“people from that part of the world”: the politics of dislocation

People from that Part of the World:The Politics of Dislocation

Henry JenkinsMassachusetts Institute of Technology

I share George Lipsitzs long-standing belief in the importance of local knowledge:you cannot really know what I know until you know where I am coming from. Whatfollows comes from the perspective of a third generation Atlantan who has nowlived more than half of his life outside the south. As the storm was devastating NewOrleans and its vicinity, I was standing watch over my fathers deathbed. I receivedmedia coverage of Hurricane Katrina from the television set in the commons areaof the hospital, alongside a mixed-race community of nurses, orderlies, and familymembers of other patients, and I also listened to my car radio as I made the longtrek from the hospital in Decatur to my brothers house in Loganville (strugglingto hold onto the fading signal from the liberal Air America until finally forced toturn to the conservative Clear Channel.)

My personal sorrow over my fathers final days mingled with the public sorrowmany of us felt over the destruction of a great American city. Although many couldnot take their eyes off the images the news was bringing them from HurricaneKatrina, I experienced only snippets of Katrina coverage amid more emotionallyimmediate experiences. As a consequence, the story of Katrina remains for me aseries of isolated images and sound bytes.

Responses coming from the Republican leadership were astonishingly outof touch: Barbara Bushs glib suggestion So many of the people in the arenahere, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this, this is working very wellfor them, immediately comes to mind, as well as Tom Delays banter with agroup of refuge children in the Astrodome, comparing their experience of traumaand loss with the fun of being at a summer camp. Air America played over andover again a montage of comments from First Lady Laura Bush in which shemangled or misremembered the name of the storm that was supposed to have beenoccupying her husbands every waking moment. And then there was the presidenthimself, whose queer sense of geography led him to leave Crawford, Texas, fly over

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 469486, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360.C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissionswebsite, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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troubled neighboring states, and head to Washington, D.C., to deal with a problemoccurring in his own backyard. Bush played guitar at a Republican fundraiser asNew Orleans was being destroyed. An image circulating on the Internet juxtaposedBushs performance with one of the more iconic images of the suffering refugesas if to equate the current resident of Pennsylvania Avenue with Nero who fiddledwhile Rome burned.

In the hospital waiting room, Atlantansblack, Latino, South Asian, andwhite alikewere seething with anger and sharing their frustrations with anyonewho would listen. Nothing set them off as much as George W. Bushs remarks tothe Republican Jewish Coalition, which was run live on one of the news networks:Ive proposed Worker Recovery Accounts to help evacuees be prepared for thejobs that are going to exist in that part of the world. Listen, theres going to be aconstruction boom down there. We want people from that part of the world beingprepared to take on those jobs (Bush 2005, emphasis mine).1 A white Atlantanwith a broad southern accent boomed over the rest, What does he mean peoplefrom that part of the world? Those folks are Americans!

Mapping America

In a region that once tried to secede from the United States and has ever sinceseen itself locked in a seemingly endless struggle to regain equal status within thecountry, the phrase that part of the world provoked bitter memories. For manyelsewhere, it seemed to take the news media forever to introduce the issue of raceinto its coverage of Katrina, but within the south, which has often found itself thescapegoat for all forms of American racism, it was inevitable that a storm hitting asouthern city would be read in terms of racial politics sooner or later. What I wasraised to think of as the northern media often seems incapable of talking aboutthe south without talking about race or talking about race without focusing almostexclusively on the south. The history of racism in the south is deeply disturbingto me as a southerner, but the United States is never going to come to grips withrace until it owns up to the fact that racism occurs outside the south and that eachregion fosters its own distinctive forms of racism, which are part of the problemthat must be addressed.

A Texans reference to people from that part of the world feels like theultimate insult from someone that southerners had once taken as one of their ownbut who now seems to have forgotten where he came from. After all, the people fromthat part of the world were overflowing the borders of Louisiana and Mississippiand finding their way into Texas. Historically, southerners defined their regionless in terms of the MasonDixon line and more in terms of membership in theConfederacy, and by those standards, Texas is very much part of the south, whereasFlorida, where Bushs brother is governor, was never fully accepted into the club.Yet many Texans have long sought to separate themselves off from Americasmental image of the south, tapping instead into the western mythology. In defining

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New Orleans as that part of the world, Bush was signaling his own profoundlack of historic consciousness (or an equally strong desire not to be associated withthose people).

Perhaps even more importantly, the people from that part of the world werethe same folks who had put Bush in the White House in the first place. AlthoughNew Orleans might have been the only city in the state of Louisiana to vote with aclear Democratic majority, that part of the world was the heart of the mythic RedStates. Bush could send his campaign workers into the Midwest and win Ohio,because he never had to worry about what the voters in Mississippi and Louisiana(not to mention Georgia) would do. The only Democratic candidates to win thepresidency in the past 40 years have come from that part of the world.

