Flood the Archive
Hurricane Katrina, Counter-Memory, and the Weaponization of Survivor Testimony.
"Counter-memory—a transformation of history into a totally different form of time," as Michel Foucault theorized in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1977), represents not merely an alternative record but a violent rupture with official history.[1] In African American tradition, counter-memory has served as a crucial tool of resistance: from slave narratives to the work of Black historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, it has consistently challenged state-sanctioned erasures of racial violence.[2]
By the post-9/11 era, this resistance took on new urgency. As scholar Marita Sturken observes, the United States framed terrorism exclusively as "foreign" aggression, systematically ignoring Black intellectuals who had long documented racial violence as domestic terror. [3] These tensions reached a breaking point in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The storm's aftermath—bodies floating in streets, families stranded on rooftops—laid bare the realities of American structural violence. Yet the Bush administration worked diligently to downplay systemic neglect, recasting the disaster as purely "natural." Mainstream media amplified this narrative, branding survivors as "looters" and "refugees" while making little effort to center the voices of marginalized communities most impacted by both the hurricane and its aftermath. These outlets similarly failed to investigate how inadequate infrastructure, itself a manifestation of institutional racism, had been a critical issue long before Katrina struck.
In response to this neglect, the people of New Orleans came together to help one another, and grassroots oral history projects emerged to document survivors' testimonies and utilize them for advocacy. One of the earliest initiatives was the Alive in Truth Project. In this essay, I argue that this project constructed a radical counter-memory of Hurricane Katrina by using life-history interviews to expose the disaster as an episode of racialized state violence. Through survivors' testimonies, the project not only challenges dominant 'Katrina-as-reported' narratives but also marks a critical shift in Black communal resistance: where systemic neglect was once met with silencing (exemplified by welfare queen tropes), Katrina's aftermath saw Black and brown communities collectively protect and amplify survivor testimonies as acts of truth-telling and self-defense. The Alive in Truth archive reveals how Black collective memory functions simultaneously as a site of trauma and a tool of resistance, binding Katrina to longer histories of racial terror while demonstrating new strategies for safeguarding marginalized narratives against erasure.
State Media Narratives:
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," George W. Bush told 'Good Morning America' on September 1st, 2005. [4] This statement exemplifies how the federal government consistently deployed rhetoric of shock and unpredictability to characterize Hurricane Katrina's devastation. By framing the disaster as an unforeseeable act of nature, the administration strategically obscured decades of infrastructural neglect and institutional racism.
This narrative of unpredictability collapses under minimal scrutiny. Not only had multiple Category 5 hurricanes (Isabel (2003), Ivan (2004), and Emily (2005)) struck the United States in the preceding years, but scientific and governmental bodies had explicitly warned about New Orleans' vulnerability. As later evidence revealed, President Bush received specific briefings about the hurricane's potential impact on New Orleans' levee system on August 28th, at least a day before Katrina made landfall. The top emergency response official of FEMA, Michael Brown, is heard in the video saying, “The storm will be disastrous. We are going to need everything we can muster, not only in this state and the region, but also across the nation, to respond to this event.”[5] By claiming that "nobody anticipated" what experts had, in fact, repeatedly anticipated, Bush's administration accomplished two strategic objectives: it positioned the government as a helpless observer rather than a negligent actor, and it established a narrative framework that mainstream media would amplify; characterizing survivors as "looters" and "refugees" in an anarchic landscape supposedly created by nature rather than by calculated governmental abandonment. The same day President Bush made his claim, a New York Times article titled “Police and Owners Begin to Challenge Looters,” written by Felicity Barringer and Jere Longman, reported on the rise of looting in New Orleans. The title itself prioritizes this narrative, suggesting a shift where authorities and property owners are beginning to regain control over this perceived lawlessness. The article explicitly states that "the desperate and the opportunistic took advantage of an overwhelmed police force and helped themselves to anything that could be carried, wheeled or floated away."[6] While the article included some dissenting voices, such as Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, the vice president of the New Orleans City Council at the time, who pointed out that the people of New Orleans had been cut off from food, water, and aid, and that these instances of looting were a result of survival. The framing of the article reinforces the narrative of lawlessness among citizens during a natural disaster, siding with store owners and the police in their portrayal as “fighting back.”
