Abstract This essay explores post‐Katrina New Orleans to challenge narratives that privilege Black resistance at the expense of other modes of being, while countering portrayals of resistance as primarily seeking inclusion into violent subjectivity. Drawing on trans‐feminist discourses of mobility and Black feminist geographies, I examine the Katrina diaspora's practices of (im)mobility—embodying illegible gender expression or inhabiting disposable spaces—to explore the capaciousness of Black fungibility. I offer “diasporic choreography” to read post‐Katrina cartography alongside two oral history interviews, one pre‐storm (2005–2006) and one post‐storm (2022). Extending Katherine McKittrick's concept of a “black sense of place as an entanglement of coloniality and resistance”, I foreground subtle, navigations Black communities make within coercive geographies. Attending to affective gestures, queer articulations of (non)belonging and shifting spatial strategies, I argue that Gulf South Black (im)mobility embodies an ontological ambivalencecrucial to understanding Katrina's long‐term impact on Black sociality.
Jaz Riley (Tue,) studied this question.