If the Democratic party could have sent recruiters into places such as thathospital waiting area that day and if they could have played effectively on theresentment and frustration of the people in that room, they might have put thesouth back into play in the next election. After all, it was not just the urban wardsof New Orleans but also the deep southern regions along coastal Mississippi thatwere gone with the wind and hip deep in the big muddy.

In my childhood years, it was said southerners would vote for a yellow dogif it was running on the Democratic ticket. Now, both parties take for grantedthat the south is, to borrow another now dated expression, as Republican asMaine. Let this be a reminder that political geographies shift over time. HowardDean had argued that Democrats should seek out the common economic interestsof poor white and black southerners as a way of overcoming the Republicandominance of the region, but then, he got tripped up in his own stereotypicalimages of people from the region: White folks in the South who drive pickuptrucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us, andnot [Republicans], because their kids dont have health insurance either, and theirkids need better schools too (Dean 2003). His opponents jumped on the referenceto the Confederate flag as a wedge issue, accusing him of promoting racism, andthus silenced his larger point. At the end of the day, Bush is not the only one whothinks of Southerners as people from that part of the world.

Consider, for example, our most common mental maps of the great divide thatcurrently shapes the American body politic. The schism between Red and Bluegets naturalized by being mapped onto the physical geography of North America.We can all see the map in our head, the one where the red states fall in the southand the west and the blue states hug the two coastlines. Although accurate in someways, this map distorts the relative balance in the number of voters represented inthe two regions. Some commentators have developed alternative maps where thestates are sized according to population density, a common practice among culturalgeographers, but such a map appears distorted or contorted, as a kind of specialpleading, because it is such an unfamiliar way of imaging the electoral landscape.2

Another map (see Wikipedia 2006) divides the country into two regionsJesusland and the United States of Canada. Yet another charted the election results


onto a map that showed the historic slave and free states of the preCivil War era(see Sensory Overload 2004), suggesting that the Republican south was purelya product of racial history and regional schisms. (This, of course, overlooks thefact that the south was solidly Democratic prior to the 1970s.) The south looksless like that part of the world on maps that try to balance out Democratic andRepublican votes state by state or even precinct by precinct. After all, in most states,the electoral majorities are relatively slim.3 There are very few purely red or bluestates. Instead, the states on these maps blur together into various shades of purple,helping us to see a country that has many common interests and few permanentrifts. This map allows us to imagine room for compromise and transformation.Many of us feel that the best way forward may be to imagine a Purple America.

We had a taste of what purple rhetoric might look like during BarackObamas speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative Americathere is the United Statesof America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino Americaand Asian Americatheres the United States of America. The pundits, the punditslike to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States forRepublicans, Blue States for Democrats. But Ive got news for them, too. We worshipan awesome God in the Blue States, and we dont like federal agents poking aroundin our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and, yes,weve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the warin Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all ofus pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States ofAmerica. [Obama 2004]

This concept of a Purple America has been dramatized throughout The WestWings 200506 season, in which a presidential campaign pits a Republican inthe image of John McCain against a Democrat in the image of Obama. Televisionwould seem to be test marketing an alternative framing of the political debate,offering us candidates who would find it difficult to get nominated within thecurrent two-party system but who appeal broadly to people watching at home intheir living rooms (Jenkins 2005). But, now, The West Wing has been canceledbefore we will ever get to see what a Purple presidency might look like.

If Bushs rhetorical dislocation separated the south from the rest of the coun-try, other acts of dislocation separated New Orleans from the Jesusland thatsurrounds it, seeing it as a later-day Sodom and Gomorrah deserving of what hap-pened to it. Reverend Bill Shanks, pastor of the New Orleansbased New CovenantFellowship, infamously proclaimed, New Orleans now is abortion free. New Or-leans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadenceand the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religionits free of all of thosethings now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out ofthereand now were going to start over again (Brown and Martin 2005).

Here is a vivid illustration of what Susan Sontag (1966) once characterizedas the imagination of disaster, the tendency to read cataclysmic events througha moral lens. The south has no monopoly for being the object of apocalyptic


fantasies. Pat Robertson (Fox News 2005) has suggested that the townsfolk ofDover, Pennsylvania, who voted out a school board that sought to impose IntelligentDesign on the local teachers, had turned their backs on God and would face divineretribution. Bill OReilly has suggested that terrorists should have a free shot atSan Francisco because Californians had not supported his particular vision ofthe war on terror.4 How easy it has suddenly become to respond to any and alldissent by simply wishing away whatever part of the cultural landscape offendsour sensibility!