Another narrative spun by the media portrayed survivors of the hurricane as "refugees." In his article "Are Katrina's Victims 'Refugees' or 'Evacuees'," published on September 5th, 2005, Mike Pesca explores the discourse surrounding how survivors should be identified. Pesca takes an interesting stance on this debate, first addressing the implications of using the word "refugee," its definition, and even including comments from civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who argued against the term's usage by stating that the survivors were citizens and "victims of neglect and a situation they should have never been put in, in the first place."[7] However, Pesca then turns around and argues that the term "refugee" is applicable to Hurricane Katrina survivors "because circumstances are turning them into refugees," even going as far as to compare New Orleans to Haiti or Kosovo.[8] While Pesca acknowledges systemic neglect, his central argument frames survivors as victims of the disaster itself based on their circumstances and the timing of their displacement, thereby overshadowing the negligence and lack of preparedness demonstrated by state officials and the federal government.
‘Alive in Truth’ Interventions: Geoffrey Glover and Wayne G
The Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project emerged as a radical grassroots effort to construct counter-memory through documenting the lived experiences of Hurricane Katrina survivors with dignity and depth. Founded and facilitated by Abe Louise Young, a New Orleans native and social justice activist, the project operated as an independent, all-volunteer initiative from 2005 to 2007. Teams of citizen interviewers began their work on September 4, 2005, at the Austin Convention Center, a temporary shelter for 6,000 evacuees.[9] Rather than accepting the "Katrina-as-reported" narratives, the project explicitly sought to document individual life histories, restore community bonds, and uphold the voices, culture, rights, and history of New Orleans residents.[10] By focusing on survivors' entire life experiences, not just their disaster stories, Alive in Truth exposed Hurricane Katrina as an episode of racialized state violence, situating it within longer histories of racial terror and systemic neglect. The project represented a critical shift in Black communal resistance, as Black and brown communities collectively protected and amplified survivor testimonies as acts of truth-telling and self-defence against potential erasure. Through these life-history interviews, the archive created a space where Black collective memory functioned simultaneously as a site of documenting trauma and as a powerful tool of resistance.
There are approximately 45 interviews available online on the Alive in Truth website for analysis. While each interview is significant in many ways, I decided to focus on two: Geoffrey Glover, whom Young interviewed, and Wayne G, with an unnamed interviewer. These two interviews exemplify how the project functions as a counter-memory to the narratives being spun by government officials.
Geoffrey Glover's interview in the Alive in Truth archive exemplifies the project's radical mission to reconstruct Hurricane Katrina's memory, not as a natural disaster, but as an episode of racialized state violence that continues the long tradition of anti-Black neglect. I apply scholar Sonali Thakkar's framework in “The Memory of Race” to better understand how Glover's narrative reveals the dual nature of race: its intractable persistence across history (seen in patterns of state abandonment) and its plastic ability to adapt to new forms of oppression, such as neoliberal disaster capitalism.[11] His testimony transcends mere trauma documentation; it actively remakes the past to serve present resistance, tethering Katrina to centuries of racial terror while demonstrating how oral history becomes a weapon against erasure. He situates his experience as a survivor of the hurricane and systemic neglect within the broader context of his life story. Born in Los Angeles, raised in New Orleans, Mr. Glover shares his experience in the "white man's system" and describes it as an active war that spans from workplace discrimination in Memphis to the Convention Center in New Orleans, where "They passed through. They did not stop. Not even one time."[12]
Glover's life history approach provides crucial context for understanding his interpretation of the Katrina disaster. His confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan and exploitative employers in Memphis taught him how "over the years, they've been able to interrupt the black man's income at will."[13] When National Guard troops marched past suffering evacuees to protect property in the French Quarter, Glover recognized this as another manifestation of the same system that had repeatedly prioritized white interests over Black lives. His spiritual transformation narrative—becoming "a servant of the Lord" after a pivotal interaction with strangers during financial hardship—offers an interpretive framework that allows him to maintain dignity despite institutional betrayal. When he states "the Lord takes care of me" amid the Convention Center chaos, he asserts agency that challenges narratives of Black victimhood or dependency. [14]
