Telling Katrina Stories: Problems and Opportunities in Engaging Disaster
| Autor: | Ruth Laurion Bowman, Michael S. Bowman |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2010 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Quarterly Journal of Speech. 96:455-461 |
| ISSN: | 1479-5779 0033-5630 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00335630.2010.521183 |
| Popis: | Like most others in critical/cultural and performance studies, we were trained to look at how discourses, sign systems, symbolic actions, and signifying practices of various sorts reinforce or alter relations of power. We learned that art (broadly conceived), criticism, pedagogy, and scholarship could be forms of engagement and intervention in those relations of power, although Stuart Hall convinced us that such engagement must be practiced ‘‘without guarantees.’’ 1 The question for us was never should one be engaged? Rather, the question*always*was over the manner and means of engagement: What form should engagement take? How do we perform as teachers, artists, and scholars so as to be efficacious*without relying on or appealing to some extrinsic or transcendent discourse to serve as the alibi for our actions or as a guarantor of their ‘‘correctness’’ or ‘‘truth’’? Although these questions have been salient to some extent for generations of communication scholars, and while they seem to have become more urgent as we wrestle with the nature and extent of our engagement in forums such as this one, they acquire a new meaning and valence, a special force, if you will, in the context of crisis. And for us, the crisis that has had an enduring effect on our understanding of what it means to be ‘‘engaged’’ as scholars in communication and performance studies was precipitated by the disasters that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the summer of 2005. As we approach the fifth anniversary of those life-changing events, we would like to use this occasion to talk about the problems we face in keeping those events alive in public memory and in making them an ongoing issue for deliberation in the public sphere: and by ‘‘we’’ in this sentence, we mean literally those of us who reside at the site of the disaster. In short, then, we want to address the problems of talking about Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans in the context of the burden of the relationship between scholarship and public/political engagement. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|