Flood of Images: Media, Memory, and Hurricane Katrina

by Bernie Cook

Overview

Anyone who was not in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city experienced the disaster as a media event, a flood of images pouring across television and computer screens. The twenty-four-hour news cycle created a surplus of representation that overwhelmed viewers and complicated understandings of the storm, the flood, and the aftermath. As time passed, documentary and fictional filmmakers took up the challenge of explaining what had happened in New Orleans, reaching beyond news reports to portray the lived experiences of survivors of Katrina. But while these narratives presented alternative understandings and more opportunities for empathy than TV news, Katrina remained a mediated experience.

In Flood of Images, Bernie Cook offers the most in-depth, wide-ranging, and carefully argued analysis of the mediation and meanings of Katrina. He engages in innovative, close, and comparative visual readings of news coverage on CNN, Fox News, and NBC; documentaries including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, and Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Elie’s Faubourg Treme; and the HBO drama Treme. Cook examines the production practices that shaped Katrina-as-media-event, exploring how those choices structured the possible memories and meanings of Katrina and how the media’s memory-making has been contested. In Flood of Images, Cook intervenes in the ongoing process of remembering and understanding Katrina.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292771369
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	430
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

A native of New Orleans, Bernie Cook is Associate Dean of Georgetown College, Georgetown University, and founding director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is the editor of Thelma & Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film and has produced short documentary films focused on social justice.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Where Y'at?

Part 1. Television News

Chapter 1. There Is No Wide Shot. Television News and Collective Memory

Chapter 2. Weather Citizens. Sunday, August 28

Chapter 3. These Are the First Pictures from the Air. Monday, August 29

Chapter 4. The Sort of Disaster Humans Cause. Tuesday, August 30

Chapter 5. The Walking Dead. Wednesday, August 31

Chapter 6. Over My Drowned Body. Thursday, September 1

Chapter 7. Not Sure What Is the Truth or Rumor Anymore. Friday, September 2

Chapter 8. A Big Corner Turned. Saturday, September 3

Chapter 9. A Violent Day. Sunday, September 4

Chapter 10. 99 Percent of It Is Bullshit. The Weeks After

Part 2. Documentary

Chapter 11. Familiar from Television. Documentary as Collected Memory

Chapter 12. A Requiem in Four Acts. When the Levees Broke

Chapter 13. Ain't Nobody Got What I Got. Trouble the Water

Chapter 14. How Can Our Past Help Us to Survive This Time? Faubourg Treme

Chapter 15. We Were Not on the Map. A Village Called Versailles

Chapter 16. Our Mayor. Race

Chapter 17. Re-Occupying New Orleans. Land of Opportunity

Chapter 18. Disappeared People. Law & Disorder

Part 3. Fiction

Chapter 19. My Truth Seems a Bit Inconsequential to Me Now. Treme's Truth Claim

Chapter 20. In the David Simon Business. Treme's Mode of Production

Chapter 21. The Continuance of Culture

Chapter 22. All These Trucks Got Bodies? Dramatizing Injustice

Conclusion. Desitively Katrina

Bibliography

Films and Media

Index

What People are Saying About This

Wheeler Winston Dixon

"This book is a brilliant accomplishment in every respect, and one that certainly deserves the widest possible audience. . . . It seems likely to become the standard history of Katrina as documented by the media, both as an event and as a shared national memory of disaster."