What makes Glover's testimony particularly powerful is how it documents both individual trauma and collective resistance. His account of communal survival—neighbours sharing cooking responsibilities, his wife securing supplies, people organizing impromptu living spaces—reveals Black mutual aid traditions that have historically emerged as responses to state abandonment. When he compares the immediate international response to the tsunami victims with the eight-day neglect of New Orleanians, he exposes the racial valuation underlying supposedly neutral disaster management.[15] This analysis aligns with Thakkar's concept of racial "figures" that persist even as their surface justifications evolve from explicit Jim Crow policies to implicit biases in emergency response protocols.[16]
Through the Alive in Truth project, Glover's personal memory becomes a political intervention. His reflection that "it's a lot of ugly things happening to black people... I am trying to forget that" reveals the tension between trauma and testimony that characterizes racial memory work.[17] Yet by speaking despite this pain, he transforms his experience into historical documentation that counters official narratives that would attribute suffering primarily to natural forces rather than human decisions. This tension embodies what Thakkar identifies as memory that is "remade according to the needs of the present"—where recounting becomes a form of resistance, personal history becomes a political critique, and individual testimony becomes a collective memory that demands accountability for centuries of organized abandonment. [18]
It is Wayne G.’s interview that demands accountability for systemic neglect by illustrating what Marita Sturken might identify as the “spectacle of suffering.” Before unpacking that, though, let us examine Wayne’s life history. While the interview does not mention Wayne’s last name or the interviewer’s identity, we know he is a member of a band called BRW and a resident of New Orleans’ 9th Ward—a district akin to a borough. The interview, conducted on September 7, 2005, begins with Wayne sharing his life story, situating himself within the New Orleans community as the son of a single mother who relied on welfare. He also briefly discusses his music career, mentioning that he was part of an R&B group with his brothers, Billy and Roy Higgins, who together formed the band BRW. Knowing the rich history of New Orleans music, I attempted to find their work to better understand Wayne, but their music is not available online; the most I was able to find was footage of them performing at weddings.
Returning to Wayne’s testimony on Hurricane Katrina and media narratives, his account directly challenges the pervasive “refugee” label by asserting his deep roots in New Orleans: “My name is Wayne. I come from a beautiful family from New Orleans. I was born and raised there. I stayed in the projects for 45 years.” [19] This simple declaration counters the portrayal of evacuees as rootless displaced persons, instead affirming their longstanding identities and ties to their city. By rejecting the “refugee” framing, Wayne exposes it as a rhetorical strategy—one that obscured government failures while denying Black and Brown survivors their rightful claim to full citizenship. To refer to U.S. citizens as “refugees” implies they do not belong, yet Wayne and countless others were not strangers in their own land. They were Americans, with homes, histories, and a brutal betrayal by the institutions meant to protect them.
Wayne explained why he initially believed relocating to the Convention Center reflected a reasonable expectation of government aid, citing his observation that “on the first day at the Convention Center, security was present, and there was electricity and air conditioning.”[20] His hope, as an American, was that his government would support him. However, the sudden withdrawal of security, the removal of resources, and even threats of violence from National Guard members—who “threatened to shoot him” when he sought help for a deceased woman—directly indicated that he and the thousands of others in the center had been neglected.[21] While mainstream media debated whether to label him a “refugee” or “evacuee,” Wayne described horrific conditions: sexual violence, death, and squalor, with no intervention from authorities. [22]These atrocities occurred not in a foreign conflict zone but on American soil, under the protection of U.S. institutions. The 'refugee' narrative was disingenuous, and Wayne’s account not only rejects it but actively challenges it. By describing acts of collective self-help, such as breaking into the kitchen to feed others, he defies the passive victim label, demonstrating agency in the face of state failure.
As one of hundreds in the archive, Glover and Wayne's stories crystallize the project's broader intervention. It fractures official narratives while suturing communal memory, arming survivors with what Thakkar might call the "unperiodizable" truth: that Katrina was never an aberration, but the latest battle in an ongoing war over whose lives, and memories, count. In this light, the archive becomes more than a repository; it is a battleground where counter-memory refuses to let racial violence be buried, whether by floodwaters or forgetting.
