How does the post-Katrina population shift in New Orleans reshape our understanding of black spatial movement, and what does it reveal about the limits of legibility within systems of power? Dominant narratives about Hurricane Katrina’s domestic impact work on spectacularizing black neglect as a means to critique state structures. Such critical accounts elicit counter-discourses that over-determine black Gulf South life under plantation politics as matters of black resistance always already preoccupied with racial-sexual capitalist governance. Riley argues that the movement patterns emerging from the resultant diaspora tell a more complex story. Indeed, Katrina’s black diaspora challenges reductionist views of life as being perpetually conscious resistance to anti-black structures. Additionally, the collective troubles characterizations of resistance as merely seeking inclusion within oppressive frameworks.

To convey these points, Riley will examine a pre-and post-Katrina map; an oral history interview with black queer Katrina baby, Alvin Stampley; and an archived, immediate post-storm interview with Tracey Wricks. Drawing on thinkers like Brandi Summers, Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, these sources help articulate how Katrina’s black diaspora forms a unique sense of place in the Gulf South, one that cannot be confined to general assertions of resistance or citizenship concerns. Specifically, Riley will emphasize modes of (im)mobility—like embodying illegible racialized gender or occupying a condemned black space—to explore how black liminality provides a terrain for black liberatory possibility. Ultimately, Riley contends that the ways Katrina’s black diaspora navigates annulled space in post-Katrina New Orleans underscore an ontological ambivalence crucial for understanding Katrina’s lasting impact on black social life.