caribbean, Latin American and Asian that has worked so well to produce that globally admired cultural gumbo – will vanish as the city loses many of its most creative groups and becomes like other American cities. The Hispanization of New Orleans was an early phenomenon of the rebuilding work being done by mainly illegal immigrant Latin Americans, often dismissively dubbed simply “Mexicans,” who are now catered for by Spanish church services, radio and television programmes and restaurants. This was seen by African Americans in particular as a threat to the “chocolate city” that Mayor Ray Nagin promised would return after the storm.

The positive result of this enforced diaspora is that, with so many citizens (scandalously called “refugees” in early press reports) dumped in other cities, and emotional alliances between musicians and music enthusiasts strengthened in many countries, there has been a revivified global cultural exchange. Because of the influx of artists, students and other volunteers into the devastated areas, new conversations are taking place, and the city is looking outwards more – especially away from the United States which treated it so shabbily. Other countries such as Cuba and Venezuela offered help after the hurricanes, help refused by a federal leadership that turned its back so visibly on its southern poor, and the French government offered such prompt financial and other support to their former colony that a 2006 Mardi Gras float pleaded, “Chirac Buy Us Back!”

As with many other world cities seeking regeneration and new markets and tourist possibilities (New Orleans's sister city Liverpool is a good example), art and music are central to this looking outwards. Prospect.1 has demonstrated the ability of New Orleans to embrace the concept of “city as gallery,” and position itself as an international cultural hub, albeit focussed on crisis and renewal. In the post-storm period, therefore, musicians and other creative artists, politicians, tourists and new immigrants opened up the city to international scrutiny (uncomfortably revealing its corruption, inefficiency and criminal laxities), while the scientific community brought sharp perspectives to bear on the meaning of the deluge for global warming and the consequences of serious erosion of coastlines across the world. Wynton Marsalis described New Orleanians as “blues people,” seeing them as exemplary of a multicultural world city:

Brave and idealistic words indeed.

For New Orleans has to keep “coming back.” Almost three years to the day after Katrina, Hurricane Gustav glanced the city, leading to a mass evacuation (considerably better organized and coordinated this time) and – followed by Ike – leading to considerable flooding and destruction, ironically much worse in Baton Rouge, the city to which many New Orleanians had evacuated following Katrina. Gustav was a reminder that no one can take for granted the idea of an occasional major hurricane hitting, or just missing, the city; global warming and climate change are real and the ultimate catastrophe appears to come ever closer. An interdisciplinary conference planned to run in the city in early September 2008, The Cultures of Rebuilding in Post-Katrina New Orleans, had to be abandoned the week before Katrina's successor, though it was rescheduled for November. Following a Columbia University symposium shortly after Katrina/Rita, which envisaged a utopian future for the city of free-floating, unzoned art islands, this conference debated the uneven and fragile rebuilding of New Orleans – with many implications for other parts of the world, from Bali and Bangladesh to India and indeed parts of Britain that have experienced floods and destruction of the built environment. Issues included the shifting definitions of culture within post-disaster scenarios, the role of culture in a rebuilding or redevelopment plan, the development and deployment of the New Orleans “brand” since the hurricanes, the boundary between natural and ecological heritage and culture heritage, and the role of individual, institutional and collective memory in representing culture.

The growing importance of cultural heritage and tourism to many countries and cities has changed the way in which we all think through disaster, climate change and sustainability, and the demographic, racial and social transformation and evolution of particular places and spaces. Creative industries and the cultural economy now constitute a significant element of Western countries' gross national product, and in times of downturn and recession, let alone disaster, are assuming greater visibility. As in the Depression (a period President Obama has reminded us bears many resemblances to the current situation), focus on, and investment in, cultural events and organizations can punch above its weight in terms of social and economic impact. Figures such as Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, who set up a youth orchestra between Arabs and Israelis, and Susan Sontag, directing Beckett's play Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theatre in the besieged city of Sarajevo in 1993, have used music and drama to bring peoples together and help transform relations in conflict zones.Footnote ¹⁸ Obama was urged to appoint a culture tsar, along the lines of culture ministers in European countries, and there is an urgent need for a federal lead on Works Progress Administration-style initiatives that would give a city like New Orleans the financial support badly needed to secure its future.