A Multicultural Ethics of the Local

In contrast to these rhetorical dislocations, George Lipsitz insists that we payattention to the local perspectives of those people who live in the areas most affectedby the storm. From the very outset of his career, Lipsitz has been preoccupied withthe challenges of locating American popular culture. At a time when many in mediastudies still understood popular culture as the formulaic product of the monolithicculture industries, Lipsitz was insisting that we deal with the particular histories ofspecific works of popular culture, seeing them as shaped by the local geographiesand personal histories of the men and women who produce them and as speakingto the experiencesalso highly localizedof the men and women who consumethem. As he warned us early in his career,

The complicated relationship between historical memory and commercial culture,between the texts of popular culture and their contexts of creation and reception, resistconventional forms of cultural criticism. . . . At their best, they [popular texts] retainmemories of the past and certain hopes for the future that rebuke the injustices andinequalities of the present. [Lipsitz 1990:17, 20]

One of Lipsitzs earliest books, The Sidewalks of Saint Louis (1991), offers amultilayered portrait of a city that had been central to his own personal develop-ment, a composite of literary, media, sports, and architectural constructions thatspoke to and about the different groups that had lived within, and moved through,Saint Louis during its extended history. Amid photographs of local landmarks andrecountings of local legends, Lipsitz offered some comments about the place oflocal history within cultural studies:

All histories make choices about what to include and what to exclude; my hope is thatby looking at what might appear to be the margins of life in St. Louis we can learnabout a collective past that escapes notice in more conventional accounts. Part of myperspective is that there are many possible ways to tell the story of the city, and I offerthis as one of those possibilities. . . . Indeed, the goal of making one big story out ofmany small ones has led urban historians to concentrate on the narrow experiences ofa minute portion of the population, those whose names appear in newspapers and wholeave their personal papers to archival collections and to all but ignore the history ofthe majority of the population past and present. [Lipsitz 1991:1]

What Lipsitz did in his book on Saint Louis might be seen as the conceptualprototype for the rest of his careerconstructing locally specific, multiculturally


inflected histories of the ways different American cities have shaped popularcultureespecially popular music. By now, Lipsitz has written vivid accountsof music, art, and media production in Saint Louis, Los Angeles, Miami, and ofcourse, New Orleansas well as global cities such as London and Mumbai. Tosay that Lipsitz is interested in reclaiming the place of the local (and the particu-lar) in cultural studies is not to say that he is disinterested in the nationalor theglobaldimensions of popular culture. Rather, Lipsitz sees the local as the placewhere we most directly experience the impact of national and global forces on ourlives.

Lipsitzs work displays an ethical commitment to respect the local as a wayof exploring how culture touches our daily lives but never to lose sight of the largercontexts within which local culture operates. We can see this balancing betweenthe local and the global at work in the opening passages from one of his chapterson the Los Angeles music scene:

Rock and Rolls popularity reflected changes in race relations as white teenagersaccepted as their own a music that originated among racial minorities. It reflectedchanges within minority communities as black and brown musicians staked unprece-dented claims for themselves as participants in shaping American popular culture.Finally rock and roll music reflected the rich cultural interactions in American citiesin the wake of social changes emanating from war mobilization and mass migrationsduring World War II. . . . To understand the era in which rock and roll emerged, we mustalso understand the complex cultural mediations taking place in communities like theEast Los Angeles barrio where Cannibal and the Headhunters developed their musicalaspirations and ambitions. The rock and roll music made by Mexican-American musi-cians like Cannibal and the Headhunters reveals important connections among music,memory, class, ethnicity, and race, and it illuminates the enduring usefulness of rockand roll as a vehicle for collective popular memory. [Lipsitz 2000:302303]

Look at how Lipsitz moves us step by step through this argument, simulta-neously broadening the focus of typical accounts of rock and roll to show howit is intimately connected to the history of race relations in the postwar UnitedStates and narrowing his focus to a specific location, a specific group, and a spe-cific recording. One of my students suggestively compared Lipsitzs characteristicrhetorical construction to the interface of Google maps, which allow us to movethrough a series of zooms from a perspective very close to the ground to one thatencompasses the entire planet. Such an approach respects the complexity of pop-ular culture, showing how everything is connected to everything else, while at thesame time producing an analysis that operates on a human scale, which is concreteeven as it is describing forces that are most often discussed in the abstract.

