Personalising disaster: Community storytelling and sharing in New Orleans post-Katrina tourism

Abstract

This paper seeks to extend existing discussions of post-disaster tourism in New Orleans by considering how competing narratives of disaster operate within the tourist experience available in New Orleans. More specifically, we explore how personal reflections and the collective memories of a community are practiced and mobilised as occasions for tourists to connect with and share in memories of disaster in post-Katrina New Orleans. We suggest that in a city where tourism has long been vital to the economic, social and cultural make-up of the place the power of sharing has emerged through personal narratives, artefacts and experiences that, more than a decade after the disaster, are woven into the tourist experience by individuals such as tour guides, curators of exhibitions, street artists, and participants in anniversary ceremonies.