Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, there is a substantial and wide-ranging body of scholarship exploring the meanings of an event that now seems an even more significant marker than 9/11. This scholarship spans multiple disciplines and approaches, focussing variously on the issues of racial inequality, which were brought so vividly to the surface by Katrina; American urban poverty; neoliberalism and disaster capitalism; American decline more broadly; the American melting pot and disaster tourism; and commodification. Two new additions to this growing body of work, Taylor, Levine, Rooksby and Scott's edited collection The Katrina Effect and Ron Eyerman's Is this America?, make important and unique contributions to Katrina studies. The latter offers a new way of understanding Katrina as traumatic through a theory of “cultural trauma,” and the former a uniquely outwardly facing study of Katrina and the nature of catastrophe in the twenty-first century.

The Katina Effect aims to understand the lasting impact of Katrina in broad terms, to reflect generally on the nature of catastrophe and to explore possibilities for approaching and understanding future catastrophes both theoretically and practically. Appearing at the ten-year anniversary of Katrina, this is a very different kind of book to the seminal collection edited by Clyde Woods at the five-year anniversary, In the Wake of Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions (2010), which was developed from a special issue of American Quarterly. While both collections are interdisciplinary, Woods's is for the most part centred on the many urgent issues surrounding the Gulf Coast, and particularly New Orleans, as well as the region and the city's place in America. This was and remains a valuable and rich book. The Katrina Effect departs from this by offering an approach that is both international and future-focussed. This is a diverse collection of essays brought together by the aim to reflect on the meanings of disaster or catastrophe (the book uses these terms interchangeably) in the twenty-first century. This approach is provocative in the sense that it means moving away from a paradigm that has focussed on American borders and divisions of race and inequality by reminding us that “catastrophe knows no national or geographic borders” (xii). It should be noted, though, that the editors and authors undertake this project with great care and clearly do not intend to bypass the facts of discrimination and injustice. In the opening essay, “The Effect of Katrina on Ideas of Justice,” for example, Naomi Zack suggests that Katrina has made it clearer to the West that “some human populations are more vulnerable than others, because of their disadvantages prior to disaster events” (43).

As stated, The Katrina Effect clearly has an international inflection; its four editors are based at the University of Western Australia while contributors hail variously from five different countries in three continents. Nevertheless the editors are quick to signpost an omission in their book and in Katrina studies in general of “non-Western perspectives on disaster” (9). Many of the essays here are, however, deeply invested in widening the geography of the discussion, and works like Anna Hartnell's “New Orleans 2005 and Port-au-Prince, 2010: Some reflections on Trans-American Disaster in the Twenty-First Century” or “Extending the Urban Disaster Paradigm: From New Orleans to Detroit (and Beyond?)” by James Rhodes open up new directions. This book's title works in two ways, then: as a collection of essays highlighting Katrina's “effect” on our understanding of the nature of catastrophe in the twenty-first century, and more generally, as a book on or about the “nature of catastrophe.”

The Katrina Effect contains fourteen essays over six sections, all of which to some extent adopt this outwardly facing approach: “Reckoning: Disaster and Justice,” “Recomposing Katrina,” “Dissembling: Sociology, Philosophy and Ecology,” “Accounting for Disaster,” “Tabula Rasa: Urbanism and Architecture,” and “Memory: Forgetfulness and Commemoration.” It is a well-presented book that includes thirty-eight images embedded in the essays as well as twelve glossy, colour photographs in Jayne O'Byrne's photo essay, “Bearing Witness: Journalists in the Eye of the Storm.” The opening section sets the tone for the collection with two pieces that reflect on the opportunities that Katrina has opened up. Zack outlines new possibilities for disaster preparedness and management, positioning Katrina as a turning point which demands that we thoroughly understand the “pre-disaster situations of vulnerable populations as major causes of how they fare in disaster events” (27). Zack goes on to explore ideas of justice and her study benefits from a range of transnational comparisons. Hartnell's essay, which follows, makes fascinating assertions about what she describes as “trans-American” disasters, looking comparatively at the Bush administration's appalling handling of Katrina and the Obama administration's problematically paternalistic and patronizing handling of the Haitian earthquake of 2010. Hartnell recognizes clear differences, the obvious being the Obama administration's much quicker response, but highlights its military approach, which saw massive troop deployments that prioritized “US security needs, and not the needs of the earthquake victims” (51), actually blocking air traffic, slowing aid relief. Like many other commentators, Hartnell sees this as the clearest sign of the end of the American century. She also, though, like Zack, sees reasons for optimism (though slightly more muted) in the way it opens up possibilities to move beyond an exceptionalist paradigm:

While Hartnell's essay provides a trenchant critique of America's handling of both of these catastrophes, she also suggests that “New Orleans’ transnational trajectories offer new ways of mapping America as it faces the twenty-first century” (66).