Spike Lee was right to produce a requiem for an African American city of a certain quality, but others see the potential for the Katrina tragedy to give New Orleans a new lease of life, and also to share with the rest of the world its recipe for postapocalyptic survival and rebirth. In its almost three centuries of existence, this city has been devastated by fire, flood and plague, and has changed hands, architectural styles, racial and ethnic mixtures, economic fortunes, and social and political cultures – so another radical shift is no exception. The city will adjust and reshape, as it has always done. Chris Rose's daily column in the Times-Picayune was collected into a much-cited book, 1 Dead in Attic, recording Rose's own experiences and those of the survivors and victims of the storm. Described as a journalist who became a “war correspondent” on 29 August 2005, he dedicated the book

Rose's book, which refers to the hurricane as “the thing” (something adopted widely in the city) is characterized by a kind of feisty sentimentality that New Orleanians have often expressed about their city, and for which “the thing” seems to have given permission:

The hurricane has focussed minds on a unique urban space that – with its uneasy multiculturalism and gulf between rich and poor classes – must still be treasured for its particular racial and cultural history. As Spike Lee's film demonstrated, the first post-storm Mardi Gras, though scaled down in size, was hailed as the sign of the rebirth of a battered city, described variously as “the shot in the arm we needed” (Melvin Rodrigue), “the springboard we needed going into the French Quarter Festival and Jazz Fest” (president of the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association), and “a smoke signal to the rest of the world that New Orleans is on its way back” (Mayor Ray Nagin). Among the various “krewes” (carnival organizations that process through the city), the satirical Krewe de Vieux boasted slogans such as “C'est Levee,” “Life's a breach,” and – instead of the famous cry from the crowd begging for carnival beads, “Throw me something mister” – a defiant call, “Throw me something FEMA.”Footnote ²⁰ The star of the show was a miniature dachshund-cross called Patches, found half-drowned in the flood, adopted and nursed back to health. She was carnival queen of the Mystic Krewe of Barkus, a dogs' club, their slogan “The Wizard of Pawz – there's no place like home.”Footnote ²¹ The loss of animals, and the decision not to evacuate by some citizens who felt they would rather die than leave behind the pets they so closely associated with their sweet home New Orleans, is something that has resonated through all the city's recovery narratives.

The carnival catchphrase “Chirac Buy Us Back!” was a reminder of the importance of European links with the city. Everywhere in those early months, the French fleur-de-lis symbol was prominently on display, asserting this to be a non-American French city; on pins, earrings, necklaces, posters and T-shirts, it was seen as a kind of badge by which everyone declared their loyalty to the city that its own government forgot. The French government, grateful for New Orleans's support during the foolish national boycott when France opposed the Iraq War, sent a delegation of diplomats and art curators on a tour of the city just two months after the hurricane, and provided financial and other help in those first days. Recognizing the importance of cultural rebirth, from March to June 2007 they loaned the New Orleans Museum of Art an exhibition of paintings, Femme, Femme, Femme: Paintings of Women in French Society from Daumier to Picasso from the Museums of France. In October 2008, the owner of AEG and coproducer of New Orleans's Jazz and Heritage Festival financed two major events in London – seen as one of the Crescent City's major international tourist markets. In the “largest gathering of Louisiana musicians ever assembled outside of America,” approximately a hundred performers played a two-day “Festival New Orleans” at the O2 arena, including jazz, rhythm ’n’ blues, zydeco and Cajun music, with food and drink stalls sponsored by Tabasco. The same weekend, the renowned New Orleans Saints football team – credited with giving a huge boost to the city's morale and spirit when they returned a year after the storm to support their home cityFootnote ²² – played the San Diego Chargers at Wembley Stadium. The attendant publicity that “New Orleans is back in business” was part of a campaign by the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau to kick-start the tourist business and restore New Orleans's economic base. In September 2009, to commemorate the fourth anniversary, British playwright Jonathan Holmes produced Katrina, a “promenade performance” play in a disused warehouse on the Thames, London. Involving the audience as “a kind of collaborator,” he re-created the sounds and sights of a flooded city, using testimonies of survivors to engage and politicize the audience as “witness to a form of public hearing of untold stories” – taking them through shocking settings and scenarios such as a flooded nightclub, the waters and wastelands through which the living and dead moved to shelter, and finally a New Orleans performative funeral with “second line.”Footnote ²³