He suggests that any given geographic region is in fact inhabited by multiplecultures that interact in complex ways. Here is the way he describes the popularmusic scene in Miami:

As a key crossroads for trade between the United States and Latin America, and as amagnet for migration from all over the hemisphere, Miami has become a privilegedplace for the generation of music marked by transnational networks, affiliations, and


identifications. From rap to reggae, from disco to dancehall, from salsa to soft rock,and from jazz to junkanoo, Miamis popular music provides a rich catalogue of thedifferent histories and experiences that have long divided its constituent populationgroups. But the music also presents a tantalizing picture of how the very things thatdivide people might paradoxically serve as a stimulus for creating new interethnic andtransnational forms of cultural coalescence and consciousness. [Lipsitz 2001:139]

Many who have written about race in the United States focus on what dividesus. However, Lipsitz finds within any local community signs that we can learn tocoexist, that we can come to value and celebrate cultural diversity. His politicsare local but never parochial. Lipsitz writes, Popular cultures images of the cityusually emphasize its dangers and divisions. . . . But the city is also the site ofmutuality and reciprocity, the locus of politics in the best sense of the word. It isthe place where people see their destinies as interdependent, where they fashioninstitutions for mutual advancement, and where collective imagination and effortcreate new possibilities (Lipsitz 2005:505506).

Although the progressive politics and local realities that shape Americanpopular culture inevitably get distorted as it enters into commercial production andglobal circulation, the memory traces of that earlier history remains for any analystwho looks closely enough. Lipsitz suggests that the marketplace may appropriateand commodify local expressions, but it also brings them into wider circulation.

New Spatial and Social Relations of VirtualDigital America

Not surprisingly, Lipsitz writes about cities such as Miami or New Orleanswith strongly defined and deeply embedded local traditions of musical expressionthat he sees from the perspective of people who have strong roots within those com-munities. Yet the reality is that the average American moves once every five years,often across regions, profoundly disrupting our experience of being grounded inthe local. Some leave their hometowns in search of educational or professionalopportunities that will insure their upward mobility or preserve their class priv-ilege. Others, such as those who left New Orleans after Katrina never to return,travel paths of desperation, seeking whatever jobs they can find, calling no placehome for long. Either way, we do not experience the local in quite the same waysas we might have done within a more stable and geographically rooted society.My family roots go back at least six generations in Georgia, probably more: mygrandfather moved from the country to the city after World War I; my father livedin Atlanta his entire life; I have lived in four different cities; my son has lived ineight. Of course, if we had stayed for another generation in Atlanta, we wouldnot have slowed down the process of change: the joke is that Atlantas skylinelooks different every time you drive into work in the morning. Cultural historiansand anthropologists understand the local as always in flux and transition, a placewhere traditions are constantly being invented and reinvented. Indeed, some re-search suggests that those who remain behind may embrace change, whereas thosewho left seem to adopt a much more conservative perspectivewanting to be able


to return home whenever they want to a world that looks just as it did when theyleft. In such a world, the local represents where we are from and not necessarilywhere we live. We fetishize the local because we can never really possess it.

This fetishization of the local may be at work in a recently launched indiecomic series called simply Local. Author Brian Woods explains, People use theplace of their birth as an identifier; they wear it as a badge of honor. Its shorthandto explain huge chunks of their personality. Some people stay in their hometownfor a lifetime, while others cant leave quickly enough, only to feel it pull themback (Arrant 2005). Each issue of Local takes place in an American city ortown (such as Richmond, Portland, Burlington, Halifax, Madison, or Minneapolis),cities rarely depicted in our popular culture but with a strong sense of location.Woods solicited photographs of these communities from people who lived there,collecting local landmarks that ground his stories, and he includes guides to thesecities written by local authors in the back of every issue. To publicize the series,Woods has constructed a website where people can submit accounts of their ownlocal communities as locations for future storylines. Others can consume their senseof the local with either a specific nostalgia for a place where they no longer live orwith a generalized appreciation of the imagined authenticity of local experience.

Here, for example, one posting on the website describes a landmark that wasvery much part of my own experience of growing up in Atlanta:

The Pink Pig rollercoaster sits on top of Lenox Mall. Its one of those wacky, only-in-America local traditions by which Im both embarrassed and mystified. The ride goesup sometime in November every yearit marks the holiday shopping season. It sits ontop of Macys, in a tent bursting with pink pig merchandise, nostalgic pictures of pinkpigs from the past, pink carpet, a Christmas tree decorated with pigs. To me, it seemssilly and indulgent and another one of those weird effects of rampant consumerism.But then again, its only a dollar to ride. And everybodys got to have some localholiday tradition. [Treason 2005]

Of course, as a native Atlantan, I remember when the store was called RichsDepartment store and was locally owned and operated. Richs was deeply en-meshed in the history of Atlanta when it began a dry-goods store created by aHungarian immigrant on Whitehall Street in 1867. The downtown departmentstore, established in 1924, remained a center of the local culture, politics, andeconomy into the 1970s.6 It was known for its liberal exchange and credit pol-icy, allowing many poor Atlantans to buy into consumer culture for the first time.Martin Luther King was arrested during a sit-in at Richs Magnolia room in 1960.Federated Department Stores acquired Richs in 1975 and merged it with R. H.Macy and Company in 1994. In a prime example of corporate insensitivity to localtraditions, the chain renamed all of the remaining outlets as Macys in 2005.