Testimonial Echoes: How Katrina Counter-Narratives Shaped Resistance
In her essay "The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part 1: What are the ethics of poetic appropriation," published by the Poetry Foundation, Abe Louise Young, the founder of the Alive in Truth project, shared the methodology behind Alive in Truth. She revealed that the project launched in the week after Hurricane Katrina with the primary goal of helping to restore authorship and narrative control to people who had been assaulted by media images portraying them as criminals. [23]
This sense of urgency in creating an oral history project aligns with what scholar Philippe Mesnard explores in "Memory Images: Between Discourse and Representation." Mesnard's central argument is that contemporary memory discourse shapes how people engage with images of trauma (violence) and has become normative at both political and cultural levels, actively framing and interpreting how images are understood and influencing our cognitive and cultural understanding of them.[24] They argue that there are tensions between control and resistance in representation, as well as who holds authority over the truth. Within the context of the Alive in Truth Project, the prevailing narrative of the hurricane's effects and aftermath being framed as an "unanticipated" natural disaster led those affected to feel an urgent need to combat this characterization. While Mesnard's analysis does not explicitly connect discourse to urgency, I argue that they are fundamentally linked. There exists a subtle yet powerful urgency to capture and understand the more elusive aspects of memory before they are completely overtaken and reshaped by the dominant discourses seeking to control the narrative.
The argument that multiple truths can coexist cannot apply to this context though, as scholar Geoffrey Cubitt explores in detail in his chapter "Social Memory and the Collective Past." Cubitt argues that while some accounts of the past may dominate, the remembered past is inherently "multiple and contestable, mutable and elusive."[25] This inherent instability and constant potential for reinterpretation could suggest an urgency to document and understand different perspectives before they are further altered, suppressed, or lost in ongoing social and political dynamics. However, the "multiple truths" argument fails to hold up when confronted with a narrative deliberately spun by the government to counter the lived experiences of disaster survivors. The Alive in Truth Project is not operating as an alternative truth; rather, it is actively disputing the dominant narrative being spun by those in power.
Another crucial methodological approach of the Alive in Truth project, as shared by Young, was its emphasis on capturing complete life histories rather than isolated disaster experiences.[26] Young reveals that while the testimonies were initially intended for a poetry collection, this approach was abandoned when interviewees expressed their desire to have their complete stories shared. The project’s life-history approach leveraged, rather than resisted, the inherent subjectivity of memory, primarily when documenting an event like Katrina, which was never an isolated crisis. As we have seen in Glover and Wayne’s interviews, survivors’ recollections of the hurricane were inextricable from their lifelong experiences of systemic neglect. Oral history’s strength lies in this very entanglement: by allowing full life narratives (not just disaster snapshots), the project revealed how Katrina exacerbated pre-existing vulnerabilities. actively countered media labels like “refugee” or “looter” that divorced survivors from their context. When Glover spoke of the Ninth Ward’s flooding, or Wayne described the Convention Center’s collapse into chaos, their stories were not about August 2005—they were about decades of divestment. The life-history approach thus transformed personal testimony into collective counter-memory, portraying disaster as a culmination, not an aberration.
Beyond capturing comprehensive life histories, the Alive in Truth project established ethical commitments that distinguished it from conventional disaster documentation efforts. The project's methodology was rooted in respect for narrators' agency and ownership of their stories, directly challenging the mainstream media's tendency to appropriate and distort survivor experiences. Participants could choose whether to have their stories recorded or simply have someone listen, reflecting a person-centred approach that prioritized individual comfort over institutional data collection.[27] This flexibility represented a radical departure from the extractive practices of mainstream journalism, which had reduced survivors to sensationalized sound bites.
The project's commitment to narrator sovereignty extended to its archival practices as well. While maintaining a free online archive to ensure public accessibility, the project guaranteed narrators the right to withdraw at any time.[28] Most significantly, the methodology included a promise to contact narrators each time someone requested to use their oral history, informing them who wanted to use their story and how it would be used. The assertion that "the decision about whether to grant permission belonged to the narrator" directly challenged conventional power dynamics, in which the stories of marginalized people are routinely appropriated without their consent.[29] This methodological choice positioned narrators not as passive subjects but as active agents in constructing counter-memory.
