“They’re Tryin’ to Wash Us Away”: Performance, Urban Adaptation, and the New New Orleans

Twardowski, Weston

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-zy7x-gd57

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“They’re Tryin’ to Wash Us Away”: Performance, Urban Adaptation, and the New New Orleans

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In the wake of environmental catastrophe, active intervention is needed to heal trauma, resist erasure, and navigate changing communities. Focusing on New Orleans after the federal levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, this dissertation looks across a diverse mix of case studies to theorize how communities utilize performance to navigate mass trauma and shape new civic identities. Since 2005, a new New Orleans has emerged. This new city is one fundamentally transformed by an influx of newcomers, alongside a massive neoliberal restructuring of public services and economic policies. These changes have only further marginalized already vulnerable communities, disproportionately forcing them into the city’s economically outsized but notoriously low-paying tourism industry. In this environment performance is increasingly essential to economic and political survival, as well as a sense of belonging and spiritual connection to home within New Orleans. Performance is a means of generating civic discourse; of drawing attention to undiscussed and buried traumas; of highlighting inequity and demanding equity; of calling for sustained investment and environmental protection; of memorializing what was lost in disaster; and, above all, of navigating tempestuous shifts to understand where we live and what it means to belong to place—to call somewhere home. Across four chapters I build a theory of adaptation through performance that unites theatre and performance theory with memory studies, trauma theory, and African American studies (particularly Black feminism and Black geography) through the site of New Orleans.

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