Hartnell's is one of several essays in The Katrina Effect which offer what Michael Rothberg might call a “multidirectional” approach to remembering and understanding Katrina.Footnote ¹ Indeed, the book concludes with an excellent piece by David Simpson who, building on his 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (2006), compares the way Katrina and 9/11 have been memorialized. Simpson is quick to point out the catalogue of accessible binaries that have made these two catastrophes easy to compare (human violence/natural violence; act of God/act of evil) but which ultimately are not sustainable. However, Simpson works through one binary that has held up, the contrasting ways in which the two catastrophes have been memorialized, outlining the questions that make memorializing Katrina so difficult: “How does one fully accept and represent the scope of human failures, oversights, or deliberate ignorance in such events? How does one memorialize corruption or cruelty?” (335). These questions lead to productive comparisons with a range of other catastrophes from the Holocaust to Vietnam that have had politicized memorials. One final example of The Katrina Effect’s unique approach is the excellent essay by Grahame F. Thompson, “Post-Katrina and Post-Financial Crises: Competing Logics of Risk, Uncertainty and Security,” which draws useful comparisons between the ways natural disasters and financial crises are understood. The overall “effect” of the book is to force the reader to think beyond Katrina as an embodiment of domestic concerns plaguing the United States, and beyond the limited ways catastrophes are imagined and dealt with, calling for a more proactive and global understanding of Katrina and the nature of catastrophe.

Ron Eyerman's monograph, Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma, also advances Katrina studies by using trauma theory in an unusual but productive way. Is This America? understands the Katrina catastrophe as a “cultural trauma,” which he outlines as distinct from collective or individual trauma. For Eyerman, what distinguishes cultural trauma is that it is not strictly an issue of the psychological response to the singular limit event, which in conventional accounts of individual or collective trauma overpowers the ability to apprehend reality. For Eyerman, cultural trauma is actually an act, or acts, rather, of narration: “Cultural traumas are not things, but processes of meaning-making and attribution, contentious contests in which various individuals and groups struggle not only to define a situation but also to manage and control it” (9). This process of what he calls “making a cultural trauma” (9) begins with the idea of Katrina as an event which has broken the American covenant. In doing this Eyerman locates Katrina on a historical continuum which includes the Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and, more generally, the failure of a “wealthy nation to alleviate racism and poverty” (1).

So what can this notion of cultural trauma do to advance our understanding of Katrina? Eyerman is ambitious in this respect and suggests that the cultural-trauma framework allows us to fruitfully engage with some of the definitive questions raised by the catastrophe. Perhaps most importantly, Eyerman suggests that by looking at these competing and contested narratives of Katrina, all of which try and understand or make meaning in a divided or fractured nation, we can begin to understand whether the cultural trauma includes all Americans, transcending the issue of race. Did Katrina, Eyerman asks provocatively, “shake the very foundations of collective identity and reshape collective memory, like, for example, the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or was it more like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which rocked the entire nation but left more of a mark on African Americans?” (15). While these questions should not need to be asked, they do, and while this might seem like another gesture that will only lead to the kind of binaries associated with the 9/11/Hurricane Katrina discussion that David Simpson mentions, Eyerman shows that unpacking competing Katrina narratives, whilst considering them to be a continually evolving cultural trauma, is a useful exercise. September 11th actually comes productively into this discussion, highlighting the competing narratives that form cultural traumas. Eyerman outlines the many questions that were asked about America's vulnerability to terror attacks during the Katrina crisis, and the idea of Katrina as a symbol of American weakness. However, Is This America? also points to the way 9/11 shaped “governmental thinking about how to respond to a threat to national security” (114), which was extended to natural disasters. These two different approaches to the intersections between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina emphasize, on the one hand, the militaristic approach to disaster relief that famously treated victims like criminals, and, on the other, the rhetoric of New Orleans as a kind of weak link in the nation.

The cultural-trauma framework is also particularly useful in fleshing out the nuances of the swift transition between the story of Katrina as a natural disaster and the story of federal failure, neglect and racism. Eyerman charts the shift in language in his second chapter, “Print Media,” noting the prevalence of words like “shame,” “embarrassment,” “disgrace” and “failure,” and indeed the kind of expression typically linked with trauma, about the “indescribable” (39). Crucially, Eyerman charts another shift in the print media, from “providing information and description to witnessing and advocacy” (50), and it is this shift that links directly to the idea of the competing and contested narratives that generate a deeply destabilizing cultural trauma. These very different books are rich additions to Katrina studies, and to American studies in general, both advancing the discussion in their own ways.