I bristle at an account that describes the Pink Pig as a Macys tradition. ThePink Pig once ran along the top of the downtown flagship store of the Richschainat a time when the ride allowed you to see the citys skyline as you circledwhat Atlantans always called the Great Tree. For many years, the lighting of the


Great Tree on Thanksgiving night represented the start of the Christmas season inAtlanta. When the flagship department store closed in the mid-1970s, it was widelyread as the final sign of white flight from downtown. The Pink Pig was relocatedto the suburbs where it ran along the third story rooftop of a suburban clustermall. Because of the erasure of history here, this posting misses the final irony:the Pink Pig became the Christmas tradition of an immigrant merchant (widelywhispered to be Jewish) operating within Bible Belt society, a wink at the processof assimilation. Today, it is just another brand iconno more or less ironic thanthe white polar bears that Coca-Cola, another Atlanta-based company, would likeus to associate with the holiday season. The Pink Pig is probably the only thingthat distinguishes the Atlanta Macys from the chain stores elsewhere around thecountry. What one might see as emblematic of the preservation of local culture wasexperienced by mean Atlantan of a different generationas equally emblematicof the ways in which local cultures are being displaced and destroyed.

Ironically, of course, this desire to produce a multitude of local experiencesmeans that neither Woods (who was born in Vermont) nor the artist Ryan Kelly(who lives in Minneapolis) have personal ties to most of the places they depict, andin some cases, they have never been there at all. Moreover, the central protagonist,whose travels and experiences provide the glue that links the various local storiestogether, must be continually dislocated and can live in no place because she hasto go everyplace. So, the stories are mapped onto the locals but do not originatethere; the protagonist, along with the reader, passes through the local but neverresides there. As Woods explains, The Local stories will be universal, whetheryou live in Portland, the Pacific Northwest, America, or the rest of the world. But,for the locals, the stories will contain landmarks and references thatll be instantlyrecognizable (Woods 2005).

I am intrigued by the idea that cyberspace may be a place where authenticlocals can be produced, shared, traded, and consumed. So often cyberspace advo-cates have constructed the digital through their own fantasies of dislocation, seeingit as a space where one is liberated from parochial constraints rather than authen-ticated through local cultures. Consider, for example, John Perry Barlows famousformulation: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh andsteel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, Iask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You haveno sovereignty where we gather. . . . Ours is a world that is both everywhere andnowhere, but it is not where bodies live (Barlow 1996). Here, Barlow renouncesall claims on the local while insisting that the local renounce all claims on him.

Cyberspace has become so associated with this kind of rhetoric of dislocationthat I felt some degree of embarrassment when I discovered the topic of Lipsitzstalk. The things Lipsitz describes in the aftermath of Katrina are so groundedin brute physical reality that my own interests in the virtual seemed frivolousby comparison. I have spent much of the past decade documenting the kinds ofcommunities emerging in cyberspace, communities of fans, bloggers, and gamers,


which I describe as offering experiences and identities that participants find lackingin the world around them. But for a growing number of us, our experience of thelocal, at least in the sense Brian Woods is using it, is constructed and mediatedthrough digital technologies.

In the 1960s, Alvin Toffler had predicted that the increased mobility of Amer-ican culture would undermine traditional kinds of relationships to communities(Toffler 1970:107108). We would invest less of ourselves in our relationshipswith others; we would become, in Tofflers term, modular. Instead, digital com-munities may be repairing the damage done to our social lives. The students livingin dorms, for example, continue to read local newspapers or listen to local radio-casts online, immigrants use the web to maintain ties to their mother country evenas they are starting to be assimilated into the new world. The web allows us toremain connected to grassroots communities even as we move from geographiclocation to geographic location, to carry our friendships around with us whereverwe go like a turtle carries its shell. Toffler underestimated our human need forcommunity and our ability to reimagine community in new terms as we face newthreats to its existence. As more and more of us become residents of game worlds oronline discussion lists, we are finding there some of what we lost when we left be-hind the local communities of our childhood, and in the process, we are learning toimagine alternative kinds of communities no longer dependent on our investmentsin the geographical local. In such a world, there is a longing for the local but thereis also a tendency to reimagine the local in new terms. Lipsitz has told us as much:The new spatial and social relations of our time have important consequences forknowledge. New social relations create new social subjects who inevitably createnew epistemologies and new ontologies, new ways of knowing and new ways ofbeing. New social subjects produce new archives and new imaginings (Lipsitz2001:78).