In many ways, then, the city is currently being kept in the global eye by musicians, writers, the media, tourism, universities and art museums. Wynton Marsalis describes it as “the only city in the world that created its own full culture – architecture, music, and festive ceremonies,” and restauranteur Ella Brennan asks,

Creole writer Roy F. Guste Jr. says that as a Creole New Orleanian he

This Caribbean-style city of sensual pleasures survives, despite everything.

The New Orleans Cultural Coalition – funded by the Getty Foundation – comprises seven organizations that are pledged “through collaborative research and planning … to maintaining a strong, vibrant sector in New Orleans.”Footnote ²⁵ Many publication and recording projects are donating proceeds to New Orleans recovery funds. If the oil companies are keeping quiet about their role in the destruction of the state, they have become visible in supporting neighbourhood festivals, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest and so on that are reviving citizens' spirits, however temporarily. But these are by no means the only, or the most energetic, benefactors. Money and “voluntourism” help have poured in to support rebuilding and social and cultural renewal, which together with neighbourhood meetings and projects have slowly brought about a “new normal.”

The celebrated New Orleans commentator Andrei Codrescu wrote,

At the November 2008 Cultures of Rebuilding conference, keynote speakers Codrescu and academic Jay Edwards both agreed that the culture of the city's poor was what made it unique – be it the music or the “shotgun house” architecture. Both warned that the post-Katrina corporate rebuilding plans might obliterate the unique multicultural motley that is New Orleans, leaving behind another bland, tourist-focussed American city. Many commentators agree with David Lowenthal that “cultural identity better coheres around suffering and loss than around success,”Footnote ²⁷ and the importance of culture in the city's regeneration (especially with a new focus on the music of its poorest residents) testifies to this. Furthermore, the writer Rebecca Solnit has offered a hopeful scenario emerging from all the current pessimism, pointing out the way “disaster utopias” of altruism, group solidarity and a sense of joy emerged to counter the “élite panics” of federal and state officialdom.Footnote ²⁸

Alas, there are major threats to the organic growth of new cultural forms and expressions within New Orleans, especially following the nation's recession, Louisiana's habitual funding and political crises, and particularly the massive cuts inflicted on the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. President Obama's four-hour visit to the city on 15 October 2009 was criticized as too little, too late, though he defended his administration's hard work on behalf of the city. There is always the possibility that the next great hurricane may hit the city directly and destroy it definitively, but until that moment comes there is a powerful will to ensure it is not yet America's “lost” Atlantis. The city faces formidable challenges with global warming, the imperfect nature of levee-reconstruction, a lack of focussed political will to rebuild properly, and a destabilized and insecure population. Reviving restaurants may have to make do with more “disaster tourists” than the pre-storm Mid-western convention dentists and businessmen, as well as international music lovers. But New Orleanians retain faith in, and enjoy enthusiastic international support for, the city's unique cultural heritage focussed on its very special sensual pleasures – its cuisine, music, parades, gardens of scented blossom, eroticism, sexual transgression and sheer hedonism. Although there is a danger of corporate packaging and cleaning up of the down and dirty in this “little drinking town with a hurricane problem,” as it has been called, nevertheless these sensual pleasures are receiving a new cultural focus in order to secure the city's economic and social future.