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Clear as Mud: The Struggle Over Louisiana’s Disappearing Wetlands

Abstract

The dissertation is about power and the landscape that power produces. It explicates a paradox of modernity, which is this: how one of the most vulnerable places to sea-level rise organizes its economy and culture around extractive thinking and the production of fossil fuels. To do that, it tracks how power produces its own conditions of possibility through crises and responses to such crises that guarantee future action. The dissertation likewise interrogates structures of discourse, science, and common sense. It analyzes and problematizes the state of Louisiana’s historic responses to various environmental crises of flooding, storms, and, starting in the late 20th century, its disappearing coastal wetlands. It frames the state’s efforts to restore its coast as part of a complex but ongoing continuum that began three centuries ago with the 1718 colonial settlement of New Orleans and recently made visible by Hurricane Katrina. I argue that the state’s political economy organizes itself as the solution to the environmental crisis of its own making. The dissertation relies on mixed methods of archival research, interviews and discourse analysis from a variety of texts, policy position papers, historic newspaper articles, scientific studies, and transcripts of public meetings and court cases. It gestures to traditional and emerging critical fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences such as political geography and political ecology, cultural studies, environmental humanities, science studies, and cultural history. The dissertation is conceptionally grounded and organized around a material component of Mississippi Delta Mud. Through mud, it explicates a cultural and environmental history of New Orleans and Lower Mississippi River Delta region. This is a story of both the natural environment and the social conditions and histories entangled within it. Far from being a passive object that has meandered through the backdrop of national identity and struggle, the Mississippi River and its mud functions as agents in the production of difference – racial and ethnic, colonizer and colonized. This dissertation attends to stories as they have been told and uses these moments to provoke a discussion of the way in which natural history becomes a venue for violence.

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