Consider, for example, the very different constructions of the local in tworecent novels by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. In Down and Out in theMagic Kingdom (Doctorow 2003), he imagined a culture founded on hyperlocalattachmentshis main characters are squatters who have taken over the man-agement of Disneyworld; each ride becomes its own local fiefdom governed byits own aesthetic commitments and political philosophies and the attractions of-ten compete among themselves for the general publics allegiances. On the onehand, the novel is about the emotional investments we make in what Umberto Eco(1990) saw as the epitome of the hyperreal, how we turn the inauthentic into thesource of local cultures. On the other hand, it is about a world where our realmof emotional investment becomes ever narrower until we feel connected only tothose people who live in our own backyard. In Eastern Standard Tribe (2004),Doctorow describes a world where communities get defined in temporal ratherthan geographic termsrather than choosing where to live, people choose whattime zone they want to inhabit, because the new information infrastructure al-lows people to interact with anyone who choose to structure their lives around the


same sleep schedule. Doctorows finely detailed style remains rooted in genera-tionally specific pop cultural landmarks that function as a new kind of local color,even as he depicts plausible worlds with radically different relationships to thelocal.

How do we assess the quality of experiences we have as part of the neotribeof fans, bloggers, and gamers? I know that what we find online is more meaningfulthan many might have imagined, that it fills a real human need for social connec-tion and fellowship. Whatever we are doing when we go online, we are not, inRobert Putnams (2001) oft-cited terms, bowling alone. Yet I wonder whetherwhat we are doing is quite as meaningful as the culturally rich and vibrant realworld communities that Lipsitz describes. I find myself feeling a certain degree ofenvy for his chosen object of study, although on closer reflection, this may simplybe the pangs of nostalgia that Susan Stewart (1993) has famously described as alonging to return to a world that never existed. As I reread him, I am drawn againand again to those passages where Lipsitz speaks about the longing people have toescape their own communities and enjoy imaginary relations with people and cul-tures from elsewhere. Even in rich, vibrant communities, there are people whosemental lives draw them elsewhere. Lipsitz is at his best, I think, when he writesabout how the inauthentic cultures created in and around popular culture may nev-ertheless be personally and culturally meaningful to the people who participate inthem.

Through Lipsitz, I learned the story of hip hop forefather Afrika Bambaataa(Planet Rock), whose youth arts organization, Zulu Nation, was inspired by hismisidentification with the warring tribes in Zulu, a Michael Caine film: The motionpicture clearly intended to depict the Zulus as predatory savages opposed to thecivilizing mission of the British empire. But as an American Black whose motherand aunts had migrated to New York from Barbados, Bambaataa saw it anotherway. In his eyes, the Zulu were heroic warriors resisting oppression (Lipsitz2005:505506). Through Lipsitz, I learned about the Mardi Gras Indians, whosecultural practices were shaped not so much by historic contact between runawayslaves and Native Americans, as by the experience of watching the performance offake native identities in the traveling Wild West Shows of the 19th century (Lipsitz1990). Through Lipsitz, I learn about dangerous crossroads where the forcesof globalization construct new kinds of musical fusions as groups, which mightonce have been isolated from each other, interact through their imaginations if notwithin their cramped living quarters. As Lipsitz writes,

The rapid movement across the globe of people, products, ideas, and images seems toundermine foundational certainties about the meaning of local and national identities,the value of personal and collective histories, and the solidity of social relationshipsand social networks. In some respects global marketing brings the people of the worldcloser together than ever before, yet consuming the same products, enjoying the sameentertainments, or working for the same employers does not seem to make us anyless divided, as old antagonisms and new enmities create violent conflicts on everycontinent. [Lipsitz 2001:3]


In short, Lipsitz turns out to be as good a theorist and critic of cultural dislo-cation as he is an advocate for the value of localization. He recognizes that everymedia producer is also already a media consumer who constructs new expressiveforms from materials appropriated from someone elses cultural experiences. Heoffers us an image of the local that is authentic but never pure, which comes outof what anthropologist Renaldo Rosaldo (1993) describes as less than a museumof pristine artifacts and more like a garage sale where everything is all jumbledtogether and what was once the exclusive property of a single local tradition is upfor grabs by anyone who wants to lay claim for it.

