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When the Investor Class Goes Marching In: Twenty Years of Real Estate Development, Privatization and Resiliency in New Orleans

Cedric Johnson & Megan French-Marcelin

What the storm and the sheer devastation wrought in its wake made possible was the consolidation of this ideological transformation virtually overnight—as city boosters, public officials, wealthy developers, private contractors, multinational hotel chains, anti-poverty researchers, entertainment conglomerates, and charter school advocates coalesced to promote a vision of wholesale privatization.

Missing New Orleans: Twenty Years Since Hurricane Katrina – Editorial Note

by Megan French-Marcelin & Cedric Johnson

When the Investor Class Goes Marching In: Twenty Years of Real Estate Development, Privatization and Resiliency in New Orleans

by Megan French-Marcelin & Cedric Johnson

Neoliberal Hurricane: Who Framed New Orleans? (2007)

by Jamie Peck

Beyond the Katrina Moment: Exposure and the Political Economy of Invisibility after the Levee Failures

by Thomas Jessen Adams

Hazardous Constructions: Mexican Immigrant Masculinity and the Rebuilding of New Orleans (2011)

by Nicole Trujillo-Pagán

Charity, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Affect Economy (2013)

by Vincanne Adams

Charity, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Affect Economy (2013)

Vincanne Adams

The seductive notion that private-sector movements will rectify or redress and respond to the larger problem of disenfranchisement of the poor and the underrepresented in America is powerful, especially for those who see their participation in such movements as a radical alternative to conventional infrastructures of social inequality and who reap the rewards of such action.

Hazardous Constructions: Mexican Immigrant Masculinity and the Rebuilding of New Orleans (2011)

Nicole Trujillo-Pagán

New Orleans demonstrated that Latino workers’ occupational risk resulted not only from contractors’ discriminatory work assignments but also from federal agency neglect whose outreach efforts focused on workers rather than on employers.

Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Because even structuralists like Reuther and Charles Killingsworth shared with the Keynesians the viewpoint that interests of capital and labor were harmonizable and that economic problems were therefore fundamentally technical, the deeper political significance of the differences went unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. The effect was to obscure the systemic roots of economic inequality in American capitalism, in fact eventually to render it invisible as inequality.

Robotic Pollocks in the Age of Amazon: Ex Machina, Actions, and Mechanical Art

José Antonio Arellano

Ex Machina helps make visible the effects of the technologically enabled economy that led to the historical convergence of theories of art and action that today appear as the stuff of common sense. The problem the movie presents is less about empathy for the other than it is about a society structured by an economy wherein the concept of intention no longer obtains. Ex Machina thus prompts viewers to consider the political significance of creating and interpreting a work of art today.

Revisiting Race, Politics, and Culture: A Symposium

Thomas Jessen Adams & Andrew Feenberg & Cedric Johnson & Howard Levy & Adolph Reed, Jr. & Preston Smith II

Scholarship and popular memory has far too often taken on the role of hagiography or sought a pure and true 1960s spirit, “uncaptured” by elites and reflective of real, authentic radicalism. Rather than being critically analyzed as key nodes of causation in the defeat of an effective egalitarian politics and the subsequent turn toward reaction—as the contributors to Race, Politics, and Culture do, befitting the seriousness with which they took their charge as both scholars and political actors—the worst tendencies of sixties-era social movements are now almost religiously worshipped in nominally left organizing and thought.

Neoliberal Hurricane: Who Framed New Orleans? (2007)

Jamie Peck

Fundamentally, the agenda of the new urban right is about setting the ‘ground rules’ for appropriate behaviour in cities, largely modeled on middle-class norms; establishing the preconditions for economic growth, largely through the kinds of minimalist supply-side interventions metaphorically represented, in this case, by the cat-5 levee; and maintaining social order through ruthless application of the force of law, facilitated by zero-tolerance policing.

Beyond the Katrina Moment: Exposure and the Political Economy of Invisibility after the Levee Failures (2025)

Thomas Jessen Adams

While the storm may have exposed the so-called invisible poor and the destitute living condition of America’s most poverty stricken and disrepaired major city, it in fact furthered the connection between the political economy of invisibility and economic dislocation.

Blinded by Righteous Outrage: From the 1994 Crime Act to Trump 2.0

Touré F. Reed

From the 1994 Crime Act through to the re-election of Donald Trump, liberal thought shapers and policymakers have tended to draw upon a moral righteousness that uncouples racial disparities from the material contexts that engender them, thereby obscuring neoliberalism’s inability to deliver for poor and working-class Americans—blacks being overrepresented among them. As the Trump administration aggressively moves to dismantle the gains that African Americans and other non-whites have made since the Civil Rights Movement if not Reconstruction, progressives should take seriously the counterproductive implications of a righteous, groupist social justice discourse that mistakes sermonizing for analysis while treating “races” as epigenetic identities (rather than ascriptive categories) with discrete interests.

The Earth’s Intentions: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and the Limits of Anti-Anthropocentrism

Stephen Schryer

Critics have celebrated Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory (2018), for the way that it distills key ecocritical ideas that gained traction in the humanities in the 2010s. Echoing New Materialists’ insistence that we set aside subject-centered ontologies that reduce non-humans to an instrumental status, the novel endows trees with agency, even granting them the ability to speak in a language that human beings might learn to understand. This essay pushes back against this desire for deep ecology, arguing that it short-circuits the novel’s critique of global capitalism. Drawing on a Transcendentalist model of language, Powers’s novel imagines trees using natural signs that collapse signs and referents, allowing them to directly change the chemistry of human brains. This fantasy of mind control distracts from the novel’s investment in communicative action, marked by recurring scenes of reading and persuasion.