Mississippi after Katrina

In Mississippi After Katrina, Jennifer Trivedi takes an holistic anthropological lens to the city of Biloxi, Mississippi, and illustrates how Hurricane Katrina revealed the cultural, political, and economic issues that shaped the community’s history, the storm’s impact, and Biloxi’s long-term recovery from Katrina.

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Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the American Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. Biloxi, Mississippi, a small town on the coast, was one of the towns devastated directly by the storm. Recovery has lasted years, influenced not only by the structure of the society as it existed in the years leading up to Katrina, but shaped also by years of repeated hurricane devastation and recovery periods. In Mississippi After Katrina, Jennifer Trivedi explores this recovery process and what pre-disaster cultural, historical, social, political, and economic distinctions shaped Biloxi and Biloxians’ recovery through ethnographic, media, and historic document research and analysis. Questions of housing and home at the heart of many Biloxians’ recovery are tied to the local job market and its reliance on the gambling industry in the years prior. But of course, communities are tied together by more than an economy. Trivedi examines how networks of people, groups, and institutions played out in the period of preparation and recovery, aiding in each process and reinforcing the distinctions that existed before the storm.