Rap and Murals in Post-Katrina America

What happens when we see Katrina, then, not simply as the destruction ofa vital local tradition but as the beginning of a new phase of borrowings andreimaginings? In what ways are people elsewhere linking their own identities andexperiences to Katrina? It is much too early to tell how the New Orleans diasporawill transform American culture, but I can point to two examples where this processof cultural appropriation has begun.

The first begins in Houston where a local hip-hop group, The LegendaryK.O., used their music to express something they were hearing from the refugeesthat were pouring into their city. Damien Randle lives near the Astrodome andMicah Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselveslistening to refugees tell their stories: Not till you see these people face to face andtalk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feelingwas that they felt abandoned, on their own little island.7 They found their refrainwhile watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americansduring a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition ofWests anger and comedian Mike Myers shock encapsulated the very differentways in which Americans were understanding what had happened.

The Legendary K.O. sampled Wests hit song, Golddigger, to provide thesoundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man tryingto make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans:

Hurricane came through, fucked us up round hereGovernment acting like its bad luck down hereAll I know is that you better bring some trucks round hereWonder why I got my middle finger up round here

People lives on the line you declining to helpSince you taking so much time we surviving ourselfJust me and my pets, and my kids, and my spouse, trappedIn my own house looking for a way out (pause)

Five days in this motherfucking atticCant use the cellphone I keep getting staticDying cause they lying instead of telling us the truthOther day the helicopters got my neighbors off the roof (off the roof)


Screwed cause they say they coming back for us tooThat was three days ago, I dont see no rescueSee a mans gotta do what a mans gotta doSince God made the path that Im trying to walk through

Swam to the store, tryin to look for foodCorner stores kinda flooded so I broke my way throughI got what I could but before I got throughNews say the police shot a black man trying to loot

Who!? Dont like black peopleGeorge Bush dont like black peopleGeorge Bush dont like black peopleGeorge Bush dont like em

I aint saying he a goldigger,but he aint fucking with no broke niggas

They distributed the song George Bush Doesnt Care About Black People asa free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the mostpowerful demonstration to date of Chuck Ds prediction that free downloads couldturn hip hop into the black mans CNN (Brown 2004), offering an alternative per-spective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication betweengeographically dispersed corners of black America. Within a few weeks time, thesong had in effect gone platinum, achieving more than a million downloads, largelythrough promotion by bloggers. Soon, people around the world were appropriatingand recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos. The songmay have started in Houston, framed around both local knowledge and nationalmedia representations, but where it was going to end up was anybodys guess.

We might understand the origins of George Bush Doesnt Care About BlackPeople in the context of an ongoing struggle over how and where local perspectiveson the disaster could be heard. One of the underreported stories about Katrinadealt with the efforts of local Houston activists to create a low-power FM station,KAMP 95.3, Evacuation Radio Services, to respond to what they saw as theinformation vacuum faced by those huddled inside the stadium. As Wired describedthe situation,

While basic needsfood, water, clothing, shelterhave been met with remarkablehospitality, the survivors of the hurricane inside the Astrodome complex say theycontinue to suffer from a lack of information. Parents struggle with paperwork toenroll their children in school while simultaneously attempting to locate housing andemployment, not to mention lost family members. Most evacuees sit alone on cots,passing the time playing cards or dominoes. Short blasts of information periodicallyecho from the Astrodomes PA speakers. [Johnson 2005]

KAMP radio hoped to provide the refuges with reliable information respondingto their particular needs, to enable communication between those situated across arange of relocation centers, and to give evacuees a way of passing the time duringtheir long waits for basic services. However, their efforts were blocked again and


again, both by county health services and by FEMA, who raised all kinds ofbarriers to the successful launch of their efforts. In one incident, for example, theywere told that they could not broadcast into the area unless they could provideindividual radios to every person inside because officials were concerned thatrefugees might fight over access to the technology, suggesting a conception ofradio as an intrinsically privatized technology even though communal listening isthe norm across much of the developing world. Many suspected that what wasreally at stake was the governments own centralized control over informationflow inside the Astrodome. One local activist argued that the response reflectedideological favoritism, suggesting to Wired that the whole situation would havebeen different if Clear Channel would have done this (Johnson 2005).

In fact, local access to information was central to policy debates over theFCCs efforts to suspend broadcast ownership caps. Many argued that Clear Chan-nels growing monopoly over radio stations around the country, coupled with theirtendencies to centralize content and delocalize production, would put people atrisk during a time of a natural disaster because there would be no one to providepeople in local areas the particular information they needed about approachingdangers. So far, I have not read any accounts that suggest whether this lack oflocal control over broadcasting influenced how people along the Gulf coast facedduring Katrina and its aftermath. Nonetheless, we are all increasingly victims ofdislocation. If the people in the Astrodome could not get access to local informa-tion, then the Legendary K.O. was trying to insure that local knowledge made itsway out and into cyberspace.