Recognizing that counter-memory construction required addressing immediate needs alongside narrative preservation, volunteers assisted narrators with practical concerns, such as completing FEMA applications, locating missing family members, arranging medical transport, and securing donations.[30] This approach reflected an understanding that resistance to dominant narratives required both discursive and material interventions. By committing to non-commercial use and directing any potential profits toward Katrina relief and New Orleans rebuilding funds, the project explicitly rejected the commodification of Black suffering that characterized much of the mainstream coverage of Katrina.
The project's trauma-informed methodology further distinguished it from conventional documentation efforts. By ensuring that volunteer therapists and social workers were present during interview sessions, particularly in cases where recounting became retraumatizing, Alive in Truth acknowledged the potential harm in memory work while creating supportive conditions for testimony.[31] This approach recognized that counter-memory formation necessarily involves engaging with painful experiences but refused to replicate the violence of dominant narratives by prioritizing the story over the storyteller. Each history represented a collaborative effort involving at least ten volunteers—including the narrator, interviewer, photographer, transcriber, social worker, editor, proofreader, digital librarian, and programmer—creating a communal infrastructure for memory preservation that stood in stark contrast to individualistic journalistic approaches.
At its core, the project's methodology valued what Young described as the "slow and careful work wherein people define and describe their history, community, and lives in the terms, language, pacing, syntax, and frameworks they choose."[32] This commitment to narrative specificity and authentic voice directly countered the homogenizing tendencies of mainstream Katrina reporting. Motivated by a shared hope for justice and a prayer of thanks, the methodology itself represented a form of resistance.[33] Demonstrating how counter-memory requires not just alternative content but alternative processes for producing, preserving, and sharing that content.
Yet the battleground of memory does not end with the creation of the archive. It extends into the ways these testimonies reverberate beyond 2005. Alive in Truth did not merely preserve counter-memory; it catalyzed a model of resistance that would echo in later movements, from courtroom advocacy to hip-hop anthems. If Glover and Wayne’s interviews weaponized truth against state erasure, then the archive’s afterlife reveals how those truths escaped institutional confines to fuel broader struggles. The unperiodizable violence of Katrina, as Thakkar warns, demands unperiodizable resistance: a fight not just to document the past, but to unsettle the present.
Twenty Years Later, How is Hurricane Katrina Remembered?
The refusal to let racial violence and state neglect be forgotten has manifested across multiple forms of cultural memory since Katrina. While projects like Alive in Truth preserved survivor testimonies, hip-hop artists—particularly those with ties to New Orleans—used music to amplify critiques of systemic failure. Lil Wayne, in his 2012 track “Georgia Bush,” directly indicts President George W. Bush’s abandonment of Black New Orleanians, framing the disaster as political violence: “We from a town where / Everybody drowned… Aint nobody tried / No doubt on my mind it was Georgia Bush.”[34] His lyrics collapse the distinction between natural disaster and state culpability, echoing survivors’ accounts of institutional betrayal. Beyoncé reignited this discourse in 2016 with “Formation,” opening her music video with the pointed question “What happened at New Orleans?”—followed by footage of flooded streets, stranded residents, and police presence.[35] By explicitly linking Katrina’s devastation to anti-Black state violence (including police brutality), she faced backlash from law enforcement and conservative critics who accused her of “anti-police” messaging. This reaction itself proved her point: the same institutions that failed New Orleanians now sought to silence narratives that exposed that failure. Though distinct from oral history, these artistic interventions function similarly—they disrupt official accounts, center Black perspectives, and insist that Katrina be remembered not as a tragedy but as an indictment.
Hurricane Katrina exposed how disasters magnify systemic inequities, but as this essay has demonstrated, it also revealed the power of counter-memory to challenge dominant narratives. Through projects like Alive in Truth and cultural interventions by artists such as Lil Wayne and Beyoncé, survivors and their allies transformed personal testimony into a collective resistance. These efforts did more than document trauma—they exposed Katrina as an episode of racialized state violence, rooted in decades of neglect and amplified by media distortion. The life histories of Glover and Wayne exemplify this resistance, showing how individual stories can disrupt archival silences and reclaim narrative agency. Their testimonies, alongside artistic responses to Katrina, prove that memory operates not merely as recollection but as an active tool for justice. As we confront future crises, this case study reminds us that remembering is never neutral. It is itself a form of political action, one that demands we center those most impacted in both our archives and our activism.
