The Neoliberal Deluge is an invaluable collection of essays that systematically places the Katrina disaster within the wider socioeconomic context that defines our times. Neoliberalism, the authors seem to collectively suggest, is a slow-burning disaster in itself, one that conditions what Lauren Berlant has termed the “ordinary crisis” of late capitalism.Footnote ¹ An understanding of neoliberalism as “slow violence”Footnote ² undermines the logic of exception that limits our understanding of “disaster”, that makes of “disaster” an object of fleeting attention, a short-term investment in the vein of market logic. It also provides crucial historical continuity that was absent from early discussions of Katrina, that often focussed on the inadequacies of the Bush administration rather than the larger systemic factors that similarly limit the Obama government to being an entity that outsources much of its work to private enterprise.

A sense of this continuity helps us go beyond Kanye West's famous comment that “George Bush doesn't care about black people”; as this collection suggests, the crucial importance of race in Katrina's aftermath needs to be considered in a way that goes beyond the black–white binary to encompass an understanding of class. The involvement of black city elites in processes that some have argued amount to “ethnic cleansing” points to the thorny issues at stake here, as well as to the need to go beyond identity politics.

The book is divided into four parts: “Governance,” “Urbanity,” “Planning” and “Inequality,” and the essays reflect a diverse set of concerns and disciplinary approaches: early political and news media rhetoric is analysed and deconstructed; the racial and ideological agendas of rebuilding plans are explored, as are the forces behind the controversial post-Katrina educational reforms. The influence of New Urbanist philosophy in the reimagining of a greener and more sustainable city is shown to be complicit in the larger trends towards privatization that have played a major role in depriving New Orleans's poorer residents of affordable housing, thus paving the way for gentrification patterns that are undeniably racialized. Important chapters analyse the particular vulnerability of black women and Latino construction workers, whose exposure to risk has been underplayed or invisible in post-Katrina discourse. And, crucially, Katrina is brought into comparison with a number of other disasters: the Chicago heatwave of 1995, the Asian tsunami of 2004, the Mid-west floods of 2008.

What is particularly impressive here is the level of engagement with post-Katrina New Orleans on the part of individual authors; for example, much of Adrienne Dixson's account of the scandalous and opportunistic firing of thousands of veteran teachers in the city in the storm's aftermath, and the problematic and chaotic charter school “system” that followed, comes from firsthand experience. John Arena's chapter derives from his own involvement in the community activism that sought to defend public-housing projects from what many see as the illegal threats to demolish them. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura's illuminating consideration of post-tsunami Sri Lanka is based on fieldwork and interviews, as are chapters by Avis Jones-Deweever and Nicole Trujillo-Pagán.

As Cedric Johnson writes in his sharp and insightful introduction, “the near destruction of New Orleans and the tortuous process of its rebirth provide an important set of political choices” (xii); against the current neoliberal trends, the authors of this book seek to “sketch another set of historical possibilities” (xii). While the authors here make various policy recommendations, what is missing here, with the exception of Arena's chapter on public housing, is an account of the resistance that has sprung up in response to what many activists here agree is an attempt to transform New Orleans into a laboratory for neoliberalism.

Part of this movement derives from the city's unique historical trajectory, which has made it home to what Clyde Woods has described as a “blues tradition” of resistance to oligarchies that have wanted to shape New Orleans and break its working-class communities, from slavery until the present.Footnote ³The Neoliberal Deluge consciously resists exploring these histories largely because it is committed to the idea that New Orleans's much-debated “exceptionalism” is in fact a myth promoted as a source of profit by the tourist industry. While Johnson's introduction provides a fascinating overview of New Orleans's vulnerable economic, geographic and environmental location and its consequent peripheral status, the cultural responses to this marginality are overlooked. The authors are right not to engage in romantic myths that suggest that New Orleans has developed on a different path from the rest of the United States. The racialized poverty and social despair revealed in Katrina's aftermath show that it bears many of the key features that have come to define American cities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But in reducing the city's rich musical and performance traditions – largely derived from African American culture – to tourist commodities, they miss crucial aesthetic and political sites that have been sketching “another set of historical possibilities” than racist and classist oppression for many decades. Still, this book is consistently excellent and sets new standards for post-Katrina scholarship. It is indispensable for anybody interested in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or neoliberalism more widely.