My second story brings this back home for menot to Atlanta, my hometown,but to MIT, my home institution. Tats Cru is a multiracial Brooklyn-based team ofgraffiti artists who have achieved some national prominence as they have movedfrom the production of murals that speak to local culture and politics to takingcontracts from major brands, such as Coca Cola, Tommy, and Sony Playstation, tocreate murals that authenticate and localize their messages to New Yorks variousminority populations. Students in several MIT dormsincluding those in SeniorHouse, where I have been housemaster for the past ten yearshave created theirown tradition of producing murals to articulate their cultural identities and assertownership over institutionally assigned spaces. The Artist-in-Residence Programof the MIT Office of the Arts sought to support this local mural culture by bringingTats Cru as visiting artists to campus, encouraging them to talk about how theirwork gets used somewhat paradoxically for both social consciousness and brandawareness. The team also wanted to help the students to refine their own skills andpractices. As it happened, the group of 20-plus MIT students chose the impact ofKatrina as the subject of their collaborative effort.

They produced a complex work (see Figure 1) that brought together many ofthe more powerful images that circulated through media coverage of the disaster.In the upper-left corner of the image, the artists link an iconic representation of aNative American on a white horse with the images of refugees and evacuees from


Figure 1Mural design produced by MIT students working with Tats Crew in Fall

2005. Courtesy of the artists.

New Orleans being crammed onto school buses. Gio (short for Giovanni), one ofthe students involved in the project, said that as far as he knew, no one working onthe project knew about the Mardi Gras Indians and their use of Native Americaniconography. The image simply emerged from an intuitive understanding that therewas some link to be drawn between the Trail of Tears and the dislocation of AfricanAmericans from the city they called home. In the lower-right corner, framing thework as a whole, is a hand holding a VCR remote. Gio explained, The handholding the remote is draped in the American flag and is supposed to belong to theaverage American. The remote and the frame (note the buttons on the left) is anallegory, conveying the distant relationship most Americans have to the events ofKatrina (personal correspondence, November 2005).

I wonder if perhaps he and the other students on the project underestimatedthe role media played in framing our understanding. Although television coveragemight have led to complacency on the part of some students who experiencedKatrina as one media spectacle among many, it also awakened the consciousness


of those students who worked on the project and others like them who felt an im-mediate emotional link, and saw an underlying political connection to, the imagesthey saw on television. Those emotions and commitments are no less real becausethey grew from mediated rather than direct local experience.

These students, and many other artists around the world, sought not to dis-locate but rather to relocate what happened along the Gulf Coast. They saw itno longer as something that had happened to people in that part of the worldbut rather as something that had happened within their own extended, imaginary,virtual, but nevertheless authentic community.

NotesEditors note: Henry Jenkins is the head and founder of the Comparative Media

Studies Program at MIT. A former journalist who was trained in a classic film studiesprogram, he ranges across the media into the new worlds of electronic games and the digitalrevolution. He has testified before Congress to defend popular culture and youth fandomfrom charges of fomenting violence. He is the author of What Made Pistachio Nuts: EarlySound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1992), Textual Poachers: Television Fans andParticipatory Culture (1992), Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who, Star Trek (1995with John Tulloch); and two forthcoming books, Convergence Culture: Where Old and NewMedia Intersect, and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

1. For the complete text, see George Bush (2005).2. For a useful discussion and illustration of different ways to map the political land-

scape, see Gastner et al. 2004.3. For the so-called map of Purple America, see Robert J. Vanderbei (n.d.).4. See Media Matters for America (2005).5. For a fuller discussion of the importance of the particular in the new cultural studies,

see Jenkins et al. 2003.6. Background information here is taken from the New Georgia Encyclopedia (2006).7. See Chicken Bones: A Journal (2005).

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ABSTRACT Rethinking American Culture was a forum featuring the work ofGeorge Lipsitz in a dialogue between American Studies and anthropology about theways in which new forms of commercial patterns and practices, new movementsof people and products, and new communications technologies are producing newways of studying culture. This dialogue addresses the struggles over the socialwarrants of U.S. culture in the 21st century and how historians and anthropologistsmight best describe and analyze such warrants and reconstitute these fields, bothof which are under pressure in a present moment of danger made all the morevisible by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana. [socialwarrants, American Studies, Hurricane Katrina, media, class]

“people from that part of the world”: the politics of dislocation

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