Abstract
The Lower Ninth Ward was ground zero for Hurricane Katrina and the Federal levee failures. And yet August 29, 2005, was not the first time the community was placed in peril. Decades of dealing with flooding, failed infrastructure and underdevelopment, poverty, crime, and toxic events from nearby petrochemical plants have produced a particular way of making sense of suffering. In the Lower Ninth, suffering is normative; suffering permeates the warp and woof of the community; suffering helps construct the culture there. In this chapter I document what I call a culture of suffering—the cultural tools and worldview that helps residents mitigate their suffering and deal with it in ways that make life livable there.
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Harvey, D.C. (2015). The Cultural Geography of Community Suffering. In: Anderson, R. (eds) World Suffering and Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 56. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9670-5_20
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