August 2025 will mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and in recognition of this significant milestone, both Netflix and Disney are set to release docuseries that focus on the events surrounding the disaster. Of particular interest are the testimonies shared on platforms like TikTok by survivors, including numerous accounts from teenagers who experienced the hurricane first-hand. These narratives recount not only the catastrophic impact of the storm but also the subsequent governmental neglect, accompanied by poignant photographs of displaced families' belongings. Listening to these accounts, which evoke memories of the prelude to the storm—the colours of the sky and the sensory experiences leading up to the disaster—raises important questions about the broader discourse surrounding Hurricane Katrina. As the oral history projects from that time, such as Alive in Truth, are revisited, one must consider the implications of these streaming services’ productions on the work of academics like Young. Young emphasized the critical need for immediate action in documenting testimonials and prioritizing the voices of survivors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
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[1] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews., ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 160.
[2] Marita Sturken, “The Memory of Racial Terror: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum,” in Critical Memory Studies: New Approach, ed. Brett Ashley Kaplan (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023), 41.
[3] Sturken, “Memory of Racial Terror,” 41
[4] ABC News, “Exclusive: Bush Says Focus Must Be on People,” ABC News, September 2005, https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/HurricaneKatrina/story?id=1086311&page=1.
[5] “BBC NEWS | Americas | Video Shows Bush Katrina Warning,” Bbc.co.uk, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4765058.stm.
[6] Felicity Barringer, “Police and Owners Begin ToChallenge Looters,” Nytimes.com (The New York Times, September 2005), https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/us/nationalspecial/police-and-owners-begin-tochallenge-looters.html.
[7] Mike Pesca, “Are Katrina’s Victims ‘Refugees’ or ‘Evacuees?,’” NPR, September 5, 2005, https://www.npr.org/2005/09/05/4833613/are-katrinas-victims-refugees-or-evacuees.
[8] Mike Pesca, “Are Katrina’s Victims ‘Refugees’ or ‘Evacuees?,’” NPR, September 5, 2005, https://www.npr.org/2005/09/05/4833613/are-katrinas-victims-refugees-or-evacuees.
[9] “Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History & Memory Project: About Us,” Aliveintruth.com, 2015, https://www.aliveintruth.com/aboutus.html.
[10] “Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History & Memory Project: About Us,” Aliveintruth.com, 2015, https://www.aliveintruth.com/aboutus.html.
[11] Sonali Thakkar, “The Memory of Race,” in Critical Memory Studies: New Approach, ed. Brett Ashley Kaplan (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023), 33.
[12] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Geoffrey G."
[13] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Geoffrey G."
[14] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Geoffrey G."
[15] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Geoffrey G."
[16] Sonali Thakkar, “The Memory of Race,” 27.
[17] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Geoffrey G."
[18] Sonali Thakkar, “The Memory of Race,” 25.
[19] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Wayne G.”
[20] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Wayne G.”
[21] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Wayne G.”
[22] Alive in Truth, "Interview with Wayne G.”
[23] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[24] Philippe Mesnard, “Memory Images, between Discourse and Representation,” in Critical Memory Studies: New Approach, ed. Brett Ashley Kaplan (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023), 141.
[25] Geoffrey Cubitt, “Social Memory and the Collective Past,” in History and Memory (Manchester University Press, 2007), 242.
[26] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[27] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[28] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[29] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[30] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[31] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[32] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[33] Poetry Foundation, “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I by Abe Louise Young,” Poetry Foundation, February 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69575/the-voices-of-hurricane-katrina-part-i.
[34] “Lil Wayne – Georgia... Bush / Weezy’z Ambitionz,” genius.com, 2006, https://genius.com/Lil-wayne-georgia-bush-weezyz-ambitionz-lyrics.
[35] Beyoncé, “Beyoncé - Formation (Official Video),” YouTube Video, YouTube, December 9, 2016,