"Our History is Based on Loss": Narrative, Memorial, and Theories of Disaster on the Post-Katrina Mississippi Gulf Coast

The Mississippi Gulf Coast was the landfall site of two of the most devastating hurricanes of the past century, Category 5 Hurricane Camille (1969) and Category 3 Hurricane Katrina (2005). Consequently, the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast have been forced to navigate a complicated relationship with disaster and disaster memory. On one hand, these storms were deeply traumatic and many locals claim to want to forget them. On the other hand, the hurricanes so reshaped life that they have become entwined with local identity and sense of place. The disaster memorial landscape is an example and manifestation of this complicated relationship. This dissertation explores the concept of the disaster memorial landscape as an assemblage of monuments, art, ruins, historical markers and sites, and other interventions into the landscape, that defines a sense of place as it relates to disaster. The disaster memorial landscape is an attempt by individuals and groups to both acknowledge tangible loss and repair, to some extent, those intangible things that were also lost to disaster. Drawing on autoethnographic reflections, site visits, archival materials, and oral history, this dissertation tracks the development of the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s disaster memorial landscape over time and across disasters. This work also introduces the concept of citizen survivor-scholars, or individuals from affected communities who take on roles traditionally held by scholars due fully or in part to their experiences with disaster. This project concludes by documenting how citizen survivor-scholars have been key to the ongoing development of the Post-Katrina disaster memorial landscape. Much of the scholarship emerging from critical disaster studies has focused on the structural inequality that shapes and is shaped by disaster. This dissertation argues for the importance of also attending to the affective dimensions of disaster. In other words, it matters how people experience disaster as individuals and as communities, how they make meaning of those experiences, and how they attempt to preserve and communicate experience, meaning, and place. The emotional experience of disaster is deeply powerful and critical to fully understanding the structures that shape disaster in the United States.