ABSTRACT

This associative essay about The Great Flood (2013) hinges on two televisual outbursts: Celine Dion, on CNN's Larry King Live, taking to task the American military-industrial complex for its refusal to intervene forcefully in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; a black gentleman, who appears in Spike Lee's When The Levees Broke (2006), and who has been displaced from his home after Katrina – ‘I’m an American. How can I be a refugee?’ This essay interlaces three hydropolitical disasters – The Great Flood in 1927, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 – to explore the limits of quantificatory approaches to extreme environmental events and to examine shared patterns of state violence against black and working-class Americans.

KEYWORDS

The Great Flood, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, Celine Dion

I am watching The Great Flood. Its angry water, terrible panoramas, its sweep and majesty, its dark sublime: I am impaled and transfixed. But I am also taken back to terrors past, riverine disasters that, for a long time, were the stuff of dusty history books, but whose memory this film rekindles and reanimates. There was a long Great Flood in 1927. It has a backstory and tributary narratives.

Watching a film, especially in this current era, feels strangely partial and fragmented. To watch a film on or through a smartphone or laptop is to know that any thoughts, speculations, and questions it generates can be rapidly shared or even answered. Open another window, tap out a query in a search engine, flick through rivers of images, drift through data, assemble – in almost-ambient fashion – your own augmented version of that film.